The CV / Résumé That Actually Gets Read

Six seconds, one page, a bored human

The story you've heard is that a robot rejects your CV. That's half true and it's the less important half. The whole truth is worse and more useful:

Your CV gets about six seconds from a tired person who has forty others to read. Eye-tracking studies of real recruiters put the first pass at roughly that. In six seconds nobody reads — they scan, looking for a reason to say no so the pile gets smaller.

So the CV's job is not to impress. It's to survive the scan — to not give the six-second reader a reason to bin it, and to leave one thing they remember.

That reframes everything below. You're not writing a document about yourself. You're designing something to be skimmed hostilely and to pass.

What you'll have at the end

• One page. Not two.
• Every bullet rewritten from a duty into an outcome
• A version that survives the automated screen without being written for it
• A CV tuned to one specific job, not a general-purpose one

Your CV is read twice, and the readers want opposite things.

The mistake people make is writing for one and forgetting the other. A beautiful two-column design with icons gets shredded by the parser. A keyword-stuffed wall of text passes the parser and bores the human into a no.

You have to pass both, and the requirements don't actually conflict — plain, structured, outcome- led text is exactly what both want. The rest of this lesson is that sentence, in detail.

✅ Check: you can name what each reader rejects.

Top to bottom, in the order a scanner looks:

NAME                              plain text, not a logo
one line: what you are + contact  "CS student · London · email · github"
─────────────────────────────────
EXPERIENCE          most recent first — the section that matters most
PROJECTS            for students: often stronger than thin work history
EDUCATION           one or two lines unless you're a recent graduate
SKILLS              real ones, grouped, no rating bars

Rules that keep it scannable:

• One page. Under roughly ten years of experience, two pages signals you can't prioritise. The discipline of cutting is the skill being tested.
• Reverse chronological. The reader assumes it. Don't make them hunt for your latest thing.
• Consistent formatting. Same date format, same tense, same bullet style throughout. Inconsistency reads as carelessness before a word is read.
• Real dates, not "2 years". Gaps and vagueness both draw the eye — for the wrong reason.

✅ Check: one page, reverse chronological, experience/projects near the top.

This is the lesson. Everything else is packaging.

Almost every weak CV describes what you were responsible for. Every strong one describes what happened because of you. The reader does not care what your duties were — they care what changed.

DUTY (what you were assigned)  →  OUTCOME (what changed, ideally measured)

The pattern for each bullet:

Strong verb · what you did · the result, with a number if one exists.

On numbers: they make an outcome real, but don't invent them. If you don't have a clean metric, use scale ("a 5,000-row dataset"), frequency ("40 a shift"), or a concrete consequence ("three reports ran on it"). A specific non-number beats a vague number, and a made-up number gets exposed in the interview — CR-04 is where a fabricated bullet goes to die.

Verbs to start with: built · shipped · grew · cut · led · designed · automated · analysed · launched · fixed. Verbs to delete: responsible for · helped with · involved in · worked on · assisted · participated. Every one of the second group hides whether you actually did anything.

"I'm a student, I have no outcomes." You have more than you think. A course project has a result. A part-time job had volume. A society role had a before and after. The exercise below is largely about finding these — they're rarely missing, just unrecorded.

✅ Check: every bullet starts with a strong verb and states a result. Zero "responsible for".

The automated screen (ATS) is real but over-feared. You defeat it by being plain, not by gaming it.

Do:

• Standard section headings: Experience, Education, Skills. Not "Where I've Made an Impact"
• A normal single-column layout, left to right, top to bottom
• Real text, selectable — test by opening your PDF and trying to highlight the words. If you can't, it's an image and the parser sees nothing
• Mirror the exact words from the job ad. If it says "data analysis", don't write "analytics" — the machine matches strings, not meanings

Don't:

• Columns, text boxes, tables — parsers read them out of order
• Icons, graphics, skill rating bars, headshots
• Putting your name or contact details in the header/footer — some parsers skip those entirely
• Creative fonts or the word "curriculum vitae" as a heading it has to interpret

The keyword rule, stated honestly: take the job ad, list the skills and tools it names, and make sure the real ones you actually have appear in your CV in the ad's wording. This isn't gaming — it's translation. You have the skill; you're just naming it the way they search for it. Never list a skill you don't have to match a keyword; that's a fast interview failure.

✅ Check: you can highlight every word in your PDF, and the ad's key terms appear in your wording.

A general CV is a weak CV. The strongest version is reordered and reworded for the specific role.

You don't rewrite it each time. You:

1. Reorder so the most relevant experience is highest. Relevance beats recency in what you lead with.
2. Reword two or three bullets to use the ad's language and emphasise the overlap.
3. Cut what's irrelevant to this role to make room. The retail job can go when applying for a data role — its space is worth more given to a project.

Keep one master CV with everything, and cut down from it per application. Cutting is faster than writing, and the master file means you never lose a bullet.

✅ Check: your CV visibly matches one specific ad — its top third speaks directly to what that ad asked for.

Six seconds, hostile scan. Do it to your own CV:

• Hand it to someone for six seconds, then take it back. Ask what they remember. If it's not the thing you wanted remembered, your best bullet is buried — move it up.
• Every bullet an outcome? Re-scan for "responsible for".
• Typos. One typo on a one-page document reads as "doesn't check their work" — and it's the single easiest no to give. Read it backwards, word by word, to catch what your eye smooths over.
• File name. Firstname-Lastname-CV.pdf, not cv_final_v3_ACTUAL.pdf. It's the first thing they see and the first impression of your attention to detail.
• PDF, not Word. Word files reflow differently on every machine; your careful one page becomes their broken two.

✅ Check: a stranger's six-second read returns the thing you most wanted them to remember.

Six common mistakes

1. Duties instead of outcomes. The whole game. "Responsible for" tells the reader nothing changed.
2. Two pages. Signals you can't prioritise — before they've read a word.
3. A design that breaks the parser. Columns and graphics look great and get shredded.
4. One CV for every job. Generic reads as "applies everywhere, cares about nowhere".
5. Inventing numbers. Exposed in the interview, and it poisons everything else you claimed.
6. A typo on one page. The cheapest possible reason to reject you.

Exercise (50 min, verifiable output)

1. Find a real job ad you'd plausibly apply for. This is your target.
2. Draft or open your CV as plain, single-column text.
3. Rewrite every bullet from duty to outcome. Strong verb, what you did, a result. Hunt hard for the numbers, scales and consequences you didn't think to record.
4. List the skills and tools the ad names. Make sure the real ones appear in the ad's wording.
5. Get it to one page. Cut whatever doesn't serve this role.
6. Test the parser: export to PDF, try to highlight every word.
7. The six-second test: hand it to someone, take it back after six seconds, ask what they remember. Move your best bullet up if it wasn't that.
8. Fix the file name and proofread backwards.

✅ Finish check: a one-page, single-column, fully selectable PDF where every bullet is an outcome, the ad's terms appear in your words, and a six-second reader remembers your strongest point.

Cheatsheet

THE JOB OF A CV
  survive a 6-second hostile scan + pass a dumb parser.
  not to impress — to not give a reason for "no".

THE ONE CHANGE
  DUTY → OUTCOME
  "responsible for social media"
    → "grew the society's Instagram 200 → 1,400 in a term"
  pattern: strong verb · what you did · result (number if real)

DELETE THESE VERBS
  responsible for · helped with · involved in · worked on · assisted

PASS THE SOFTWARE (by being plain, not clever)
  standard headings · single column · selectable text
  mirror the ad's EXACT words for skills you really have
  test: can you highlight every word in the PDF?

STRUCTURE
  name · one-line what-you-are + contact
  EXPERIENCE / PROJECTS (top) · EDUCATION · SKILLS
  one page · reverse chronological · consistent formatting

PER APPLICATION
  keep one master CV → reorder, reword 2-3 bullets, cut to fit
  relevance beats recency in what you lead with

FINAL PASS
  6-sec test on a friend · no "responsible for" · zero typos
  Firstname-Lastname-CV.pdf · export PDF not Word

Sources

1. Bock, L. — Work Rules!, 2015
2. Ladders — Eye-Tracking Study of résumé review, 2018
3. US Bureau of Labor Statistics — occupational and hiring data

Next lesson: CR-02 — LinkedIn: Building Findability (L1) Related: CR-03 Your Portfolio · CR-04 Interviews and the STAR Method · CR-05 Cold Email · PS-10 Persuasion in Writing Path: Job Ready — 1/7