How To Write A Resume Today

Why A “Good-Enough” Resume Is All You Need Today

Nowadays, a resume doesn’t need to be perfect. It needs to be clear, aligned with the job you’re targeting, and free of red flags. 

Hiring teams (and the AI tools they use to screen resumes) are not looking for pretty designs or long lists. Instead, they scan for alignment: 

• Does this person’s experience match the role? 
• Can I quickly understand their impact? 
• Is there anything here that might raise concern?

After helping 800+ folks, we’ve noticed a good resume doesn’t guarantee you a job. But a bad resume/LinkedIn profile makes it hard to get interviews for the right roles.

So this guide shows how to write a “good-enough” resume, so recruiters and hiring managers want to meet you. 

In typical CareerSprout fashion… Here’s Katie’s favorite resume joke before we dive in: 

… Why did the resume go to therapy? 

… It had too many bullet points weighing it down 😂

Step 0: Identify One Target Role With a Career Audit

Before we write a client’s resume, we get clear on their short and long term goals.

Why?

Because a resume is not a list of everything you’ve ever done… It’s a marketing asset to position you for your next role.

So we always start with a Career Audit to identify one clear target role that aligns with

• Short + long term personal goals
• Short + long term professional goals

This doesn’t mean you’re locked into a single job title forever. But if your resume is trying to speak to multiple paths at once (for example: strategy, product, and operations), it usually ends up resonating with none of them.

During a Career Audit, we ask questions like:

• What kind of work actually energizes you?
• Which roles map to the work you want to do more of?
• Where do your past wins align most naturally with future opportunities?
• What would be the title, scope, and industry of the job you’d say yes to today?

Once that direction is clear, the resume has ONE purpose: to position you as an obvious fit for that one type of role. Every line, bullet, and keyword should support that story.

If you’re still debating between multiple directions, press pause on rewriting your resume. Instead, complete the audit process and choose a lane.

Step 1: Use a Clear, Simple Resume Structure

You don’t need to design your resume from scratch or use gimmicks. Use a proven structure that keeps the focus on your experience and results.

Here’s the proven structure we use:

1. Header (name, phone, email, city and state, LinkedIn url)
2. Summary (1 to 2 paragraphs with 3 to 5 lines in each, targeted to your role)
3. Career Highlights (4 to 6 quantifiable impact bullets)
4. Selected Experience (2 to 4 roles listing your responsibilities + quantifiable wins)
5. Other Experience (older or less-relevant roles listed by Company and Title only)
6. Education (university, degree, major – no graduation years needed)
7. Key Skills and Tools (use this to list domain-relevant skills and tools)

Free Resource: CareerSprout Resume Template

This layout is familiar to recruiters, easy to scan, and compatible with the applicant tracking systems (aka the infamous ATS).

Length of resume:

• <5 years of experience = 1 page 
• <10 years of experience = 2 pages 
• 10+ years of relevant experience = 3 pages (if needed)
• Note: most people fit on 2 pages

Bonus Tip: If you study 15-25 job descriptions for your target role, it’s easier to

• Use keyword phrases from job descriptions 
• Highlight your relevant wins and responsibilities
• De-emphasize work that doesn’t map directly to your target role
• Avoid overly technical detail unless it’s repeated across multiple job descriptions

Step 2: Write Your Summary

Your summary isn’t meant to tell your full story. Its purpose is to position you for the job you want and make it easy for hiring teams to understand your experience at a glance.

Here’s what to include:

• Your role or function, years of experience, and industries
• The scope of your work (and if applicable leadership experience)
• Key strategic impact or strengths, using language pulled from job descriptions

Weak Summary Example:

I’m a highly motivated product leader with a passion for innovation, synergy, and collaboration. Known as a jack-of-all-trades with a proven ability to wear many hats in fast-paced environments. Strong people-person with great personality and a can-do attitude that allows me to learn quickly. I bring energy, enthusiasm, and outside the box thinking to everything I do. Looking for the next exciting opportunity to do great things with great people.

Strong Summary Example:

Product Leader with 15+ years of experience developing B2B and B2C enterprise products across Healthcare and Retail industries. Successful track record of taking products from idea to launch, creating product roadmaps and go-to-market (GTM) strategies, gaining support for product vision, scaling and sunsetting products.

Experienced leading and mentoring globally distributed teams of 50+ individuals (engineers, product managers, and designers) across the US, Asia, and Europe, creating personal development and performance plans, and ensuring OKRs are understood and achieved.

Step 3: Add Career Highlights (If You Have 10+ Years)

Career highlights are not meant to summarize your entire career. They catch the eyes of recruiters and hiring managers with quantifiable metrics that are relevant to the role you’re targeting. Use 4 to 6 short bullets. And if you’re a leader, be sure to include bullet points to show leadership scope, impact, etc. 

Weak Career Highlight Bullet Point Examples:  

• Collaborated with other departments to make sure tech needs were met.

• Responsible for the org’s technology department and IT systems.

• Helped increase efficiencies using new tools and platforms.

• Managed a team of engineers and developers.

• Implemented cloud solutions.

The fun formatting doesn’t change the fact that these bullet points are vague, generic, and task-focused. There’s no scope, no data, and no results to tell the hiring team that you’re the bees knees. 

Strong Career Highlight Bullet Point Examples: 

• Managed global organizations of up to 330 people while maintaining 97% retention rate and increasing employment engagement by 3.6% 

• Increased website visits 13% by partnering with Machine Learning, Engineering, UX/UI, and Product to revamp website in 18 months

• Reduced data center expenses from $10M to $1M annually by consolidating 5 data centers into hybrid cloud solutions with Google Cloud (GCP) to modernize legacy systems with zero downtime

• Grew capitalized software assets from $0 to $3M annually by introducing and implementing software capitalization strategies for systematic amortization 

• Helped 21 individuals secure senior leadership promotions through direct training and mentorship

Step 4: Add Selected Experience For Work History

Remember, hiring teams (and the AI tools they use to screen resumes) are not looking for pretty designs or long lists. Instead, they scan for alignment: 

• Does this person’s experience match the role? 
• Can I quickly understand their impact? 
• Is there anything here that might raise concern?

Demonstrate your alignment by showing the scope of work and the impact with 

• 3 to 5 bullets showing your strategic responsibilities 
• 3 to 5 bullets showing your key achievements

You don’t need to overexplain your contributions when you can quantify them.

Be concise and use effective metrics such as: 

• Revenue or cost impact
• Retention or conversion rate changes
• Time saved
• Headcount or budget managed
• Efficiency gains or risk reductions

Ask yourself: What changed in the business because of this work?  

Weak (combined) Bullet Points:

• Led the cross-functional conceptualization, ideation, prioritization, and implementation of transformational initiatives across the full spectrum of business operations with a focus on enhancing cross-departmental synergies, thereby improving organizational efficiency, saving billions heck you can even say trillions dollars because nobody is going to read this or care that you unlocked latent growth potential through technological enablers and innovation roadmaps.

• Architected and evangelized a multi-layered enterprise platform modernization roadmap by leveraging a hybrid-cloud infrastructure paradigm in alignment with stakeholder-aligned OKRs and a long-term digital transformation framework that doubled productivity.

• Instrumental in spearheading the development and deployment of mission-critical, highly scalable, enterprise-grade systems by aligning cross-functional contributors across engineering, data science, product, and executive teams to deliver billions in revenue in alignment with KPIs and OKRs.

Strong (concise) Responsibility Bullet Point Examples:

• Overseeing corporate IT while leading team of 50+ resources and owning $16M P&L 

• Developing and executing technological resource allocation strategy to align AI initiatives with OKRs 

• Communicating technology strategy to technical and non-technical stakeholders 

• Building strong cross-functional relationships to ensure alignment across business initiatives 

• Preventing data breaches by assessing and mitigating technological risks and security threats  

Strong (concise) Key Achievements Bullet Points:

• Oversaw reduction of team from 121 to 70 while increasing morale, productivity, and engagement

• Grew capitalized software assets from $0 to $3M by implementing strategies for systematic amortization

• Increased software engineering effectiveness 22% by introducing AI copilots

• Transformed an engineering team from 18 individuals who consistently missed ship deadlines to a high-performing team of 6 who consistently ship on time 

• Increased online checkout conversion rate from 1.9% to 14% by engineering 4 unique online ordering experiences allowing people to purchase online instead of speaking with a human

Step 5: Use “Other Experience” for Older Roles

Your resume doesn’t need to tell your entire career story. Roles from more than 10 to 15 years ago (or roles that don’t support your current target) should be moved into an “Other Professional Experience” section.

This section is a placeholder. It shows continuity, but it doesn’t take up space.

• Just list the Company and Title
• No dates
• No bullets
  

This prevents the resume from getting bloated while still accounting for earlier roles. If it doesn’t help you get the job you want next, don’t give it real estate. 

If you are including this section, use this format: 

OTHER PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE 

Walmart Senior Project Manager 

Sony Project Manager 

Step 6: Keep the Education Section Simple

Your education section goes near the bottom, and it shouldn’t take more than one line per degree. And you should only include relevant certifications.

You don’t need to include 

• Graduation years
• GPAs
• Coursework
• Honors
• Extracurriculars 

Hiring managers care more about your experience than your school background. Just confirm the credential and keep it moving. 

Note: We’ve had multiple $500k+ executives leave this section off entirely because they never graduated college. 

If you are including this section, use this format: 

EDUCATION

University of Texas Bachelor of Arts, Psychology

Certifications: PMP (Project Management Professional)|Certified Scrum Master (CSM) 

Step 7: Add “Key Skills & Tools” 

This section helps your resume pass the scan by humans and applicant tracking systems. But it needs to be focused and relevant to your target role.

Here’s how to break it down:

• Skills should include strategic, leadership, or functional capabilities (e.g. Roadmap Execution, Revenue Growth, Agile Methodologies, Stakeholder Alignment). These are the areas you lead or influence.
• Tools should list platforms, systems, or programming languages from job descriptions (e.g. Salesforce, Jira, Python, Figma, Snowflake).

Avoid:

• Listing soft skills (team player, fast learner, excellent communicator)
• Repeating tools already mentioned in earlier bullets 
• Generic or outdated platforms

Keep this section sharp and role-relevant. Think of it as a quick scan of the tools you know and the levers you pull. 

Use this format: 

KEY SKILLS & TOOLS 

Skills: Agile Methodologies, User Interaction (UI) Design, User Experience (UX) Design, Roadmap Development, Scrum, Design-Thinking Approach, Cross-functional Team Leadership, SaaS Web and Mobile Development, Data Analytics

Tools: Salesforce, Jira, Confluence, Miro, Figma, Slack, Trello, Notion, Airtable, Smartsheet, O365 Suite, Product Board, Google Workspace Apps, MS Project, Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, AutoCAD, Revit, SolidWorks, SketchUp, Bluebeam, PropertyRadar, Follow Up Boss, Open AI, ChatGPT, AI Agent Operator

Step 8: Update LinkedIn To Match Your Resume

Your resume should match what people see on LinkedIn. Once your resume is dialed in, update your LinkedIn to reflect the same core story.

Update Your Headline: keep it short and sweet based on relevant info. For example

• Senior Product Leader in B2B, B2C, Fintech, Blockchain, Media | Built products attaining $1.3B+ ARR
• Program Manager | 94% of projects delivered ahead of schedule & under budget
• Head of Customer Success l leading CS teams, managing $13.8M+ in ARR, and maintaining 97% renewal rate.

Update Your Photo (if needed): so it’s a close-up of your face with a smile. You can test Competence, Likability, and Influence here: photofeeler.co

Update Your About Section: copy/paste your resume’s

• Summary
• Career Highlights
• Key Skills / Tools
• Call-to-action like “Contact me at…” or “Check out my portfolio…”

Update Your Role History: copy/paste the responsibilities/accomplishments from each of the roles under your selected experience section of your resume

Final Thoughts

A resume doesn’t need to be perfect. It needs to answer the hiring team’s questions: 

• Does this person’s experience match the role? 
• Can I quickly understand their impact? 
• Is there anything here that might raise concern?

That’s it.

Your resume is not what gets you the job. It’s not even the thing that gets you the conversation in today’s market.

So instead of endlessly tweaking bullet points or waiting for the perfect draft, focus on getting your “good-enough” resume into the market. Then focus your time on building relationships with hiring teams who work at the companies you admire. 

We’re rooting for you! 

Next Steps:

Write your resume using the CareerSprout resume template and bonus materials

Or apply for the coaching waitlist if you want to work with CareerSprout Coaches to 

• Identify the right next role for you
• Get an optimized resume written for you
• Learn how to land interviews (without applying) 
• Prep for interviews to get job offers 
• Negotiate any low ball offers