Seems cruel, doesn’t it?
You logged years building experience.
Spent thousands of dollars on university.
Invested hours polishing your resume.
And your life’s work gets reduced to a 6-second glance from a recruiter.
However maddening, this is the reality of the situation. Here’s how to make sure your resume passes the 6-second test.
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Numbers tell your story
Metrics matter.
In this market and this economy, companies want to know how your work affects the numbers, whether it’s increasing profits, producing more traffic, reducing churn, or a variety of different ways you can quantify what you do.
So, when you’re writing your resume, rewrite the bullets to include concrete numbers. Doing so makes your accomplishments much more results-focused in a recruiter’s eye.
For example:
- Before: “Increased social media engagement”
- After: “Grew LinkedIn audience from 2k to 50k in 8 months”
This reminds me of what I do in my own business.
Instead of saying, “I’ll help you land clients,” I talk about the specific results that have already happened with clients.
“I helped a career coach reach $30K/mo in 9 months” is much more appealing than “I work with career coaches to help them build their business.”
So what do you do if you don’t have quantifiable business metrics that are easy to find and speak to?
Most people who say they don’t have metrics just haven’t been asked the right questions to surface what’s already there.
There’s a discovery process for pulling numbers out of work that feels impossible to quantify.
Things like:
- How many client implementations did you lead?
- How long did the average project take?
- What was the largest or most complex thing you owned in terms of size or revenue or users?
- How many projects were you running at once?
- What percentage of your projects launched on time and on budget?
- How many people did you train or onboard?
- By how much did you reduce errors or support tickets or processing time?
- What was the dollar size of the budget or portfolio you touched? How many transactions or accounts did you handle each month?
If you don’t already have a process for tracking your accomplishments, it’s time to get started.
Open a blank doc. For each role, list every project, every responsibility, every deliverable, every tool, every team you touched.
For every entry, ask three questions:
- How big?
- How many?
- How often?
Pick a number you’re 80% sure of and write it down. Then check it against pay slips, old emails, calendar invites, performance reviews, project plans, or LinkedIn updates from that period. You’ll get closer estimates than you might have thought.
Results lead, methods follow
In copywriting, they tell you to talk about benefits instead of features.
Take a drill for example.
Nobody buys a drill → They buy a hole.
A level deeper → They buy a hole to hang the picture, mount the shelf, install the security camera.
It’s a classic business mistake to talk about what you do instead of what your product or service does.
This is why so many businesses fail. Their thesis = I think this product is cool, therefore people should buy it because I made it.
Nope!
People only buy what benefits them. Whether the benefit is utility, entertainment, or escapism, you always have to be able to answer the question:
So what?
The “so what” rule is a great rule for copywriting in business, which makes it a great rule for writing your resume—because great resume writing IS great copywriting.
Let’s take a look at a typical task-oriented bullet someone might include on their profile:
“Managed email campaigns”
This information tells you nothing about:
- How well the campaigns performed
- How the campaigns affected revenue
- How the business looked before and after the campaigns ran
So, here we would say, “You managed email campaigns—so what?”
The answer in the form of a resume bullet:
“Generated $300k in revenue through automated email sequences”
The outcome-driven language doesn’t necessarily have to be about generating cash. Even if the outcome is qualitative, you can talk about it in a compelling way.
I came across a post recently from a Specialist Biomedical Scientist who showed this in action. She wrote about how she used to describe her role at work in one diminishing sentence.
“I just… process samples.”
But her actual job was so much more than that.
She could spot a patient with a factor deficiency based on an abnormal clotting screen.
She could identify a patient with a type of acute leukemia from a blood smear.
She could count fetal cells and determine if there was a fetal-maternal hemorrhage from a few drops of maternal blood.
And yet she reduced all that valuable experience, training, and qualifications down to one sentence.
She called this the “authority translation” problem.
Senior healthcare professionals undervalue themselves because their skills don’t seem visible.
Because it’s automatic now, they think it’s ordinary.
It’s not.
That’s the qualitative version of “So what?”
Pattern recognition, decision consequences, the ability to translate between clinical and operational contexts. That’s what markets pay for.
But you can’t articulate it because you’ve been doing it so long, you’ve forgotten it’s specialized judgment.
The first step to seeing your market value is to stop saying, “I just…”
Power verbs drive impact
You’ve done work that drives outcomes, so you should talk about your work that way instead of being passive.
And again, we want to tie in any data or outcome language we can.
Before: “Responsible for team projects”
After: “Spearheaded 3 product launches reaching 1M+ users”
What’s interesting here isn’t only the word choice, but the belief and mindset behind it.
I was at the coffee shop one day and started chatting with the guy sitting next to me. I told him that I coached career coaches, which led him to open up about his own job search process.
Him: I struggle to promote myself. I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging.
Me: You’re not bragging, you’re just telling the truth about the outcomes you drove with the right packaging.
He let out a little sigh of relief. He got it.
Maybe part of this is a result of a culture and society that train you to see yourself as a task-doer rather than an outcome-driver.
Obviously, people drive value for their companies; otherwise, companies wouldn’t be able to charge more than they pay their employees.
Since the companies are already getting more value than what they pay you, the least you can do for yourself is own the value you create.
Start by replacing every “responsible for” with an action verb. “Responsible for hiring” is just bad writing. What did you actually do? Did you recruit, source, screen, hire, build out, restructure, scale?
Pick the verb that matches what happened.
Match the verb to the seniority of the role.
- Junior bullets use words like supported, executed, coordinated, contributed.
- Mid-level bullets use led, built, owned, drove.
- Senior bullets use spearheaded, scaled, restructured, transformed.
Picking the wrong altitude makes the bullet feel off even if the content is right.
Lead with the verb, not your title. “Project manager who oversaw” buries the action. “Oversaw a $5M product launch as project manager” leads with what you did.
White space wins
The same rule that applies to blogging and social media writing applies to resume writing.
Less is more.
Most resumes are bloated with blocky paragraphs that explain every single detail of work experience. This is especially true for senior leaders who have decades of experience.
Instead, you want a handful of your biggest wins in bullet-point format.
The bigger the experience, the harder it is to edit down. Senior leaders who’ve been working 15 to 25 years feel the pressure to list everything, because everything feels important. They try to prove their value by including every project, every promotion, every achievement.
But when there’s too much information, recruiters won’t read all of it and your most important achievements get lost in the pile.
Recruiters are scanning quickly. If your resume is bloated and they can’t instantly see your value, they will move on to the next one.
I’ve witnessed this.
For their own clients, the coaches I work with will excavate the handful of wins that matter for the target role, delete what’s irrelevant, and use outcome-focused language.
The same exact job seekers who were getting zero callbacks suddenly start getting interviews.
The experience hasn’t changed, but the framing has.
This is key, especially in a market where you’re competing with hundreds of other people for the same job (who have the same skillset and the same experience).
Here are a few tips to tighten up your resume:
- Cap bullets per role: Most recent: 4-6. One before that: 3-4. Over 5 years old: 2-3. 15+ years back: one strong line, or just the title and dates.
- Sort every bullet by impact, then cut the bottom third: That’s almost always routine work that doesn’t differentiate you.
- Combine related bullets: Turn three lines into one that covers the system, scope, and outcome.
- Delete adverbs and qualifiers: “Successfully launched” to “Launched,” “Effectively managed” to “Managed,” and “Significantly improved” needs a number, not an adverb.
- Print it out, step back, and look at it: If your eye can’t find the bullets, dates, and section headers in under 6 seconds, it’s not tight enough.
Context creates clarity
If there was one phrase I’d ban job seekers from using, it would be this one:
“Led cross-functional team”
Dunno what this means. Nobody does.
And I’m pretty sure it’s just copied and pasted from their job description. I know because that’s how I used to do my resume and LinkedIn, swiping a word-salad paragraph of jargon from the company I worked for.
Revised: “Led 12-person team across 3 departments to cut costs by 40%”
Even if you don’t have a business metric in there, you can at least speak to whatever concrete number you have, like the number of people on the team.
The mistake most job seekers make is assuming the recruiter knows what they did.
The recruiter doesn’t.
They are reading your resume along with dozens of others, often without any background in your job function. Internal jargon that made perfect sense at your last company means nothing to the person scanning your resume.
“Led cross-functional team” fails the 3 hows test from above.
“Led a 12-person team across 3 departments over 18 months to cut costs by 40%” passes the test.
Most of the time, when a job seeker swipes language from a job description, they’re trying to sound official.
But the people writing those job descriptions are often HR generalists who’ve never done the role. Borrowing their language makes you invisible.
Remove anything that sounds like it came from the company website
One caveat here: don’t confuse buzzword-stripping with keyword-stripping.
If the job posting says “Salesforce,” “Agile,” “Series A,” or “clinical trials,” those words stay—an ATS is scanning for that exact language, and a recruiter is too. That’s not corporate filler, that’s the vocabulary of the job.
What you’re cutting is the language that describes nothing: “championed strategic initiatives,” “leveraged synergies,” “operationalized a culture of innovation.” A real tool, skill, certification, or deliverable survives that cut. A phrase that could be swapped into any job description on the internet doesn’t.
Related:
Test every bullet against this question
If you removed your name from the page, would this line fit on fifty other resumes without changing a word?
If yes, it’s filler.
Replace it with the specific thing you actually did. “Championed strategic initiatives” might really mean “rolled out a new pricing model across three regions in six months.”
Plain language describing real work outperforms sophisticated language describing nothing every single time.
Write the bullet for someone outside your industry
Picture an HR person with no background in your specialty. They don’t know your acronyms, what tools you use, or what “good” looks like in your role.
If they can’t immediately understand what you did and why it mattered, the bullet needs more context. The more expertise you have, the easier it is to assume the reader shares your vocabulary. They don’t.
Treat your resume like a movie trailer
I remember being so excited to see “Suicide Squad” in theatres. I’m a big comic book movie fan, and the trailer was excellent.
When I went to the movie, I’m not kidding when I say the only scenes in the movie I enjoyed were the ones in the trailer. Either way, they did what they needed to do to get me in the door.
Treat your resume the same way.
Provide the highlight reel. Never lie, but amplify your experience as much as possible. Omit everything that doesn’t drive the narrative you’re trying to get across to the recruiter.
Because you already did the work.
None of this is about becoming a more impressive version of yourself—it’s about describing the version that already exists.
Most often, you undersell yourself on your resume by accident. You weren’t hiding your value; you simply never had to spell it out before.
Your manager knew what “handled the Henderson account” meant. Your team knew what “led the migration” actually cost you. The recruiter reading your resume for six seconds knows none of that, so you have to hand it to them.
Your job is to prove you’re good at your work in a way a stranger can verify in the time it takes to glance at their phone.
Make those seconds count.
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