How to build a resume that actually gets you hired in 2026

Start with the goal, because almost nobody does.

Your resume has two jobs:

1. Pass the ATS
2. Get in front of a hiring manager

That's it. That's the whole thing.

It's not your life story. It's not a personality test. It's a document that has to survive a keyword filter and then survive about seven seconds of a tired human's attention. Everything in this post is in service of those two things.

I've manually reviewed over 100,000 resumes. Not skimmed. Not run through software. Actually read them. I've hired people out of Google, Meta, and companies at that level. I also run Yara, an AI copilot for your job search that handles most of this for you.

So here's what I actually see all day.

Resumes are table stakes and most people still fuck them up. Which is frustrating, because your resume is not what gets you the job. It's the thing sitting open on someone's screen while they're talking to you. Every question they ask comes off of it. Vague resume, vague interview.

Fix it once. Then go win the conversation.

This is mostly written for engineers and designers. Most of it works for anyone. LinkedIn is its own beast, I did that separately.

First, don't get eaten by the ATS

This part is boring and mechanical and you have to do it anyway.

• One column. No side panels.
• No graphics, no icons, no photos, no skill bars. Ever.
• No tables, no text boxes, no headers or footers. Parsers choke on all of it.
• Normal section names. "Experience," not "Where I've Made Impact."
• PDF, unless they specifically ask for something else.
• Name the file like a professional. firstname-lastname-resume.pdf. Not resume_final_FINAL_v3.pdf.

And put the actual keywords from the job description into your real bullets. Not into a keyword block at the bottom. If the JD says Postgres eight times and you've used Postgres, the word Postgres should appear in a line about something you built.

That's it. Don't overthink this part. A clean single-column resume passes almost everything.

Get the order right

Top to bottom:

1. Name, contact, links
2. Summary
3. Experience
4. Projects
5. Education
6. Skills

Two things I see constantly.

Education at the top. Students do this every single time. Nobody cares where you went. Putting it first tells me you think it's the best thing about you, which is a bad signal on its own. Bottom.

Skills at the top. A wall of keywords sitting above your actual work is the fastest way to look like you have nothing to show. Bottom.

Name, summary, work. That's the order a human actually reads in.

Your summary is three lines

What you do. What you've built. What you're looking for.

That's it. Don't write "results-driven professional passionate about leveraging technology." Everyone can tell that means nothing.

Write it like you'd say it out loud:

Product designer, 5 years, mostly consumer mobile. Owned onboarding and growth at two seed-stage startups. Looking for a role where I own a full surface end to end.

Done. Move on.

Every line has to pass one test

Someone reads your bullet and knows exactly what you'd own at their company.

That's the test. Most lines fail it badly.

Three things fix almost all of them.

Name the actual thing, not the category.

"Worked on payments" is a category. "Built the payouts service every merchant transaction runs through" is a thing.

Use a verb that says you built it.

"Helped with the redesign" and "designed and shipped the redesign" can describe the exact same work. They get completely different responses.

Say what changed.

"Redesigned the mobile signup flow" is fine. "Redesigned the mobile signup flow, activation 31% to 48% on 200k monthly signups" is something someone can act on.

Put it together:

Not every bullet needs a number. Forcing one everywhere reads try-hard. But every bullet needs a real thing and a verb that owns it.

Ownership is the whole game

This is the piece I care about most.

Everyone has experience. Everyone can list things on a page. Almost nobody has ownership, and that's the actual thing people are reading for.

They read your verbs to figure out which one you are.

Verbs that make you a passenger: maintained, supported, contributed to, assisted, helped, worked on, responsible for, participated in.

Verbs that make you the builder: built, designed, shipped, owned, authored, launched, rebuilt, started.

If you actually built something and your resume says you "helped maintain" it, you just talked yourself out of a job you can do. Self-inflicted rejection. I see it constantly.

And stop being humble. You're literally in a pile of hundreds of people. Nobody is going to read between the lines and generously assume you were the one who did the work. Be that guy. Say you did it.

Be specific. Categories get skimmed, facts get read.

Writing "AI/ML experience" in 2026 is like writing "computer experience." Everybody says it. It filters nothing.

What people are actually scanning for is the specific work. Agent harnesses, tool calling, orchestration loops, eval harnesses, multi-agent systems, latency and cost tradeoffs in production. If you've done any of that and your resume says "ML engineer with LLM experience," you're invisible to the exact people hiring for exactly what you do.

Same thing everywhere else:

"Design systems" is a category. "Owned the component library across 4 product teams" is a fact.

"Financial modeling" is a category. "Built the model that supported a $12M raise" is a fact.

"Growth marketing" is a category. "Ran paid from $0 to $200k/mo spend at 2.1 ROAS" is a fact.

Get specific or get skipped.

Numbers

These land: scale (2,000 merchants, 200k requests/month, 400 engineers), change (31% to 48%, 6 hours to 20 minutes), money (revenue, spend, cost saved), time (shipped solo in two weeks).

These are noise: lines of code, "10+ projects," meetings run, "improved performance by 80%" with no baseline and no metric.

One hard rule. Never put a number on your resume you can't talk about for five minutes. They will ask. "Cut latency 60%" with no idea how you measured it is worse than no number at all.

Context: where you were and when

Two problems, opposite directions.

Nobody's heard of your company. Your metric is floating in space. One clause fixes it. What the product is, who uses it, how big. "Built the matching engine behind our freight marketplace, 3,000 carriers and ~$200M booked a year."

Everybody's heard of your company. Now the logo is working against you. "SWE at Meta" makes me assume you owned some small widget on a giant machine, and that assumption is usually wrong. Fix it: "Founding engineer on [team], 6 people, built [thing]."

And say when you joined. "Series C startup, 2023 to 2026" and "Series C startup, employee #30" are completely different lines. Joined early? Say the headcount. Company scaled under you? Say the multiple. Joined late at a big name? Anchor the line to something you actually built, because the logo won't carry it.

Have a projects section. All of you.

This is the one I push hardest and the one everyone skips.

Everyone has experience. Everyone can claim things. What actually separates people is whether there's a body of work attached to them. Something you made because you wanted it to exist, not because someone assigned it.

This is not an engineering thing. A finance person with a public model of an industry they care about beats one who lists "financial analysis." A marketer who grew their own newsletter to 5,000 people beats one who lists "content strategy." A designer with three real case studies beats one with a Dribbble account.

And if you have no experience at all, projects are the entire game. Read that again.

Projects get you the internship. The internship does not get you the projects. People have this completely backwards and then wonder why nothing is landing.

Build the thing. Put it on the page. Link it.

Tailoring is a skill, not find-and-replace

Most people "tailor" by swapping keywords out of the JD. That's not tailoring. That's cosplay.

Real tailoring means understanding what the company actually does, who it's for, and what kind of person wins there. Then leading with the parts of your history that match.

Say I'm a designer applying to Airbnb. Airbnb is consumer at massive scale. So I lead with consumer work. Consumer surfaces, consumer metrics, consumer instincts. If the role skews mobile, my mobile work goes first and desktop gets one line. If I've got enterprise experience, it drops to the bottom or comes off entirely, because it's not the argument I'm making.

Then read the level.

IC role. They care whether you can do the work. Cut the managerial stuff. Nobody hiring an IC wants to read about the team you ran. It reads like someone who's going to be miserable in the seat.

Manager role. Flip it. Team size, scope, hiring, what you built through other people.

Every serious application gets a slightly different resume. That's the cost of doing it right. It's also exactly why the people who do it stand out.

Gaps and layoffs

Never write "career break." Never write "sabbatical." Never leave a bare 14-month hole with nothing in it.

A gap with nothing in it reads as a gap. A gap with work in it reads as someone who kept working.

Fill it with whatever's true. Contract work, freelance clients, consulting, open source, a project you shipped and put online. There's almost always something. If there genuinely isn't, go make something now and then the gap has an answer.

This isn't about hiding anything. It's about not handing someone a reason to stop reading.

The stuff that doesn't need its own section

One page. Unless you're genuinely tenured. Some people are and multi-page is fine for them. Most people are padding. Be honest about which one you are.

Stop putting irrelevant shit on there. Applying to an engineering or finance role? Your high school job doesn't go on the page. Neither does the unrelated part-time gig from six years ago. Nobody reads that as well-rounded. They read it as filler.

Links that make your case. GitHub, portfolio, personal site, a relevant X account. That's the list. Do not put your personal Instagram on your resume. Not your finsta. Not the account where you're posting dumb shit with your friends. I see this way more than you'd think. If a link doesn't make the argument that you can do the work, delete it.

Don't fucking lie. References get called. Numbers get questioned. If you can't back it in a live conversation, it doesn't go on the page. Getting caught mid-process is worse than never being in it at all.

Using AI properly

AI is great for iterating. It's terrible at writing your resume for you, and I can tell.

Em dashes everywhere. "Spearheaded." "Leveraged." "Robust." Perfectly parallel bullets that sound impressive and say nothing. The second I clock it I start reading everything else with more suspicion, which is the exact opposite of what you want.

Here's the right way to use it. One bullet at a time. Ask what question a hiring manager would ask next, then answer that question inside the line. Repeat until there's nothing left to ask.

"Built the ingestion pipeline." Doing what? For whom? How big? So what?

"Rebuilt the ingestion pipeline for logistics data across 200 carriers, nightly load from 6 hours to 20 minutes."

That's the loop. AI is good at running it with you. It's bad at running it for you.

Yara is trained on all of this, so it'll run that loop with you line by line and push back when a bullet is vague. Slight plug. I built it because I wanted it to exist.

Track your links

Small thing almost nobody does.

When you put a portfolio or project link on your resume, you should know when someone opens it. Which application. When. What they actually looked at and how long they stayed on it.

That tells you which applications are alive, who to follow up with, and when. Turns the black hole into something with signal in it.

That's built into Yara too. Tracked links plus session replay. Last plug.

Good resume vs bad resume

Same person, same jobs, same five years. Left is what I get. Right is what it should be.

Templates that actually work

Single column, clear hierarchy, no graphics, no skill bars, no photos. The rest is section order, and section order is the argument.

Run this before you send anything

• Two-column layout or graphics that break the parser
• Education above your experience
• Skills above your experience
• Skills written as a keyword wall
• No projects section
• Passenger verbs where builder verbs belong
• Categories instead of actual things ("payments," "search," "AI/ML")
• Numbers you can't defend for five minutes
• No context on a company nobody's heard of
• Big-name logo with no team, no headcount, no surface
• A gap labeled "career break"
• Personal socials linked
• Three pages at two years of experience
• High school jobs and unrelated part-time work
• The same resume sent to 200 companies
• Em dashes

The one question

After every bullet, ask: can a hiring manager picture exactly what I'd build for them in month one?

If you can't picture it yourself, neither can they.

Get this out of the way. It's table stakes. It's not what wins you the job, but every conversation gets built on top of it, and a sharp resume means your talking points are already loaded before you open your mouth.

Go rewrite it tonight.

Frequently asked questions