Minimal Pro, for crowded fields.

What happens in eleven seconds

Eye-tracking studies of recruiters scanning resumes find remarkably consistent behaviour. The eye lands on the name, drops to the most recent job title and employer, checks the dates either side of it, jumps to the education line, and then — only if nothing has disqualified you — starts actually reading.

That path is the design brief. Your name, your latest title, your dates and your qualification must be findable without effort. Everything else is a second-round argument, and it only gets made if the first round goes well.

This is why a dense, beautifully written paragraph at the top of a resume is usually wasted. It sits in the path but reads too slowly to be read.

What to cut, in order

When the page will not fit, cut in this sequence. Stop as soon as it fits.

• The objective statement. Always. It says what you want; the reader is thinking about what they need.
• Duties a reader can assume. A cashier handled cash. Delete it.
• Jobs older than ten years, compressed into a single "Earlier" line.
• Bullets four and five of any job. Keep the best three.
• Generic skills. Communication, teamwork, hard-working, Microsoft Office.
• Hobbies, unless one is genuinely relevant to the work.
• References available on request. Everyone knows. It wastes a line to say nothing.

What you never cut: numbers, job titles, dates, and the qualification the job advert asks for.

Tailoring without rewriting

You are told to tailor your resume to every job, and then nobody explains how to do that forty times without going mad. In practice, three edits do almost all of the work.

• Change the headline to the exact job title in the advert. If it says Finance Manager, the top of your page says Finance Manager.
• Reorder the top three bullets of your most recent job so the one closest to the advert sits first.
• Swap two or three skills for words the advert uses, provided they are true of you.

Ninety seconds of work, and it changes what the reader sees in the eleven seconds that decide. Rewriting the whole document adds very little beyond this.

Gaps, honestly

A career break is common and survivable. What is not survivable is a reader discovering one you tried to conceal — because from that moment they read everything else looking for the next thing you hid.

The rule is short. State it as a row in the timeline. Give it three or four words of reason. Attach one true thing you did during it — a qualification, a course, a freelance project, caring work. Then move on and never mention it again.

And do not use the trick of listing only years to smudge the dates. Recruiters have seen it, they know what it means, and it costs more trust than the gap itself ever would.