What Employers Really Look for in a Resume (Beyond Keywords)

Most resume advice focuses on the wrong things. Keywords, formatting tricks, ATS optimization—these matter, but they're not what gets you interviews.

What actually moves resumes from the "maybe" pile to the "interview" pile is harder to game: evidence of impact, relevance to the role, and clarity about what you actually did.

How Resumes Actually Get Reviewed

Understanding the review process helps you optimize for reality:

First scan (6-15 seconds): A recruiter or hiring manager glances at your resume. They're looking for quick signals: relevant title, recognizable company, reasonable tenure, obvious qualifications.

Second look (1-2 minutes): If you pass the first scan, they read more carefully. Now they're looking for evidence that you can do this job. What did you accomplish? Does it seem relevant?

Deep evaluation (interviews): Your resume gets you to this stage; your interview performance determines what happens next. But reviewers often refer back to your resume during interviews.

Most resumes fail at the first scan—not because of formatting, but because the relevant signals aren't immediately visible.

What Reviewers Actually Notice

Evidence of Impact

The single most important thing on your resume: proof that you made things better.

Not responsibilities. Not tasks. Impact.

Weak: "Responsible for marketing campaigns" Strong: "Led marketing campaigns that increased qualified leads by 40% year-over-year"

Weak: "Managed a team of five engineers" Strong: "Grew engineering team from 3 to 8 while reducing time-to-deployment by 50%"

The difference is accountability and results. Anyone can be "responsible for" something. Showing measurable improvement demonstrates actual contribution.

Relevance to the Role

Hiring managers are solving a specific problem. Your resume should clearly address that problem.

This means:

• Leading with experience most relevant to this role
• Using language that maps to their job description
• Highlighting accomplishments that relate to their needs
• De-emphasizing (or removing) irrelevant experience

A resume that worked for a marketing role needs revision for a product role, even if your experience is genuinely transferable. The translation work is yours to do.

Progression and Growth

Your career should tell a story of increasing scope, impact, or expertise. Reviewers notice:

• Did responsibilities grow over time?
• Did complexity increase?
• Were promotions earned?
• Is there a coherent narrative?

Stagnation—same role and scope for years—raises questions. Frequent job changes—multiple short stints—raises different questions. Your resume should make your progression understandable.

Clarity About Your Role

Vague descriptions make reviewers suspicious. "Worked with stakeholders on various initiatives" could mean anything from strategic leadership to attending meetings.

Strong resumes make clear:

• What you specifically owned
• What decisions you made
• What you built, changed, or improved
• Where you had authority versus support

The "we" trap is common here. Teams accomplish things, but reviewers need to understand your specific contribution within the team.

What Reviewers Don't Care About (As Much)

Perfect Formatting

Unless your resume is a design portfolio, elaborate formatting doesn't help and sometimes hurts. Clean, readable, professional—that's the bar. Beyond that, content matters more than layout.

Fancy templates from resume builders often look the same to recruiters who've seen thousands. They're not bad, but they're not differentiating.

Keyword Stuffing

Some ATS optimization is real. But cramming keywords into your resume in unnatural ways is obvious and off-putting to human readers.

Use relevant terminology naturally. Don't artificially insert keywords hoping an algorithm will boost you. If your experience is genuinely relevant, the right terms will appear naturally.

Long Lists of Skills

A "Skills" section listing 30 technologies or competencies tells reviewers nothing. If you claim expertise in everything, expertise in anything becomes questionable.

Be selective. List skills that are genuinely strong and relevant to this role. Let your experience bullets demonstrate the others.

Objectives or Summaries

Unless genuinely useful ("Career-changing professional seeking to apply X experience to Y field"), these sections often waste premium resume real estate with generic statements anyone could make.

Lead with your strongest, most relevant experience instead.

The Achievement Extraction Problem

The gap between "did the work" and "can describe the work compellingly" is where most resumes fail.

Most professionals have accomplished meaningful things but struggle to articulate them. When writing resume bullets, they default to job description language (responsibilities) rather than impact language (results).

This isn't a writing problem—it's an information problem. The specific metrics, context, and outcomes that make achievements compelling weren't captured at the time. Months later, those details have faded.

This is why career journaling pays off at resume time. Professionals who track achievements have the raw material for strong bullets. Those who don't are reconstructing from unreliable memory.

Tailoring Without Starting Over

You don't need a new resume for every application. But you do need some customization:

Order of bullets: Lead with the most relevant achievements for this role.

Emphasis shifts: The same role can emphasize different aspects depending on the target job.

Language alignment: Mirror the terminology in the job description where genuine.

Top third: The beginning of your resume gets the most attention. Make sure your most relevant qualifications are there.

A base resume that you adjust for each application beats both a generic resume used everywhere and a completely custom resume built each time.

The Specificity Test

Review each bullet on your resume with this question: Could someone else at my level at my company make the same claim?

If yes, it's too generic. "Managed projects" could describe anyone. "Led cross-functional team of 6 to deliver new checkout experience, reducing cart abandonment by 12%" is specific to you.

Specificity creates memorability. When a hiring manager reviews 50 resumes, the specific ones stand out.

Making the Investment

Strong resumes require work:

1. Extract achievements: Mine your career for specific accomplishments with metrics
2. Structure clearly: Each bullet should convey one clear impact
3. Tailor relevance: Customize for each opportunity
4. Get feedback: Others see gaps and unclear points you miss

This work is worth it. A strong resume doesn't just get you interviews—it sets up those interviews for success by establishing your credibility before you walk in.

The Career Journal Connection

Resume quality ultimately depends on the raw material: your actual accomplishments and your ability to articulate them.

Professionals who journal their careers accumulate this raw material automatically. Each achievement captured is a potential resume bullet. Each STAR story documented is interview preparation done early.

When a resume update is needed, they're selecting and polishing—not reconstructing from faded memory.

Your resume is the marketing document for your career. The best marketing tells true, compelling stories. Those stories exist in your work history. The question is whether you captured them.