Guides, résumé advice & job-hunting tips
Everything below is written for people who are applying right now: how to structure a Résumé, how applicant tracking systems read it, how to run a job search that converts, and how to prepare for the interview that follows.
The guides are written and kept up to date by the recruiting team at Briefly Recruiting. We screen applications for client roles every week, so the advice here reflects what actually decides a first screen rather than general résumé folklore.
Resume guides
How to write a Résumé that gets interviews
A practical, step-by-step guide to writing a Résumé: structure, section order, what to include, what to cut, and how recruiters actually read your résumé.
6 min readRead guideATS-friendly résumés: what actually matters
How applicant tracking systems parse your résumé, which formatting choices break them, and the keyword approach that gets your Résumé in front of a human.
6 min readRead guideWriting a professional summary and strong bullet points
Formulas and before/after examples for the two highest-impact parts of a résumé: the professional summary at the top and the achievement bullets underneath.
6 min readRead guideThe cover letter that is actually read
When a cover letter matters, a four-paragraph structure that works, and the openings and closings to avoid.
6 min readRead guideJob hunting
Interviews
Career
Where to start
If you are starting from a blank page, read how to write a résumé first: it covers section order, what belongs in a summary, how far back your history should go, and how to handle a first job with no experience. Once you have a draft, move to summaries and bullet points, which is where most documents are won or lost — it shows the same job written as duties and then rewritten as evidence.
If you already have a résumé that is not producing invitations, the problem is usually one of three things. Either the document is not being read properly by screening software, in which case the ATS guide explains what to strip out; or it reads as generic, which the tailoring advice in the same guides fixes; or the volume and targeting of your applications is off, which is what job search strategy is about.
Two guides deal with situations candidates worry about most. Career gaps and career changes shows how to present time out for caring, illness, redundancy or study without apologising for it, and how to make a switch of field look deliberate. And once the invitation arrives, interview preparation covers the questions that decide a first conversation and how to answer them with the same evidence you put on the page. The cover letter guide covers when a letter is worth writing at all, and what to put in it when it is.
How these guides are written
Each article is written by Robert Dembinski of Briefly Recruiting and reviewed when the advice changes; the author and the review date appear at the top of every guide. The material comes from screening real applications for client vacancies — what made a hiring manager say yes, and what made them stop reading. Where advice depends on your country, industry or seniority, we say so rather than presenting one convention as universal. We do not publish statistics we cannot stand behind, and we correct articles when readers show us something is out of date. If you spot an error, the contact form reaches us directly.
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