Our defaults aren't house style. They're mostly the boring consensus of university career services and the platforms your resume passes through. Here's each one with the reason attached — and the places where the evidence is genuinely contested.
Bullets: action, then result
Harvard's career services and MIT's career development office give effectively identical guidance: start each bullet with a strong action verb, state the activity or project, then state the result. Keep bullets to one or two lines. Drop complete sentences and drop first person — no I, me, my. Quantify wherever you honestly can.
It's the shape our suggested rewrites move toward. See writing bullets that land.
Reverse-chronological, in a fixed order
Most recent first, in a section order readers and parsers both expect. It's the layout least likely to be misread and the one a skimming reader can navigate without effort.
This is why section order in the editor is fixed. You can't accidentally bury your current role below a certifications list.
Single column, standard headings, contact details in the body
Indeed's and LinkedIn's own ATS formatting guidance converge here: single column, standard section headings, no images or tables or text boxes, contact details in the body rather than a page header or footer, plain bullet glyphs rather than icons, standard type sizes.
Worth being precise about the reasoning, because a lot of what circulates on this isn't sourced. The specific parse-failure percentages you'll find online — 23% of failures are caused by tables, two-column layouts failed in 7 of 8 systems — come from marketing pages with no published methodology, and we won't repeat them.
The same conclusion is available honestly. The eye-tracking work on recruiters found the worst-performing resumes were the cluttered, multi-column, low-whitespace ones with missing headings. That's a human-reader finding, it's well documented, and it points the same way.
Evidence over claims
NACE's employer research says employers want candidates to share examples and situations where they used a skill to solve a problem. Between two otherwise equal candidates, they overwhelmingly pick the one with relevant experience to point at.
It also notes the employer wish list is long — more than half of respondents name ten or more skills they want. Which is itself an argument for prioritizing the few that match the posting in front of you rather than listing everything you've ever touched.
Tailoring — the honest version
We think tailoring matters, and we'll tell you exactly how strong the evidence is.
What we won't claim: we could not find a credible controlled experiment showing that tailoring lifts callback rates. Every circulating figure — 55.3% more callbacks, tailored resumes get 3x more interviews — traces to content-marketing pages with no sample and no method, several of them citing each other in a loop. We don't use those numbers.
What we will claim: tailoring addresses a documented failure mode. 88% of employers in the Hidden Workers study agreed qualified candidates get screened out for not matching a posting's exact stated criteria. Employers say they want role-relevant evidence. And application volume has surged while postings have fallen, so being obviously right for the role is doing more work than it used to.
That's an argument from mechanism, not from a number we can't stand behind. We'd rather give you the weaker, true version.
One to two pages
Not one page. See how long should your resume be? — including who funded the best study on it.
Quantification
Solidly supported by the Harvard and MIT guidance and by NACE's evidence finding. Also worth flagging: the specific recruiter percentages circulating about quantified achievements come from vendor blogs citing unnamed surveys, so we don't quote them either. The practice is well founded; the statistics attached to it online mostly aren't.
Where we differ from common advice
We don't offer a font-size control. Shrinking type to force one page makes a resume worse at exactly the moment it matters most.
We don't chase keyword coverage. See why we don't suggest more keywords.
We don't let the tool add facts. See we never invent your experience.
We don't repeat the popular statistics. See resume advice we won't give you.