What a recruiter in your field is looking for
Screening looks different from one role to the next. A nurse is filtered on registration, an engineer on the exact CAD package, a marketer on whether there is a number anywhere. Pick yours.
Or just upload it →Software Engineer
The stack you work in and the scale you have worked at. A reader wants to know within seconds whether you have met the kind of problem the job has.
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Product Manager
The product you owned, who used it, and what changed because you owned it. Not the ceremonies you ran.
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Data Analyst
SQL plus the specific BI tool they use, and one decision that was made differently because of your analysis.
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Registered Nurse
Your registration, your specialty and your years in it. For clinical roles these are screening facts, not background detail, and they belong at the very top.
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Project Manager
Budget and scope, the industry, and your certification if you have one. Scope is what sorts project managers.
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Business Analyst
The domain and the kind of change you have analysed. BA is a title that means five different jobs, so say which one you do.
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Accountant
Your qualification and the standards you work under. Both are frequently hard filters.
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Marketing Manager
The channel you own, the budget you have run, and a number that moved. Marketing is the field where unquantified claims are least believed.
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Mechanical Engineer
The CAD and analysis tools you actually use, the industry, and something you designed that got made.
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Graphic Designer
A working portfolio link and the discipline you actually practise. For design, the link is the application and the document is the covering note.
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Why the role changes the advice
Most resume advice is written as though one set of rules covers everybody. It does not, and the gap is widest exactly where it costs most: the screening step that happens before a person reads anything.
A nurse is filtered on registration. If the licence, the body and the number are not on the document, nothing else on it gets read, and in the UK that means NMC rather than a state licence. An accountant is filtered on the qualifying body and the reporting standard, and part qualified is a different candidate from qualified. A mechanical engineer is searched for the exact CAD package, where SolidWorks and CATIA are not interchangeable to a search box. A marketer is judged on whether there is a number anywhere, because the vocabulary is easy to use without having done the work.
Those are not stylistic preferences. They are the difference between appearing in a recruiter’s result list and being absent from it. The terms each field is actually searched on are here, grouped by whether a term is a hard filter or just a search word.
What every one of these pages covers
- What the top third of page one has to establish for that role, since that is where a reader decides whether to keep going.
- The terms recruiters in that field actually search for, and the ones that are hard filters rather than preferences.
- Three mistakes the role makes in particular, not generic advice with the job title swapped in.
- One real bullet from that field, rewritten, so the difference is visible rather than described.
- What changes outside North America, which for several of these is the most useful thing on the page.
If your role is not listed
The check itself works for any role. It reads the document, works out what you are aiming at and compares it against what that field expects, so there is no list of supported jobs to be missing from. These ten exist because the screening differences were worth writing down, not because the others are unsupported. Upload yours and you will get the same read.
Outside North America, most people call it a CV, and the conventions differ enough to matter: two pages is normal, no photo in the UK, Ireland or Australia, and the credential rules change entirely. The CV version is here.