Resume Guides

The parts of resume advice that have checkable answers, rather than the parts that come down to taste.

Most resume advice is someone's opinion presented as a rule. Some of it is not: whether a parser can read your file, what happens to a two-column layout when it is flattened into text, whether your contact details survive being extracted from a PDF. Those questions have answers you can verify, and those are the ones covered here.

Where a subject is genuinely a matter of judgement, the guide says so and gives you what the evidence suggests rather than a rule. The editorial policy sets out where that line falls and what a page passes before it is published.

• What ATS keyword matching actually does

  Keyword matching is real, keyword scores are mostly invented, and the difference decides whether the advice you follow helps you or wastes your time.

  13 September 2026

• How long should a resume be?

  Every site gives you a page count. Here is what the evidence actually supports, why the page count is the wrong variable, and what to measure instead.

  13 September 2026

• PDF or Word: which resume file to send

  PDF is the right default and the reasons are mechanical, not aesthetic — but there are four situations where sending a Word file is the correct answer.

  13 September 2026

• How to check if your resume is ATS-friendly

  A 30-second test with no tools involved, the four failures it reveals, and the one thing it cannot tell you about how your resume will be read.

  12 September 2026

Check it yourself

Nothing here asks you to take a claim on trust. The ATS resume checker runs the same parser these guides describe against your own file and tells you what it extracted — so you can see the behaviour rather than read about it.