The Resume Loop

Before we write anything, you need material, and the only place it currently exists is inside my head. Get it out.

I have [X] years of experience. Roles: [titles and employers]. Work on the three most recent only — anything older we will handle in a single line later.

The standard. A usable fact takes one of two shapes.

A change: what I was doing, the condition things were in before, the condition afterwards, and how I would know.
A load: what I was handling, how much of it, over what period, and how I would know.

A fact missing any part of its own shape is not bankable yet.

The loop:

1. Put one question to me.
2. Score my answer against whichever shape it belongs to. Name the shape and tell me which part is missing.
3. Go back for the missing part. Do not open a new subject while a part is outstanding.
4. Once all four are present, bank it and move on.

Fifteen questions per role at most. Announce each time you change role.

Aim at territory I would not volunteer: work that sat outside my job description, the mess I inherited, what I absorbed when somebody left, the routine nobody thanked me for, the volume that passed through my hands in an average week.

Two prohibitions. No resume lines — we are collecting, not drafting. No compliments on my answers.

Output: the banked list, grouped by employer, in my own words, each fact showing its shape and all its parts.

Something I did had an effect. I never measured it. Work out whether a number can be honestly reconstructed, or whether it cannot.

What I did: [describe it plainly]

First, the obvious question. Do I already know this number and simply never wrote it down? If I do, take it, ask me how I know it, and stop there. Reconstruction is for effects nobody counted, not for counts nobody recorded.

If I do not know it, we rebuild. You are rebuilding arithmetic, not producing an estimate. Ask me for the inputs one at a time — frequency, duration, headcount, volume, cost, failure rate, whatever this particular calculation actually requires. Decide for yourself which inputs matter; they differ case by case.

After each answer, tell me one of three things: this narrows it, this does not help, or the whole calculation turns on this one.

When you have enough, show me the arithmetic itself — inputs, operation, result. Then give me the resume line in two or three versions, strongest evidence first.

The test for every version: could I reproduce that same arithmetic out loud, in a room, under questioning? Write out the sentence I would have to say. Strike any version where I could not say it honestly.

If the arithmetic cannot be rebuilt, say so and give me the line without a number in it. An unquantified line that survives questioning is worth more than a quantified one that does not.

I am building my first resume and I have not held a full-time job yet.

Here is what I have done: [course and college, projects, internships, part-time or freelance work, roles in societies, clubs or events, family business, volunteering, anything I built or started on my own]

Interview me one question at a time, up to fifteen questions. After each answer, decide whether it is concrete enough to put in front of an employer. If it is not, ask again differently before moving on.

Go after:

- what I personally built, wrote or ran, as opposed to what my group did
- decisions I made, and what I would do differently now
- anything I was trusted with: money, people, deadlines, somebody else's reputation
- what I taught myself because nobody was going to teach me
- scale, even when it is small — how many people, how many days, how much money, how many entries

Rules:

- Coursework is not employment. A class project is a project, not a job. Help me describe it accurately and let it stand on its own.
- If something was a group effort, my line has to say what I did in it.
- If I gave myself a title — founder, co-founder, head of anything, president of something I started — the title proves nothing on its own. Ask me what exists today that would not exist without me, and what I decided rather than helped with. If the honest answer is that I contributed to somebody else's work, help me say that instead. It reads better than a title I cannot back.
- Do not ask me about my strengths, my passion, or what I am looking for. Those produce nothing usable.

Group the result under whichever of these actually have content: what I made or set up, what I ran or organised, what I was trusted with, what I sold or persuaded people to do. Leave out any heading with nothing under it, and tell me which ones came back empty — that is useful information about where my evidence is thin.

Three situations — the hardest I have handled. One at a time. If I have not worked yet, use my projects, internships and society roles instead.

For each, keep going until a stranger reading the account could not mistake it for anyone else's. You are after:

- the shape of the problem when it landed on me, including whatever made it politically awkward
- the boundary between my work and my team's, drawn explicitly
- the decision I would take back
- where things stood at the end, described in facts a third party could verify
- what I do differently now because of it

Stopping rule: after each answer, ask yourself whether a hostile listener could still reply "so what?" While they could, keep questioning.

Hold off on resume phrasing entirely. We are collecting accounts, not lines.

Once all three are collected: rank them by usefulness to me, name the one I am overrating, and pull the single sentence from the strongest that could carry weight on a resume.

I want to know what the market calls the work I actually do.

If employed: Here is my week — [what I actually do, including the parts nobody assigned me and the parts I would rather not admit consume most of it]. My title, which we will come back to, is [title].

If not yet employed: I have no title to compare against. Here is everything I have done — [paste the fact list from 1.3]. Treat internships, society roles, freelance work and anything I started as the week.

Work in sequence and do not jump ahead:

1. Use only the description. My title stays out of it entirely.
2. Sort what I described into the core of the job and the incidental — what I do because of what I am, against what I do because of where I happen to sit.
3. Now bring the title back and compare it against what you found.

Report:

- what this work is called in live job postings, rather than what my employer or my college decided to call it
- the gap in both directions — where my title overstates, and where it conceals
- the search terms recruiters use for this work that appear nowhere in my own vocabulary

Close with one sentence describing the work, every adjective stripped out. Somebody senior in my field should read it and place both the job and the level without needing to ask.

Here is what I do: [paste the sentence from 2.1]
Here is my evidence: [paste the fact list from Stage 1]

Work out which jobs I can actually win.

Plan before you name anything. First list the three things my evidence proves strongly, and the three things it does not prove at all. Show me that list. Then build on it.

Give me two columns:

- Genuine candidate — roles where my evidence covers the requirements that matter
- Looks right on paper — roles my title and background suggest, but where I would be found out in the first interview

Under every role in both columns, write the single thing most likely to disqualify me, and what evidence would remove it.

Do not encourage me. Do not lengthen the first column to make me feel better. If only one role belongs in it, say so and tell me what it would take to add a second.

I am targeting this role: [role, and paste a real job advertisement for it if I have one]

Write the brief for my resume. Not the resume — the brief.

Using my evidence [paste the fact list from Stage 1], give me:

1. The three things this document has to prove, ranked by what would get me rejected fastest if it were missing.
2. Under each, the exact facts from my evidence that prove it.
3. What in my background is true, possibly impressive, and irrelevant to this role — and therefore comes out.
4. What I cannot prove yet, and will have to handle some other way.

Do not write a single line of resume content. If you catch yourself drafting a bullet, stop and put the underlying fact into point 2 instead.

I am going to build the document against this brief, and hold you to it afterwards.

Convert these into resume bullets: [facts from Stage 1, or bullets I already have]

Eight per run. If I have pasted more, handle the first eight and tell me to run it again.

Every bullet passes through three visible stages:

Draft. Write it.

Critique. Turn on your own draft and interrogate it. Where does the sentence begin — at the outcome, or at the activity? Would somebody outside my industry see the capability in it? Does the result trace back to something I told you, or did you close that gap yourself? Then run the substitution: put a different person's name and a different employer on this sentence. If it still reads as true, it is describing a job rather than describing me.

Improve. Rebuild it from your own critique.

The stop. Where the source fact carries no defensible outcome, produce the Draft and the Critique and then halt. Issue one numbered question asking me for the outcome, and wait. That bullet has no Improve stage until I answer — improving it would mean supplying the missing piece yourself.

If more than half a batch halts, stop the whole run and say so. It means these facts are not ready to be drafted, and my time is better spent back at 1.1 or 1.2 than answering eight questions at once.

Constraints: my verbs keep the weight I gave them, so assisted stays assisted; nothing runs past two lines; and mark any finished bullet that reads a rank above what I actually described.

Show the stages together so I can see what your critique changed.

Assemble the document.

Inputs: the brief [paste 2.3], my banked evidence [paste Stage 1], and my existing resume if anything in it survives [paste it].

The header is my name, one line naming the work I do, then phone, email, city and LinkedIn. Leave out my photograph, my residential address, my date of birth, my marital status and my father's name — all conventional on Indian resumes, none of them any help to me.

One exception. Where my right to work somewhere is itself a fact the employer needs, a single line stating my work authorisation stays. An iqama, a residence visa, a work permit or a notice period are facts about how quickly I can be hired. A passport number is not, and it comes out.

Then, in order: a short opening block establishing the work, the level and the proof; my roles newest first; qualifications, compressed; and a skills list holding only things I would sit an examination in.

Space is a budget. My current role draws the largest share and each earlier one draws less, with anything beyond roughly seven years back entitled to a line and nothing more. Spend that budget on whatever the brief asks you to prove — a bullet that proves nothing in the brief is not competing for space, it is taking it.

Write in fragments, not sentences with subjects. No "responsible for". No first person. Nothing describing my temperament.

Where the brief needs proof I have not banked, mark the position and leave it empty. Filling it is not your decision to make.

Close with two registers: everything you dropped and why, and every position you left open.

You are going to compare two documents.

My evidence — everything I actually told you:
[paste the Stage 1 fact list]

The draft you produced from it:
[paste the draft]

Any fact, figure, timeframe, team size, scope or outcome that appears in the draft but not in my evidence was supplied by you, not by me. Find every one of them.

Also look for:

- a verb that assumes authority my evidence does not show
- phrasing that implies a result my evidence never mentions
- a gap smoothed over so neatly that it stopped being visible

For each one: quote the line, say what you added, and give me a numbered question I have to answer before that line is honest.

Do not fix anything yourself. Do not reword around a gap to make it disappear. If a line is fully covered by my evidence, leave it off the list.

Finish by telling me how many lines in this document I could not currently defend in an interview.

Bring this down to [one page / two pages]. Type size and margins are fixed — they are not a lever.

Work through five tiers, announcing each transition, and exhaust one tier before opening the next.

Tier 1 — dead weight. Lines describing what the role involved rather than what I did inside it.
Tier 2 — liability. Anything I would rather an interviewer passed over.
Tier 3 — duplication. Where two bullets carry the same point, the weaker one goes.
Tier 4 — history. Roles older than my three most recent collapse to a single line each.
Tier 5 — compression. Only now, tighten the language itself.

Reach the target in an earlier tier and stop there. Tell me which tier you finished in. Tiers 3 and 4 are different in scale — deduplication removes lines, collapsing history removes pages — so do not treat one as a substitute for the other.

On measurement. With pasted text only: give me word counts before and after, call the page figure an estimate, and say plainly that you cannot see where the breaks fall. With an uploaded PDF or editable file: examine the real pagination, type size, leading and break positions before deciding whether the target has been met.

Hand me the removed material as a separate list.

Last: name the removal you are least confident about, and what would earn its place back.

Two separate readings. Keep them apart.

[paste my resume]

Reading one — the glance. Look at the upper third of page one and nothing beyond it. Stop at that boundary. Report:

- the impression formed in five seconds — what work, what seniority, what kind of person
- which elements up there are consuming the most valuable space on the page while returning the least
- what a reader still would not know about me, having read only this

Write that verdict down before going further.

Reading two — the rest. Now read everything below, and identify what has a stronger claim to that space than whatever currently holds it.

Your first verdict stands as written. Do not revise it now that you know more — it came from the only reader whose experience matches a real recruiter's, and editing it destroys the evidence.

Then produce three replacements for the upper third: one aimed at [role A], one at [role B], and one aimed at neither.

Evidence only. Nothing about my character, my drive or my enthusiasm.

[paste the job advertisement]

Split it first: duties, requirements, and everything else — the company story, the values writing, the equal-opportunity notice, the benefits. Analyse only the first two. Tell me what share of the whole was the third, because a posting that is mostly institutional prose usually means the role itself received about ten minutes of somebody's attention.

Now read the duties and requirements as a document that discloses more than it means to.

Translate it. Strip the register and tell me what this person will be doing on a Tuesday.

Separate live requirements from inherited ones. Some lines read as though written for this role; others read as though carried over from a previous posting. Say which is which, say that you are inferring it from how the writing behaves, and show me what gave it away. If nothing reads inherited, say so rather than manufacturing suspicion.

Diagnose the vacancy. Why does this role exist right now, and what does the answer suggest about what broke, who left, or what is about to be attempted?

Test the entry threshold. Where the posting names a years range starting at zero, or invites freshers, check whether somebody with no employment could actually hold the skills it lists as required. Distinguish employment from exposure — an internship, a family business, a student society or a training placement can produce genuine exposure without a payslip. Where the required skills demand exposure the stated range does not imply, tell me plainly: the published threshold and the operating threshold are different, and only one of them decides anything.

Flag incoherence. Requirements that contradict each other, a skill combination no single career produces, language narrow enough to suggest the role was written around somebody already chosen.

Extract the vocabulary somebody would type to find this posting — from this text, not from your general knowledge of the field.

Finally, weight the requirements. Which ones end an application when unmet, and which ones nobody will ever verify. Where the posting labels requirements as required or preferred, start from its own labels and tell me where you think it has them wrong.

Aim this resume at one specific job.

[paste the resume and the advertisement]

Gate first. Decide whether this is a job for rearrangement or a job for rebuilding. Rearrangement works when the evidence exists and is merely badly placed. It fails when the evidence is absent altogether, or when it sits so far down the page that the opening third argues for a different career. If it fails, say so, stop there, and send me back to 2.3. Do not produce a version that cannot succeed.

If rearrangement works, split the task in two and show me both halves.

The planning half. Decide every change and tie each one to a specific line in the advertisement. No resume text appears in this half at all.

The execution half. Make exactly the changes you planned, and nothing else.

Permitted: promoting relevant bullets up the order; re-describing real work in this employer's vocabulary; lengthening what matters here and shortening what does not; reworking the opening block and skills list around this role.

Not permitted: any claim, figure, title or span I did not already hold; keywords placed for retrieval rather than for truth; a skill I could not defend under examination.

Close with a change register — one row per change, with a mark against everything I have to verify before this document leaves my hands.

Write the covering note.

[resume and advertisement] · [the 4.1 analysis, if it exists] · [how the role reached me, or who put me forward]

Three movements, 150 words in total.

Open by naming the role and my reason for writing. Start at the point — no scene-setting.

The middle carries one thing only: whichever part of my experience speaks to the problem this employer is actually trying to solve, with its evidence attached.

Close by proposing a conversation. Not requesting one. Not thanking them in advance for their consideration.

Banned throughout: any declaration of enthusiasm, any assertion that I am well suited, any string of adjectives about myself. Write the way I would speak to somebody whose time I respected.

If nothing in my experience genuinely addresses their problem, tell me that instead of building a bridge out of adjectives.

Then compress the whole thing to seventy words, for the applications that give me nothing but a box.

We are going to test this document until it passes, or until we know exactly why it cannot.

[paste the resume]
[paste my LinkedIn profile too, if I have one — headline, About, jobs, skills]
Target role: [role] · Target length: [one page / two pages]

The seven pass conditions:

1. Every bullet states a result I can defend, or has been flagged for me to supply one.
2. None of these appear anywhere: spearheaded, streamlined, robust, seamless, passionate, results-driven, highly motivated, proven ability to, proven track record, end-to-end, value added. "Successfully" survives only where deleting it would change the meaning.
3. The substitution test. Put somebody else's name and employer on each sentence. Any sentence that still reads as true is describing a job rather than describing me, and fails.
4. No sentence using three items for rhythm rather than for information — the giveaway is that dropping one would cost the reader nothing. Ordinary lists of three real things are fine. And no construction that denies one thing in order to affirm another.
5. It is within the target length. Count the words and state the count — roughly 450 to 550 for one page, 900 to 1,100 for two. Treat this as an estimate, not proof of pagination. If I have told you the document already fits on one page and the count is well above this range, flag a possible readability problem: the text may be set small or spaced tightly to make it fit. Do not state that as fact unless you can see the rendered document, or unless I have given you the font size and line spacing.
6. No figure is implausible on its face, and no figure is a different order of magnitude from the others in the document. You are not judging whether a claim is true — you are telling me which ones a reader will not believe.
7. Nothing contradicts anything else. Check totals against the items listed beneath them, years of experience against the earliest date shown, and any figure that appears more than once. If I have pasted my LinkedIn profile, check the resume against that as well — employer names, job titles, start and end dates, and how I describe myself all have to match. Flag anything a recruiter reading both would notice, including things that are merely out of date.

How to run it:

- Test against all seven. Report pass or fail for each, quoting the failing lines and stating the word count.
- Fix only the failures.
- Test again. Repeat up to four times.

Deleting is not fixing. If a bullet fails condition 1, flag it as unresolved with the question you need answered — do not remove it and call the condition met. Remove no more than three bullets across the entire run. If more than three fail, stop and tell me this document needs Stage 1 before it needs Stage 5.

Do not tell me it passes while any condition is failing. If something still fails after four attempts, stop and tell me what is blocking it.

Show me the pass table after every attempt, not only the last one.

Open a new chat for this one. Do not run it in the conversation where the resume was written. A session that helped write the document cannot honestly grade it.

You are screening candidates. You have no history with this document and no reason to be kind about it.

Here is a resume: [paste it]
Here is the job: [paste the advertisement]

For each requirement that is a genuine filter, tell me:

- met, partly met, or not met
- the exact line in the resume that supports your judgement
- what is missing where it falls short

Then:

- the three gaps that would actually cost this candidate the interview, and which gaps do not matter
- whether this is a reasonable stretch or a wasted application
- anything in the resume that raises a question the resume itself does not answer

Be blunt. Do not soften a negative verdict — and do not manufacture one. If the honest answer is that this is a strong application, say that plainly and stop.

Read my resume as four different people, one at a time, and keep their verdicts separate.

[paste the text, or upload the file itself if you can]
Layout: [describe it — columns, tables, headers, footers, graphics, icons, rating bars, photo, font size and line spacing if known]

If I have neither uploaded the document nor described the layout, ask me for the layout before starting. If I did upload it, inspect it directly and tell me what you still cannot determine from it — exact point size, or whether a given element sits inside a text box.

1. A recruiter with ten seconds. What do they take me for, at what level, and do they open it or move on?

2. A hiring manager whose team has a problem. Does this look like somebody who could solve it? Where do they stop reading?

3. An ATS-risk reviewer, and the human who reads afterwards. Work through three categories.
Content that may never be extracted at all: text held inside boxes, tables, headers or footers; skills existing only as a bar, dial or icon; anything living in an image.
Content extracted in the wrong order or the wrong shape: multi-column layouts; date formats that change between roles; headings renamed into something no parser recognises; terms written as an acronym in one place and spelled out in another, with the two never meeting.
Content that survives extraction and then defeats the human: type below roughly ten point; leading tight enough to make scanning effortful; blocks dense enough that the eye finds nowhere to rest.
This is risk, not prophecy — you cannot run any actual applicant tracking system. Separate what you found in the document itself from what you inferred only from my description of it. A layout that is already clean does not need flattening into plain text; say so if that is what you find.

4. A sceptic who assumes I am overstating. Which line do they attack first?

Keep the four verdicts separate. Do not merge them into a single opinion.

At the end, state which checks you could not perform, and why. Then name the one change that improves all four verdicts at once.

You are conducting the interview. Your only information is this document: [paste it]
Role: [role]

Ask what the document itself provokes. One question at a time, and wait for my answer.

Cover three kinds:

- the direct ones, aimed at whatever I have claimed most confidently
- the ones I am hoping you will not ask: the unexplained interval, the role I left quickly, the move that reads sideways or downward, the project whose ending this document declines to describe
- at least one that stays on a single figure and keeps going until the figure either survives or collapses

After each answer, give me a verdict and name the follow-up a sceptical interviewer would reach for next.

No encouragement. If an answer was weak, say it was weak.

At the close: the answer needing the most work, and the single line in this document that generated the most difficulty.

The quarter is closing. Capture it before the detail decays.

Put these to me one at a time, and refuse any answer given in generalities:

1. What did I finish this quarter, and what did I fix?
2. Which measurement moved, and can I state where it stood at each end?
3. What landed on me that belonged to nobody, or belonged to somebody else?
4. What is inside my competence now that was outside it three months ago?
5. What failed, and what did I do once it had?

Convert the answers into lines a resume could carry, and preserve my raw account beneath each one — in two years the line by itself will not tell me what it meant.

Where the quarter produced nothing worth recording, record that. A manufactured bullet is worse than an empty quarter, and an empty quarter is itself a finding about the job.

My applications are not getting responses. Work out what to change.

What I have been sending: [paste the resume]
Roles I applied to: [paste two or three of the advertisements]
Applications sent: [number] · Over: [how many weeks] · Responses: [number, and what kind]

Do not guess. Work through these in order and tell me which one the evidence actually points at:

1. Targeting — I am applying for jobs I was never going to get. Check the resume against those advertisements and tell me honestly whether I was a real candidate for any of them.
2. The document — I am a candidate, but the resume does not show it inside ten seconds.
3. Route — the resume is fine, and the applications are going somewhere nobody reads.
4. Volume — the numbers are too small to conclude anything yet. Tell me what number would be enough.

For whichever one the evidence points at, give me exactly one change to test next. Tell me what result would show it worked, and how long to wait before deciding.

Do not blame the market. Do not hand me five changes at once — I will not know which one worked.