I screen, on average, 100 engineering resumes a month. The number has been roughly stable for the last three years across two companies. That works out to about 1,200 a year, more during hiring sprees, less during freezes. I spend somewhere between 60 and 120 seconds on each one. The cumulative time investment in resume reading I have made is honestly not far from a full work-month per year of my life.
The pattern I have noticed, over those 3,500-ish resumes, is that the resumes that move me from "skim" to "phone screen" all look surprisingly similar, and they look noticeably different from the ones that lose me. The gap is not about candidates being objectively better; it is about the resume making the case efficiently for the candidate they actually are. A strong engineer with a weak resume is depressingly common. A weak engineer with a strong resume is much rarer (in my experience), but they do exist, and the resume gets them to a phone screen they sometimes do not deserve.
This article is what I actually look for in those 90 seconds, the patterns that earn the phone screen, and the things I have learned to stop caring about. Take it as one screener's opinion at one role band (mid to senior IC); other screeners weight differently, and at different levels the bar shifts.
What 90 seconds of screening actually looks like
It is worth describing because the rhythm of the read is what shapes the advice. My eye path on a resume, in the order it lands:
- The current and most recent job (5-10 seconds). Title, company, length, what they did there.
- The bullets under the most recent role (15-25 seconds). I skim for verbs, numbers, and outcomes.
- The job before that (10 seconds). Same scan.
- Career arc (5 seconds). Are the moves up, sideways, or down? Are the gaps explained?
- Tech stack scan (5-10 seconds). Does the stack overlap with what we use, or with stacks I respect?
- The bottom of the page (5 seconds). Education and any credentials. I look at this last because, for the levels I screen, it almost never decides anything.
The whole read is roughly 60-90 seconds. If something snags my eye in step 2 or 3 in a positive way, I might add 30-60 seconds to read more carefully. If nothing does, I am in the "reject" pile by step 4.
The pattern I want to stress: most of my attention is on the most recent job's bullets. Almost everything else is window dressing. If the recent role's bullets are not selling the candidate, the rest of the resume cannot rescue the read.
What I am scanning for in those bullets
The bullets are 80% of the screening decision in my pile. Here is what I look for in each one, in priority order. A good resume bullet hits at least two of these four. A great one hits three or four.
A specific outcome. "Improved performance" is vague. "Cut p99 latency from 450ms to 120ms" is specific. The first tells me nothing; the second tells me you knew what to measure, you measured it, you moved it. Numbers are not the goal; the goal is concreteness. A bullet that says "reduced incident response time, cutting our average page-to-resolution from 35 minutes to 12" hits the target the same way.
The candidate's role in the outcome. "Helped redesign the checkout flow" tells me you were in the room. "Owned the architecture and led the migration of the checkout flow to event-driven" tells me what you did. The second is a much stronger claim; if it is true, write it. If it is not true, do not write it (the phone screen will catch it, painfully).
The technical decision. "Built a feature using Postgres" is empty. "Chose Postgres over DynamoDB after benchmarking the read-pattern; the lower p99 latency and the join queries we needed made the trade-off lean Postgres" is a sentence I want to read more of. The decision is the signal that the candidate understands trade-offs, not just tools.
The size of the system. "Reduced infra cost" is one thing. "Reduced infra cost on a service handling 40k QPS by 30%" is another. The first I cannot evaluate; the second tells me the candidate knows what scale their work was at and is willing to anchor it.
If I read four bullets under your most recent role and they all hit two or more of these, I am almost certainly moving you to the phone screen, even if the rest of the resume is bland. If they all hit one or zero, I am almost certainly moving you to the no pile, even if you went to a fancy school.
The bullet that lost me, and the rewrite
A real anonymized bullet I rejected, paraphrased to protect the candidate:
Worked on the team's microservices, contributed to multiple features and bug fixes, collaborated with cross-functional partners.
Four distinct claims, none of them concrete. After 60 seconds I have learned that this person was on a team and did things. There is no signal about what they are good at, what they own, or how they think.
The same candidate's actual work, as I learned in the phone screen later (the resume was on a friend's pile and got escalated): they had owned the migration of three services from a legacy auth system to OAuth2, they had cut a recurring 2am page from 3 incidents per week to one per quarter, and they had mentored two junior engineers into senior level. All three are phone-screen-earning facts, none of them were on the resume.
A rewrite that would have moved them up the pile:
Migrated three internal services from legacy session-based auth to OAuth2; rolled out with zero customer-visible downtime over a three-week phased migration.
Reduced 2am pager noise from a recurring incident from 3/week to 1/quarter by adding rate limiting and a circuit breaker; saved the team an estimated 15 hours of on-call time per month.
Mentored two engineers from mid-level to senior; both were promoted within 18 months. Worked with their manager to design a structured pairing rotation that we now use across the team.
Same work, three concrete bullets, each hitting at least three of the four targets above. The rewrite took the candidate maybe 20 minutes. It would have changed their pile entirely.
What I have stopped caring about
A short list of things resumes spend space on that, in my screening, almost never move the needle.
Skill lists. A bullet of 20 technologies tells me you have heard of all of them, not that you are good at any of them. The rare exception: if the role specifically requires an unusual tech ("Erlang", "Spark", "low-level CUDA") and your skill list shows it, the keyword scan helps. Otherwise, these are wallpaper.
Side project paragraphs that are obviously toy projects. A todo list app, a clone of Twitter, a personal blog. These are fine for very junior candidates who genuinely have no other work to show. For mid+ candidates they actively hurt: they take up space the work bullets should have, and they signal that the candidate could not think of a more impressive thing to put there. The exception that helps: a side project that is in production, used by other people, has a non-trivial scale, and is technically distinctive.
Education at the bottom for senior candidates. I do not look at where you went to school for a senior IC role. I literally do not. Several candidates I have hired had no college degree at all. The school's name, the GPA, the major, none of it shifts my screening at the senior level. (For new grads it does, but that is a different population than the one I am writing about.)
Buzzwords in the summary. "Passionate, detail-oriented, results-driven engineer with a track record of leveraging cutting-edge technologies to deliver high-impact solutions." I have seen this sentence, give or take adjectives, several hundred times. It does not say anything that distinguishes the resume from any other resume on the pile. If you have a summary, make it concrete: "Senior engineer focused on backend systems, with depth in payments and event-driven architectures. Most recent work: scaling a 100k QPS payments pipeline to handle a 5x growth in transaction volume."
Stylized resumes with unusual fonts and layouts. They are, at best, neutral. At worst, they signal that the candidate spent more time on the design than on the content. The screeners I know all read content; the design adds nothing. A clean one-page or two-page LaTeX or simple Word format is plenty.
The patterns that move resumes up
The specific patterns I have noticed in the resumes that consistently moved candidates to phone screen, beyond the bullet quality I described above:
One page for sub-10-year experience, two pages for 10+. Most resumes I see at the senior level are too long. Two pages is plenty. Three pages of dense bullets means I skim and lose details that matter. If you are at three pages, cut the early jobs to one bullet each.
Reverse chronological, no fancy formats. Functional resumes (where you list skills first and jobs as a bare list at the bottom) make me suspicious that you are hiding gap years or short tenures. They almost always get a stricter read. If you have nothing to hide, a standard chronological format reads better.
Career arc you can read in 5 seconds. I want to see, on the eye-path of step 4 above, that the candidate has been on an upward trajectory: more responsibility over time, larger scope, harder problems. The arc does not have to be a straight line. Lateral moves are fine if they were intentional and the resume helps me understand them.
Honest job titles. "Software Engineer III" at the company that uses that title is fine. "Senior Lead Distinguished Engineer" at a company that does not actually have that title is going to make me dig. I have rejected resumes for this and felt bad, but the mismatch erodes trust in the rest of the document.
Recent work front and center. The bullets under the most recent role get more attention than any others, so put your strongest stuff there. If your strongest work was three jobs ago, that is a signal you are stuck, and the resume has to address that explicitly (e.g. by structuring the recent role as a long bullet list of strong work even if individual scopes are smaller).
A specific structure that has worked for friends
For friends I have helped review, the structure that has produced the most phone screens is roughly:
The shape is unspectacular on purpose. Screeners read a lot of resumes; deviating from the standard layout costs you their first 10 seconds while they orient. The signal is in the content of the bullets, not the layout.
Calibrating your bullets honestly
A gut check I have suggested to friends rewriting their resumes: take each bullet and ask whether you could defend it in detail in a phone screen. A bullet that says "led the migration of payment infrastructure to event-driven, processing 40k QPS at peak" had better come with an answer to "what was the hardest part of that migration?" If your answer is "I was on the team that did it but I owned only a small part", the bullet is overstating, and the phone screen will reveal the gap painfully.
The inverse is also true: a lot of senior engineers undersell their work because they do not want to feel like they are bragging. "Helped with the migration" understates a real ownership. The honest framing for a bullet is the most accurate one, neither inflated nor diminished, with a clear ownership scope. If you owned the architecture, say so. If you executed the architecture someone else designed, say that. Either is impressive; the lie about which one you did is the problem.
The resume is one bet, not the whole gamble
The last thing I want to leave with this: a great resume buys you a phone screen. It does not buy you a job. The phone screen and the loop after it will reveal everything the resume hinted at. A resume that overstates gets caught fast and the candidate ends up worse than if they had been honest. A resume that understates gets less attention than it should but is robust to scrutiny. The ideal resume sits exactly at the line of accurate, and it does so concretely enough that I can see, in 90 seconds, why the next hour with you will be worth my time. If the resume tells me that, the rest of the process is yours to win or lose on the merits.