A recruiter's first pass over your resume takes seconds — often with an ATS filter in front of it. Most developer resumes fail not because the engineer is weak, but because the document buries the signal. Here's what actually gets read, kept and forwarded.

1. Outcomes, not responsibilities

"Responsible for maintaining backend services" says nothing. "Cut p99 latency from 800ms to 120ms by rewriting the query layer; saved ~$40k/yr in compute" gets circled. Every bullet should answer: what changed because you were there? Numbers beat adjectives — latency, revenue, users, incidents avoided, releases shipped.

2. One page until ~10 years in

Cut the intern project from 2019. Cut "Microsoft Word" from skills. Recency and relevance win: your last two roles carry 80% of the decision, so give them 80% of the space. Older roles compress to one line each.

3. Make it ATS-safe, then human-pleasant

Single column, standard headings (Experience, Skills, Education) — tables and text boxes scramble parsers.
Match the job description's exact keywords where honest ("Kubernetes", not just "container orchestration").
PDF, real text (not scanned), filename firstname-lastname-resume.pdf.

4. The skills section is a filter, not a museum

List what you'd be happy to be interviewed on tomorrow — nothing else. Ten sharp skills beat forty stale ones; every listed skill is an invitation for a question.

5. Put one live link in the header — and make it count

This is the highest-leverage line on the page. A resume is frozen the moment you export it; a link to a live bio keeps proving you after the PDF is filed. One URL in your header — whomi.bio/you — gives the reader your GitHub activity from this week, real project case studies, Stack Overflow reputation and a structured way to contact you. Recruiters who click spend minutes there instead of seconds on the PDF, and hiring managers get the proof a resume can't carry.

It also survives forwarding: resumes get emailed around and mangled; the link always renders fresh, with a proper preview card, on any device.

6. Tailor the top third, reuse the rest

Recruiters decide in the top third of the page. Keep a stable base resume, then rewrite the headline and first three bullets per application to mirror the role. Fifteen minutes per application, dramatically better hit rate.

The checklist

Every bullet has a measurable outcome
One page, single column, ATS-parseable PDF
Skills list = interview-ready only
Live bio link in the header (claim yours free — it even auto-generates a PDF resume from your profile)
Top third tailored to the role

Next: make sure the person who Googles you after reading the resume finds the right thing — Developer Portfolio SEO.