skills/resplendent-resume-builder/references/resume-craft.md

# Resume craft

Use this reference for a resume or CV build, rewrite, diagnosis, formatting decision, specialized positioning, or master career dossier. It consolidates the source capabilities `resume-bullet-writer`, `resume-quantifier`, `resume-formatter`, `resume-section-builder`, `tech-resume-optimizer`, `executive-resume-writer`, `academic-cv-builder`, and `creative-portfolio-resume`.

Also read [professional editorial method](editorial-method.md). When the user asks for examples, templates, visual polish, or proven practices, read [example patterns and sources](example-patterns.md).

## Choose the right artifact

- **Professional resume:** concise, role-relevant evidence for most industry applications. Default to a single column, conventional headings, selectable text, and reverse chronology.
- **Academic CV:** comprehensive scholarly record. Expand only with supplied evidence; order sections by the institution and role. Publications, grants, teaching, service, presentations, and mentoring can be separate sections when relevant.
- **Executive resume:** strategic scope, leadership context, transformation, operating scale, and governance. Use a concise executive profile, selected career highlights, and evidence of organization-level outcomes; do not manufacture confidential figures.
- **Technical resume:** make the technical work legible by connecting systems, tools, decisions, constraints, and outcomes. List technologies only at a supportable proficiency level and avoid a detached keyword dump.
- **Creative portfolio resume:** default to ATS-safe content. Offer a designed portfolio version only when it will be viewed directly by people; state that unconventional layout, graphics, columns, text-in-images, or infographics can harm parsing. Keep an ATS-safe companion version.
- **Master career dossier:** comprehensive, reusable source material for future resumes, applications, LinkedIn updates, interviews, and portfolios. It is an evidence repository, not an application-ready resume; completeness and traceability matter more than brevity.

Do not force a one-page rule. Match length to relevance, seniority, discipline, and supplied evidence; cut repetition and layout waste before cutting meaningful achievements or shrinking type.

## Evidence inventory and structure

First identify the candidate's target, career stage, work history, education, projects, skills, recognition, and nontraditional experience. Choose sections by relevance:

1. Contact and relevant professional links.
2. Targeted headline or summary only when it clarifies direction or differentiates the candidate.
3. Skills grouped by meaningful domain, only if supported and useful to the target role.
4. Experience, projects, research, or leadership evidence.
5. Education, certifications, publications, grants, selected presentations, portfolio, volunteer work, languages, or awards when they strengthen the case.

For early-career candidates, projects, coursework, internships, labs, leadership, or community work may carry more evidence. For a career change, lead with transferable outcomes and a skills section that the evidence supports. Explain gaps only if the user wants to address them; use accurate, concise labels rather than defensive prose.

Give sections distinct jobs:

- **Headline:** identifies the supported target or professional identity.
- **Summary/profile:** interprets the strongest evidence and direction; it is not a compressed repetition of the first role.
- **Highlights:** optional; use only for high-value evidence that will not immediately repeat in Experience.
- **Skills:** supported technical, domain, language, or operating capabilities that aid scanning; avoid a second summary made of nouns.
- **Experience/projects:** primary evidence of action, judgment, scope, and outcomes.

Before finalizing, perform the whole-document repetition audit from the editorial-method reference.

### Master career dossier

Start with source recovery, not a blank-slate interview. If the user has not supplied background material, make the first question a request for any existing resume/CV, LinkedIn profile or export, professional bio, portfolio, career notes, performance reviews, or accomplishment lists. If useful sources are already available, do not ask for them again. Extract a preliminary career timeline and evidence inventory, show what was recovered and the highest-value gaps, then ask one focused question at a time only for missing or weak evidence. Periodically summarize what has been captured and what remains so the interview has a visible endpoint.

When the user wants a master dossier, interview them one high-value question at a time and organize the answers into a durable source of truth. Capture, when supported: employers, titles, dates, locations or work arrangements, scope, responsibilities, achievements, metrics, products/projects, decisions and constraints, skills/tools, credentials, recognition, portfolio links, and reusable situation/action/result stories. Mark each item as verified, approximate, confidential, or needing confirmation; never turn a prompt for missing evidence into a fact.

Keep the dossier comprehensive and structured enough to support later tailoring. Preserve distinct evidence even when it would be repetitive in a resume. Summarize the candidate's career themes and strongest evidence separately from the underlying role records so future application materials can be concise without losing provenance.

## Write credible achievement bullets

Rewrite a bullet from evidence, not from a stock verb list. A useful pattern is:

`action + object/context + method or constraint + outcome/scale`

Start with a precise action when it clarifies responsibility. State the system, customer, process, team, or problem where helpful. Include outcome, scale, speed, quality, cost, risk, adoption, or collaboration only when known. Keep the candidate's actual role clear: contributed, partnered, led, owned, or advised are not interchangeable.

When revising, provide the strongest supported version and optionally a tighter alternative. Explain which input fact supports the new claim. Avoid duty-only bullets, empty superlatives, first-person pronouns, buzzword chains, and a mechanical requirement that every bullet contain a number.

### Metric discovery without invention

Ask compact questions that recover real evidence: how many customers, requests, records, releases, locations, people, dollars, hours, or teams? What changed before versus after? What deadline, error rate, adoption rate, cycle time, quality signal, or risk reduction did the work affect? What is the minimum defensible scale?

Do not convert a guess into a resume fact. If the user wants to estimate, keep it separate as a **confirm before use** option, label the assumption, prefer conservative ranges or lower bounds, and omit it from final copy until confirmed. Confidential results can be expressed truthfully with a non-sensitive scale or qualitative consequence.

## Formatting and parsing rules

Use standard headings such as Experience, Education, Skills, Projects, Publications, and Certifications. Use clear dates, employer/organization, title, and location conventions. Keep text selectable and reading order obvious. Avoid tables, text boxes, sidebars, headers/footers for essential content, icon-only contact labels, multi-column layouts, logos, graphics that carry meaning, excessive styling, and unexplained acronyms when ATS compatibility matters.

Treat each experience header as a machine-readable record, not decorative prose. Prefer one supported canonical title per role. A slash, pipe, ampersand, stacked title, or combined title/progression can be truncated by an application parser; preserve the candidate's official history, but flag the ambiguity and, when the evidence supports it, represent a genuine promotion as separate dated roles or move a secondary function into a bullet instead of manufacturing a cleaner title.

Treat Education as structured eligibility data. Capture the institution, location, field of study, credential or degree type when known, and completion/status when relevant. For incomplete study, state the coursework or program and that no degree was completed; never imply graduation. If the degree type or attendance dates are unknown, flag those fields for confirmation because an application form may require manual selections even when the resume itself is truthful and readable.

Perform a plain-text mental check: can the candidate's name, contact, titles, employers, dates, headings, bullets, and skills still be understood in reading order? If not, simplify. For designed creative material, make the trade-off explicit and retain the ATS version.

## Specialized routes

### Academic CV

Use a complete, accurate chronology. Preserve citation style consistency and author order. Separate peer-reviewed work, works in progress, presentations, grants, teaching, mentoring, service, memberships, and honors where the target expects them. Do not imply a manuscript is published, funded, accepted, or invited unless supplied.

### Executive positioning

Foreground strategic mandate, organizational scope, leadership approach, financial/operational stewardship, transformation, cross-functional influence, board/advisory work, and durable outcomes. Respect confidentiality; describe scale in safe terms when exact data cannot be shared. Do not use inflated leadership claims to conceal an individual-contributor role.

### Technical positioning

Group technical skills by domain only if that makes scanning easier. Tie technologies to implementation, architecture, reliability, security, performance, product, or delivery evidence. Distinguish personal ownership from team work and do not claim familiarity with a tool merely because it appears in a job description.

### Creative positioning

Treat the resume as a work sample only when the application channel supports it. Include a portfolio link if supplied; choose examples that reveal process, contribution, constraints, and outcomes. Never let visual style obscure text or factual evidence.

## Useful deliverable shapes

- **Audit:** highest-impact issues, repetition decisions, revised sections, missing-evidence questions, and format recommendations.
- **Build:** complete structured resume/CV copy, followed by facts to confirm.
- **Bullet pass:** original, revised bullet, evidence note, and a focused metric question if needed.
- **Section plan:** recommended section order, purpose of each section, and material to include or leave out.
- **Master dossier:** structured role records, evidence inventory, reusable stories, career themes, facts to confirm, and a short update note showing what was added in the session.