Resume and LinkedIn for Senior Roles

A senior CV is read for somewhere between 20 and 60 seconds by someone deciding whether to spend 30 minutes on a call. Optimise for that, not for completeness.

Bullets are outcomes, not responsibilities. "Responsible for the checkout flow" says nothing. "Rebuilt checkout; drop-off at payment fell from 9% to 3.5% and the flow now handles 4k orders/day" says what happened because you were there. The template that works: action, mechanism, result. Aim for three or four bullets per role, not eight.

Front-load the recent and relevant. The last two roles get the space. Anything more than about eight years back is one line. Nobody is assessing you on 2015.

One page. Two only if there's genuinely a decade of relevant senior work, and even then, cut. Length is negatively correlated with seniority in how it reads.

Make the AI-adjacent work visible if you're targeting these companies — a line about models, evals, streaming interfaces, or agent tooling is a keyword and a signal at once. Same for the stack: React, TypeScript, Next.js should be findable in the first ten seconds, because a human and a filter are both scanning for them.

Skip the noise. Photos, skill-rating bars, "references available on request", objective statements, and a wall of every technology you've touched. A skills line is fine; a taxonomy of forty items is not, and it dilutes the ones that matter.

LinkedIn is a different document. It's a search surface, so the headline and the About section carry the positioning line, and recruiters filter on titles and keywords. Set it to open-to-work for recruiters if you want inbound, and keep the last two roles' descriptions substantive — that's what gets read after the headline.

A GitHub or a site helps disproportionately at these companies if there's something real on it. One well-built project with a readable README beats thirty forks. If you have nothing public, that's fine — don't link an empty profile.

This is the artefact that decides whether you get into the process at all, and it's read faster and more sceptically than most people imagine. It's also cheap to fix: the same story bank that prepares the behavioural round supplies the bullets.

• Write bullets as action, mechanism, result — with a number wherever one exists.
• Three or four bullets per role; the last two roles get most of the page.
• One page unless a decade of senior work genuinely demands two.
• Make the target stack and any model-adjacent work findable in the first ten seconds.
• Cut photos, rating bars, objectives, and exhaustive technology lists.
• LinkedIn is a search surface — the headline and About carry your positioning line.
• One substantial public project outperforms a long list of repos; no link beats an empty profile.
• Source the bullets from your story bank so the CV and the interview answers agree.