Choose from a wide range of NEWCV resume templates and customize your NEWCV design with a single click.
Use ATS-optimised Resume and resume templates that pass applicant tracking systems. Our Resume builder helps recruiters read, scan, and shortlist your Resume faster.
Use professional field-tested resume templates that follow the exact Resume rules employers look for.
Create Resume
Use professional field-tested resume templates that follow the exact Resume rules employers look for.
Create ResumeRecruiters screen resumes to decide whether a candidate is worth moving forward, not to deeply admire every detail of someone’s career story. In the Canadian job market, most resumes are first reviewed for role fit, relevant experience, location or work eligibility, job stability, clarity, keywords, and evidence that the candidate can solve the employer’s actual problem. The best resumes make that decision easy. The weakest ones force the recruiter to guess, dig, translate vague language, or hope the important information is hidden somewhere. And let me be blunt: when recruiters are reviewing dozens or hundreds of applications, guessing is not a hiring strategy. If your resume does not quickly answer “Can this person do this job, in this context, for this employer?”, it is probably not getting the attention you think it deserves.
Most candidates think recruiters are looking for the “best” candidate. That sounds logical, but it is not quite how resume screening works.
Recruiters are usually looking for the most relevant, least risky, easiest to understand candidate for the role in front of them.
That distinction matters.
A recruiter is not reading your resume in a calm little candlelit room with soft music and unlimited patience. They are usually balancing hiring manager expectations, salary ranges, timelines, internal politics, applicant volume, ATS filters, competing candidates, and the delightful mystery of job descriptions that sometimes read like four different roles had a workplace accident.
When I screen a resume, I am asking practical questions very quickly:
Does this person match the core requirements of the role?
Have they done similar work in a similar environment?
Is their experience recent enough to be relevant?
Do their job titles, responsibilities, and results make sense together?
Candidates often imagine resume screening as a careful ranking process where recruiters thoughtfully compare every applicant side by side. Sometimes that happens later. But the first screen is often more about elimination than selection.
At the early stage, recruiters are looking for reasons to move quickly.
That does not mean they are being careless. It means the hiring process is built around constraints. A recruiter may have 150 applicants for one role, but only 10 to 15 realistic interview slots. A hiring manager may say they are “open minded,” then reject everyone who does not have one very specific industry background. An ATS may rank applications based on keywords, but the recruiter still has to make human judgement calls.
During the first screen, resumes are often sorted into rough categories:
Strong fit: Clearly relevant, easy to understand, worth contacting
Possible fit: Some alignment, but missing clarity or has questions
Weak fit: Not enough relevant experience or too far from the role
No fit: Does not meet key requirements or appears misaligned
The danger zone is not always “no fit.” It is often “possible fit.”
Are there any obvious gaps, inconsistencies, or unexplained jumps?
Can I confidently present this person to the hiring manager without having to explain too much?
Will the hiring manager understand the value of this candidate within 30 seconds?
That last question is brutal but real. A resume is not just a career summary. It is a decision document. Its job is to reduce doubt.
That is where many decent candidates get lost. Not because they are unqualified, but because their resume creates too much work for the recruiter. If I need to decode whether your experience matches the role, compare vague responsibilities across multiple jobs, and guess what tools or industries you have worked with, your application becomes harder to move forward.
A good resume does not make the recruiter work harder to see your value. It puts the evidence where the recruiter is already looking.
The famous “six second resume scan” gets repeated everywhere, usually in a dramatic way. The reality is more nuanced. Some resumes get six seconds. Some get 30 seconds. Strong resumes get more time. Confusing resumes get less.
The first scan is not a full read. It is a relevance check.
Here is what I usually notice first:
Current or most recent job title
Current or most recent employer
Location and work eligibility signals
Industry background
Years of relevant experience
Core skills and tools
Career progression
Resume structure and readability
Whether the resume appears tailored to the role
In Canada, location and work authorization can matter more than candidates expect, especially for roles requiring local market knowledge, hybrid work, provincial licensing, security clearance, bilingual ability, or Canadian regulatory experience. This does not mean employers only hire people with Canadian experience. That advice is often oversimplified and, frankly, can become lazy hiring shorthand. But it does mean your resume needs to help employers understand your fit for the Canadian context if it is relevant to the job.
For example, if you have international experience and are applying in Canada, your resume should not make the recruiter guess how your background translates. If your job title, company type, education, or certifications may be unfamiliar to a Canadian employer, give enough context to make your value clear.
Recruiters are not always rejecting international experience. They are often rejecting unclear positioning.
The applicant tracking system, or ATS, is often blamed for everything. I understand why. It feels easier to believe a mysterious robot rejected you than to accept that a human may have reviewed your resume and moved on.
But here is the reality: the ATS is not usually the final decision maker. It is a system recruiters use to collect, organize, search, filter, and review applications. Some systems rank candidates. Some parse resumes badly. Some are clunky enough to test everyone’s will to live. But recruiters and hiring teams still make the actual hiring decisions in most Canadian hiring processes.
That said, ATS compatibility matters.
A resume that is hard for the ATS to parse can create problems before a recruiter even reads it. Overdesigned resumes, text boxes, graphics, columns, icons, photos, unusual fonts, and complicated formatting can cause important information to be missed or misplaced.
But ATS optimization is not just about formatting. It is also about language alignment.
If the job posting says “project coordination,” and your resume only says “supported business initiatives,” you may be describing the same thing, but your wording is weaker for both the ATS and the recruiter. If the role asks for “stakeholder management,” “Salesforce,” “financial reporting,” “inventory control,” “client onboarding,” or “full cycle recruitment,” those exact concepts should appear naturally if you genuinely have that experience.
The trick is not keyword stuffing. Recruiters can spot that. The trick is using the employer’s language where it accurately reflects your background.
Weak Example:
“Helped with different business tasks and supported team goals.”
Good Example:
“Coordinated client onboarding tasks, tracked project milestones, updated CRM records in Salesforce, and followed up with internal stakeholders to keep implementation timelines on track.”
The good example is not better because it sounds fancier. It is better because it gives the recruiter searchable, specific, job relevant evidence.
A resume moves forward when it makes the recruiter feel confident that the candidate is worth a conversation.
Confidence comes from evidence.
Not adjectives. Not “motivated professional.” Not “excellent communicator.” Not “team player.” Those phrases are resume wallpaper. They are everywhere, and they do not help much.
Strong resumes usually show:
Clear alignment with the target role
Relevant job titles or transferable responsibilities
Specific skills connected to real work
Achievements that show scale, impact, or complexity
Progression or stability that makes sense
Tools, systems, methods, or industry knowledge the employer needs
A professional summary that positions the candidate clearly
Bullet points that explain outcomes, not just duties
Formatting that lets the recruiter find information quickly
The best resumes answer recruiter questions before they become objections.
For example, if you are applying for a payroll role, I want to know payroll size, provinces covered, systems used, compliance exposure, union or non union environment, reporting responsibilities, and whether you handled full cycle payroll or only assisted with pieces of it.
If you are applying for a marketing role, I want to know channels, campaign types, budgets, performance metrics, tools, audience, and whether you created strategy, executed campaigns, analyzed results, or all of the above.
If you are applying for an operations role, I want to know process ownership, team size, KPIs, vendor management, inventory, scheduling, cost savings, workflow improvements, and cross functional coordination.
This is where many resumes fail. They describe the job category, but not the level, scope, or practical value of the work.
Most resume rejection is not dramatic. It is not personal. It is usually a combination of mismatch, unclear positioning, missing evidence, or too much doubt.
Common reasons recruiters skip resumes include:
The experience does not match the core role requirements
The resume is too vague to evaluate quickly
The candidate appears overqualified or underqualified without explanation
Job titles do not match responsibilities
Employment gaps are unexplained or confusing
The resume is too long without enough relevant value
The candidate applies to many unrelated roles at the same company
Key tools, certifications, or requirements are missing
The resume looks generic and untailored
The career direction is unclear
One thing candidates often misunderstand is that recruiters are not only asking, “Can this person do the job?” They are also asking, “Can I explain this candidate to the hiring manager?”
That is a different question.
A recruiter may personally see potential in your background, but if your resume does not clearly connect to the hiring manager’s needs, the recruiter may hesitate. Hiring managers are not always generous readers. Some are excellent. Some are rushed. Some fixate on one missing keyword and ignore five strong transferable strengths. Welcome to hiring. It is not always elegant.
Your resume needs to survive both the recruiter screen and the hiring manager screen.
Recruiters and hiring managers often read resumes through different lenses.
Recruiters tend to look for fit, searchability, communication clarity, salary alignment, logistics, motivation, and whether the candidate is worth screening.
Hiring managers tend to look for direct work relevance, team fit, technical depth, problem solving ability, industry exposure, and whether the candidate can succeed with limited hand holding.
A recruiter may notice that your resume is well structured and aligned with the posting. A hiring manager may immediately ask, “But have they actually managed this type of client portfolio?” or “Have they worked in a regulated environment?” or “Do they know our software stack?”
This is why generic resumes struggle. They may pass a surface level screen but fail when someone closer to the work reviews them.
For Canadian job seekers, this matters especially in fields where provincial requirements, local market knowledge, bilingual communication, compliance, certifications, or sector specific experience affect hiring decisions. A resume for a Canadian accounting, healthcare, construction, public sector, education, logistics, HR, or financial services role needs to show the right context clearly.
Do not assume the hiring manager will infer your fit. Hiring managers are busy, and many of them are not trained resume readers. They are scanning for proof that you can handle their specific problems.
Career progression is not just about promotions. It is about whether your career story makes sense.
When I look at progression, I am asking:
Has the candidate taken on more responsibility over time?
Do the moves look intentional or random?
Is the candidate growing in a relevant direction?
Are there repeated short stays without explanation?
Did they move from hands on execution into leadership, strategy, specialization, or broader ownership?
Does the current target role make sense as a next step?
A messy career path is not automatically bad. Many strong candidates have career pivots, layoffs, immigration moves, family breaks, contract roles, or industry changes. The issue is not imperfection. The issue is lack of explanation.
Canadian hiring managers are often cautious when the career story feels unclear. They may wonder whether the candidate will stay, whether the role is too junior or too senior, whether the candidate is pivoting intentionally, or whether the candidate is applying out of desperation.
This is where your resume summary can do useful work.
Not a fluffy summary. A strategic one.
Weak Example:
“Hardworking professional seeking a challenging role where I can grow and contribute to company success.”
This says almost nothing. It sounds polite, but it does not position you.
Good Example:
“Operations coordinator with five years of experience supporting inventory planning, vendor communication, order tracking, and process improvement across fast paced distribution environments. Strong fit for roles requiring cross functional coordination, data accuracy, and practical problem solving.”
That summary gives direction. It tells the recruiter what to do with the resume.
Employment gaps are not automatic deal breakers. Job hopping is not always a deal breaker either. But unexplained patterns create questions.
Recruiters usually look at context.
A six month gap after a layoff is different from repeated unexplained gaps after every role. Contract work is different from leaving multiple permanent jobs after three months. A career break for caregiving, relocation, education, health, immigration, or restructuring can be completely understandable.
The mistake is pretending gaps do not exist when they are obvious.
You do not need to overexplain personal details on your resume. But you can reduce uncertainty.
For example:
“Career break for family caregiving, 2023 to 2024”
“Relocated to Canada and completed settlement transition, 2022”
“Contract role completed as scheduled”
“Company wide restructuring”
“Professional development period focused on PMP coursework and data analytics training”
Keep it factual. Keep it calm. Do not sound defensive.
For job changes, the key is pattern interpretation. If every move shows growth, better scope, stronger alignment, or contract completion, it looks different from a string of unexplained exits.
Recruiters are not judging your life. They are assessing hiring risk. Your job is to remove avoidable doubt.
Skills sections are useful, but they are often misused.
A list of skills is not proof. It is a signal. Recruiters then look for evidence in the work history.
If your skills section says “leadership,” but your experience does not show team leadership, project leadership, training, mentoring, decision making, or ownership, the word does not carry much weight.
If your resume says “Excel,” I want to know what level of Excel. Basic formatting? Pivot tables? VLOOKUP? Power Query? Financial modelling? Reporting dashboards? Data cleanup? There is a large difference between “I opened Excel once and survived” and “I built reporting tools that leadership actually used.”
A strong skills section should include relevant, searchable terms, but your experience section should prove them.
For example:
Weak Example:
“Skills: communication, teamwork, organization, leadership, Microsoft Office”
Good Example:
“Skills: stakeholder coordination, client onboarding, CRM data management, Salesforce, Excel reporting, meeting coordination, process documentation, issue tracking”
The good version is more useful because it reflects actual work contexts. It helps the ATS, the recruiter, and the hiring manager understand the candidate’s functional fit.
Soft skills matter, but they are more convincing when shown through situations and outcomes.
Instead of saying “strong communication skills,” show that you:
Managed client updates across multiple accounts
Presented weekly project status reports to leadership
Resolved service issues between customers and internal teams
Trained new hires on process documentation
Coordinated between finance, operations, and sales teams
That is communication in hiring language.
Achievements are not only for executives or salespeople. Every role has some form of value. The problem is that many candidates think achievements must be huge, glamorous, or attached to perfect metrics.
They do not.
Recruiters look for evidence that you made work better, faster, smoother, more accurate, more profitable, more compliant, more organized, or less painful. Yes, “less painful” is a real workplace outcome, even if no one puts it on a corporate poster.
Good achievements can include:
Improved a process
Reduced errors
Increased customer satisfaction
Supported revenue growth
Saved time
Managed volume
Improved reporting accuracy
Helped a team meet deadlines
Reduced backlog
Supported compliance
Trained team members
Managed competing priorities successfully
The best resume bullets often combine responsibility, scope, and outcome.
Weak Example:
“Responsible for customer service.”
Good Example:
“Managed 40 to 60 customer inquiries daily across phone and email, resolving account issues, updating CRM records, and escalating complex cases to reduce repeat follow ups.”
That bullet is stronger because it gives volume, channels, tasks, tools, and business relevance.
Candidates often ask whether every bullet needs a number. No. But every bullet needs a point.
A resume full of duties says, “This was my job description.” A resume with strong achievements says, “This is how I performed the work and why it mattered.”
When several candidates meet the basic requirements, recruiters start looking at quality of fit.
This is where small details matter.
Similar candidates may be compared on:
Recency of relevant experience
Industry match
Tool and system match
Communication clarity
Career stability
Level of responsibility
Evidence of results
Salary alignment
Location and availability
Professional presentation
Hiring manager preferences
This is also where candidate positioning becomes important. Two people may have similar experience, but one resume makes the value obvious and the other makes it look ordinary.
For example, “managed administrative tasks” is forgettable. “Coordinated executive calendars, prepared board materials, processed vendor invoices, and managed confidential records for a 60 person professional services office” gives a much clearer picture.
The work may be similar. The positioning is not.
Recruiters do not always choose the candidate with the most experience. They often choose the candidate whose experience is easiest to trust for the specific role.
That is why tailoring matters. Not fake tailoring. Not copying the job posting into your resume like you are trying to hypnotize the ATS. Real tailoring means selecting and framing your actual experience around what the employer needs most.
Candidates often misunderstand relevant experience. They think it means having the exact same job title. Sometimes it does. But often, relevant experience means you have handled similar problems, environments, responsibilities, tools, customers, regulations, pace, or decision making.
For example, a candidate moving from hospitality operations into office coordination may have relevant experience in scheduling, customer service, vendor communication, problem solving, and high pressure coordination. But if the resume only says “served guests and handled daily tasks,” the relevance is buried.
A newcomer to Canada may have strong finance experience abroad, but if their resume does not clarify reporting standards, systems, transaction volume, industry type, and stakeholder exposure, a Canadian employer may struggle to compare that background with local candidates.
A teacher moving into corporate training may have strong facilitation, curriculum development, stakeholder communication, and learning assessment experience. But if the resume reads only like a classroom teaching document, recruiters may not connect the dots.
Relevant experience is not always obvious. Your resume has to translate it.
This is one of the biggest gaps I see: candidates know they are capable, but their resume does not explain their capability in the employer’s language.
Not every so called red flag is fair. Some hiring advice makes candidates feel like one gap, one short role, or one career pivot has ruined everything. That is nonsense.
Recruiters care about patterns, risk, and unexplained contradictions.
Real resume red flags include:
A resume that is too vague to evaluate
Job titles that seem inflated compared with responsibilities
Claims that sound impressive but have no evidence
Frequent short roles with no contract context
Applying to roles at completely different levels and functions
Large unexplained gaps combined with unclear current direction
Missing dates or inconsistent timelines
A resume that looks copied from job descriptions
No measurable scope in roles where scope matters
Overly designed formatting that hides the actual content
The biggest red flag is often not the issue itself. It is the lack of context.
A short role is not automatically bad. A short role with no explanation may raise questions. A career gap is not automatically bad. A career gap hidden awkwardly with missing dates may look worse than the truth. A career change is not bad. A career change with no positioning can look random.
Recruiters can handle reality. What they struggle with is confusion.
The goal is not to impress recruiters with decorative language. The goal is to help the right recruiter quickly understand why you fit the role.
Use these principles:
Put the most relevant information near the top
Use a clear professional summary that positions your fit
Match your language to the role without keyword stuffing
Show scope, tools, industries, volume, customers, budgets, or team size where relevant
Use job titles and company descriptions that make context clear
Explain unusual career moves briefly and professionally
Prioritize recent and relevant experience
Remove outdated or unrelated detail that distracts from your target role
Keep formatting clean, ATS friendly, and easy to scan
Write bullets that show responsibility plus impact
Think of your resume like a business case. You are not begging for a chance. You are presenting evidence.
A strong resume makes the recruiter think, “This person is worth speaking to.”
A weak resume makes the recruiter think, “Maybe, but I am not sure.”
That uncertainty is costly.
The hiring process is not always as logical as candidates are told it is. Good candidates get missed. Weak job postings attract the wrong applicants. Hiring managers change their minds. Recruiters work with incomplete information. ATS systems create friction. Salary ranges sometimes appear late in the process, because apparently transparency is still a radical concept in some rooms.
But you still have control over how clearly you present your value.
Here is what I wish more candidates understood:
Recruiters are not mind readers
Hiring managers often need more context than candidates assume
A generic resume is not neutral, it is weak positioning
ATS keywords matter, but human clarity matters more
The most qualified candidate on paper does not always get the interview
Employers are often screening for risk as much as ability
Your resume must make sense for the job you want next, not only describe the jobs you had before
The strongest candidates do not always have perfect backgrounds. They have clear, relevant, well positioned resumes that make the hiring decision easier.
That is the real advantage.
Before applying, read your resume the way a recruiter would. Not lovingly. Not emotionally. Practically.
Ask yourself:
Can someone understand my target role within 10 seconds?
Is my most relevant experience visible near the top?
Do my recent roles clearly connect to the job posting?
Have I included the right tools, systems, certifications, or industry terms?
Do my bullets show scope and outcomes, not only duties?
Are my dates clear and consistent?
Have I explained anything that may raise obvious questions?
Does my resume match the Canadian job market and employer expectations for this role?
Would a hiring manager understand why I am a strong fit?
Is there anything on the page that distracts from my main positioning?
A resume should not require a private tour. If you need to explain too much outside the document, the document is not doing enough work.
Written by Simar Malhi, a recruiter and headhunter with international recruitment experience. I write about CVs, job applications, hiring decisions, and the reality behind recruitment processes. My goal is to help candidates understand more honestly how employers, recruiters, and hiring managers actually select candidates.
Upload Resume
Import from Linkedin