How to Make a Resume With AI Recruiters Can Read
A friend of mine spent a Saturday making his resume beautiful. Two columns, a sidebar with little skill bars, a soft grey background, three fonts. It looked like something out of a design portfolio. He pasted it into a company's application portal and the preview came back as this:
Marco Vitale Logistics CoordinatorEXPERIENCE Skills Excel 80% SAP 60%2021 – Present Warehouse Ops Lead, Nordwind Freight
His work history had been shuffled into his skill bars. The recruiter never saw a resume — they saw noise, and the pile is big enough that noise gets closed.
So here's how to make a resume with AI that actually gets read: you make two of them, and you only design one.
The two-resume rule
Most applications go through an ATS — applicant tracking software that parses your file into a database before a human ever opens it. Parsers read in one direction, top to bottom, and they choke on the exact things that make a resume look designed: columns, text inside shapes, headers as images, tables, icons standing in for words.
So split the job:
- The plain version. Single column, boring, no graphics, standard section names ("Experience", "Education", "Skills"). This is what you upload to portals and job boards. It's a data file, not a document. Let it be ugly.
- The designed version. One page, laid out properly, exported as PDF. This is what you email a hiring manager directly, attach to a warm intro, hand over at a career fair, link from your portfolio, or send when someone says "just send me your CV." A human opens this one, and a human notices layout.
Almost every "AI resume" post skips this, tells you to make one gorgeous file, and quietly costs people interviews. Two files. Fifteen extra minutes. Now let's design the one that a person reads.
What the top third of the page has to do
A recruiter's first pass isn't reading, it's triage. They're answering one question — is this person plausibly the thing we're hiring? — and they answer it in the top third of the page, before scrolling.
That real estate holds three things, in this order:
- Your name. Biggest text on the page. Not decorative, just clearly first.
- The role you're claiming, in the employer's words. Not "Operations Professional." If the posting says Logistics Coordinator, that line says Logistics Coordinator.
- One line of evidence that the claim is true. A number, a scope, a name they'd recognize.
Marco's rewrite:
Marco Vitale Logistics Coordinator 4 years running inbound ops for a 40-truck freight terminal · cut dock dwell time 22%
That's it. No "objective," no paragraph about being a passionate team player who thrives in fast-paced environments. Three lines, and the recruiter already knows to keep going. Everything below the fold is just proof.
One page, three zones
Below that header, Marco's page splits into three blocks — and they're stacked, not side by side, because a single column survives every viewer, every printer, and every parser.
Experience takes about 55% of the remaining page. Three jobs, most recent first. Each one: role, company, dates on one line, then two or three bullets. Every bullet starts with a verb and ends with a consequence.
Warehouse Ops Lead — Nordwind Freight · 2021–Present · Rebuilt the inbound scheduling sheet into a slotted dock plan; dwell time down 22% in one quarter · Trained 11 seasonal staff each peak; zero lost-time incidents across two seasons · Ran daily reconciliation for ~900 pallets/week between SAP and the yard log
Skills takes a short strip — plain text, comma-separated, no percentage bars. Nobody believes "Excel 80%," and it costs a recruiter more effort to decode a bar than to read the word. SAP MM · Excel (pivot tables, XLOOKUP) · dock scheduling · German (C1) · forklift licence
Education and certificates is the last, smallest block. Once you have four years of work, this is a footnote. Two lines is fine.
Notice the ratio: the biggest section is the one with evidence in it, and the amount of vertical space each block gets is a claim about how much it matters. Get the ratio wrong — a giant skills panel, a paragraph about your hobbies — and the page argues against you before anyone reads a word. That's plain visual hierarchy, the same principle behind design principles for non-designers, applied to a document instead of a poster.
Building one in Ridvay Studio
You don't need to place any of this by hand. Describe the page and Studio generates it as an editable design — real text, font, and shape layers you then adjust, not a flat image you have to regenerate every time a comma is wrong.
Paste this in:
A one-page A4 resume for a logistics coordinator named Marco Vitale. Dark navy header band with his name large, the role beneath it, and one line of career evidence. Single column below: an Experience section with three roles and bullet points, a short one-line Skills strip, and a small Education block. One font family in two weights, one accent color, generous white space, no columns, no icons, no skill bars.
What comes back is a laid-out page with each block as its own text layer. Then make these four edits — each one is the advice above, applied:
- Click your name and push the size up until it's clearly the largest thing on the page. Then knock the section headings down a step. Hierarchy is a gap between sizes, not a lot of big text.
- Recolor the accent to one hue only. Section headings and the header band share it; body text stays near-black. If you want a palette you can trust rather than guessing, professional color combinations has ready-made pairs.
- Delete the skill bars if the layout gave you any, and replace them with the one plain skills line. Select the shapes, delete, type over.
- Drag the Experience block taller and let the Education block shrink. You're spending space in proportion to the evidence.
Two more things worth using: apply your brand kit if you have one — the same font and accent on your resume, portfolio cover, and email signature reads as deliberate — and grab a share link (ridvay.com/d/…) when someone asks for your CV in a DM and you don't want to send an attachment. Export the PDF for the version that gets emailed.
Generate the resume layout in Studio →
The four mistakes that do the most damage
Two columns is the big one, already covered. The other three:
Three fonts. A resume needs one family in two weights — bold for names and headings, regular for everything else. If you want a second family for contrast, keep it to the header only and use a pair that's actually designed to work together; font pairing for non-designers covers combos that don't fight.
Grey body text. Light grey on white looks calm on your monitor and disappears on a printout or a dim laptop screen in a meeting room. Body copy goes near-black.
Two pages when you have four years of experience. The second page is where a recruiter learns you can't tell what matters. Cut the oldest job to one line, cut the objective, cut the hobbies, and it fits.
Send the right file to the right place
Portal or job board? The plain single-column version, exported as PDF or DOCX, no graphics. Human inbox, warm intro, career fair, portfolio link? The designed one.
The designed resume isn't decoration — it's the version that gets looked at rather than parsed, and layout is how you get read in the seven seconds you have. Build it once, keep it editable, and change three lines the next time you apply somewhere.