Resumes and cover letters

The document does one job: get a human being to read it for thirty seconds. Almost everything written about resumes is about the second half of that sentence, and the first half is where most applications actually fail.

• Employment gaps, described plainly

  Reviewed by Marie-Ève Lacombe.

  07 May 2026

• Formatting a resume that a tracking system can read

  Reviewed by Priya Chandrasekar.

  04 Feb 2026

Three things we will not tell you to do

• Keep it to one page regardless. One page is right for early careers and wrong for someone with fifteen years of it. Two is normal in Canada and nobody is counting.
• Add a photograph. Common in some countries and not here. It creates a human-rights exposure for the employer, and some organisations discard the document rather than take it on.
• Write an objective statement. It is a paragraph about what you want, at the top of a document about what you offer.