The Resume Formula That Gets You Hired (Stolen From Google)

I review 50+ resumes a week. Most of them say nothing. They list responsibilities. Nobody cares what you were responsible for. They care what you actually did.

Here's the pattern: someone sends me a two-page resume packed with bullet points, and every single one starts with "Managed..." or "Responsible for..." or "Assisted with..." I scan the whole thing and I still don't know what this person is good at. I don't know what they achieved. I don't know why I should pick up the phone.

Google's recruiters figured this out years ago. They use a formula called X-Y-Z. It's simple. It works. And almost nobody in Australia uses it.

The X-Y-Z formula

Here it is:

X is the result — what you actually achieved. Y is the metric that proves it — the number, the percentage, the dollar figure. Z is how you did it — the specific action, method, or decision that made it happen.

It forces you to lead with impact, not activity. That's the difference between a resume that gets a call and one that gets deleted.

Most people write their resume like a job description. They describe what the role was. But hiring managers already know what the role was — they wrote the job ad. What they don't know is whether you were any good at it.

Bad vs. good: see the difference

I've rewritten hundreds of resume bullet points. Here are five examples from the kinds of roles we place at 37Talent every week. Read the "bad" version first. Then read the "good" one. You'll feel the difference immediately.

Role	Before	After (X-Y-Z)
Programmatic Trader	"Managed programmatic campaigns across multiple DSPs"	"Grew programmatic revenue by 34% ($2.1M) by consolidating from 4 DSPs to 2 and implementing automated bidding strategies"
Product Manager	"Responsible for product roadmap and stakeholder management"	"Shipped 3 features that increased user retention by 18%, by running 12 user interviews and redesigning the onboarding flow"
Senior Data Engineer	"Built and maintained data pipelines using Python and AWS"	"Reduced pipeline processing time by 65% (from 4 hours to 84 minutes) by migrating batch jobs to Spark on Databricks"
Digital Marketing Manager	"Managed digital marketing campaigns including SEM and social"	"Cut cost-per-acquisition by 28% ($340K annual saving) by shifting 40% of SEM budget to TikTok and Meta lookalike audiences"
DevOps Engineer	"Implemented CI/CD pipelines and managed cloud infrastructure"	"Reduced deployment time from 2 hours to 8 minutes by building a fully automated CI/CD pipeline with GitHub Actions and Terraform"

Look at the "before" column. Every single one of those bullet points could describe 10,000 people. They're generic. They're forgettable. They're the recruiting equivalent of background noise.

Now look at the "after" column. Each one tells a story in a single sentence. You know what happened, how big the impact was, and how they pulled it off. That's a resume that gets a phone call.

The three rules

1. Numbers beat adjectives

"Significant growth" means nothing. "34% revenue increase" means everything. If you find yourself reaching for words like "substantial," "considerable," or "greatly improved" — stop. Find the number. There is always a number. If you don't know the exact figure, estimate conservatively and use a tilde. ~30% improvement is still infinitely better than "significant improvement."

2. Start with the result, not the task

Nobody opens with "I was responsible for..." in a conversation. Don't do it on paper. When someone asks what you do at a dinner party, you don't say "I'm responsible for the management of cross-functional stakeholder alignment." You say "I launch products" or "I cut our ad spend by a third." Your resume should read the same way — direct, human, results-first.

3. Be specific about HOW

"By doing Z" is what separates you from 200 other candidates who got the same result. The method is your signature. Anyone can say they increased revenue. The candidate who explains how they did it — by consolidating DSPs, by redesigning onboarding, by migrating to Spark — that's the person who sounds like they actually know what they're talking about. Because they do.

What hiring managers actually scan for

I asked 10 hiring managers what they look for in the first 6 seconds of reading a resume. Every single one said the same thing: evidence of impact.

Not education. Not years of experience. Not a fancy title. Impact.

They're not reading your resume. They're scanning it. X-Y-Z gives them something to lock onto in those 6 seconds. A number. A metric. A result that makes them pause and think, "OK, this person can actually do the job."

A resume with 5 strong X-Y-Z bullet points beats a 3-page document with 40 responsibility statements. Every time. I've watched it happen hundreds of times. The shorter, sharper resume wins.

Go rewrite yours. Right now.

Here's the test: read every bullet point on your resume. If it starts with "Responsible for" or "Managed" — rewrite it. Use the formula. Lead with the result. Add the number. Explain the method.

Open your resume right now. Pick your top 3 achievements. Rewrite them as X-Y-Z. That alone will put you ahead of 90% of applicants.

You don't need a new qualification. You don't need another side project. You need to describe what you've already done in a way that makes people pay attention. That's it. That's the whole trick.