resume_craft v1.0.0

name: "resume_craft" description: "Write or rewrite a resume: convert duty lists into quantified impact bullets, tailor the resume to a specific job description, and format it to survive applicant tracking systems. Use when someone asks for resume help, a resume review, help tailoring a resume to a posting, or stronger bullet points."

Purpose

Turn a raw work history into a resume that gets interviews. Three jobs: make every bullet prove impact with numbers, tailor the content to the specific role being applied for, and keep the formatting clean enough for applicant tracking systems (ATS) to parse. Never invent facts. If the user cannot give you a number, leave it as a flag, not a guess.

Workflow

1. Intake: build the master record first

Ask for, or read in, everything before you start editing:

• Full work history with titles, employers, locations, and start/end dates (month and year).
• For each role, the raw material: what they actually did, who they worked with, what changed because of them. Duties are fine here. This is the untrimmed master record, not the application version.
• Education, certifications, skills, projects, volunteering.
• The target job description, when there is one.

Probe for numbers with specific questions: how much went up or down (percent), how many users/requests/team members (absolute), how many hours or weeks saved (time), how many countries or product lines (scope). If they cannot recall a number, write [to confirm] and move on. Never invent a metric, a date, a quote, or an award.

2. Convert duties to impact bullets

Every bullet follows the X-Y-Z formula: Accomplished X as measured by Y by doing Z.

• ✅ "Rebuilt the checkout API, cutting p95 latency from 1.2s to 380ms and lifting conversion 8%."
• ❌ "Responsible for the checkout API."

Rules for each bullet:

• Start with a strong action verb. Never "responsible for", "helped with", "worked on", "was tasked with". A verb bank by function lives in references/action-verbs.md.
• One bullet, one accomplishment. Split stacked bullets apart.
• Include at least one quantified result (percent, dollars, count, or time) plus scope (team size, user base, budget) wherever the facts exist.
• No number available? Fall back to scope or qualitative impact: "became the support team's default escalation point for billing disputes" is honest; a fabricated "improved satisfaction 25%" is not.
• Keep bullets to one or two lines each. Eight to ten bullets max per role for recent jobs, fewer for older ones.
• Delete anything that does not pass the "who cares?" test: routine maintenance nobody changed, admin work any entry-level person could do, vague claims with no number and no comparison.

3. Tailor to the role

Keep the master record complete. For each application, produce a tailored copy:

• Pull keywords from the job description into three buckets: hard skills (tools, languages, certifications, methods), soft skills, and industry terms.
• Separate REQUIRED (under "Requirements", "must have", or mentioned 3+ times) from PREFERRED ("nice to have", mentioned once). Required keywords must appear, written the way the posting writes them. Spell out an acronym the first time ("Customer Relationship Management (CRM)") so both forms match.
• Weave the critical keywords naturally into the summary, skills list, and bullets, 2 to 4 times across the resume. Never keyword-stuff. If a keyword does not honestly apply to the user's experience, leave it out and flag it.
• Summary: 3 to 5 sentences, front-loaded with the role's most important keywords, plus years of experience and 1 to 2 quantified wins.
• Cut bullets that do not serve this role, even good ones. A tailored one-page resume beats a complete three-pager.
• Detail on keyword handling and common tailoring mistakes lives in references/tailoring-playbook.md.

4. Format for the ATS

About 90% of Fortune 500 companies screen with an applicant tracking system that parses the resume before a human sees it. The checklist in references/ats-checklist.md is the full pass; the non-negotiables:

• Single column, standard fonts (Arial, Calibri, Helvetica, Times New Roman), 10-12pt body.
• Standard section names: Contact, Professional Summary, Work Experience, Skills, Education, Certifications.
• No tables, text boxes, graphics, headers/footers, columns, or decorative bullets.
• Standard bullets (plain hyphens or the • character). Contact info in the document body, not a page header.
• Consistent date format everywhere, month and year both shown.
• Save as .docx unless the posting specifies PDF. When in doubt, check the posting.

Sanity check: paste the resume text into a plain text editor. If the order scrambles or sections vanish, the ATS will struggle with it too.

Output Contract

When asked to deliver a resume, return:

1. The resume itself, plain text or cleanly formatted markdown that maps directly onto the ATS rules (no multi-column tricks).
2. A short change log: what you cut, what you rephrased, and which bullets need numbers ([to confirm] items listed explicitly).
3. If tailored to a posting: the required-keyword coverage, one line per keyword, marking which are present and which the user's history does not honestly support.

When asked only to review, return the three sections in this order: what survives ATS parsing, which bullets are duties in disguise (rewritten), what to cut. Never rewrite the resume in a "fancy" format the user cannot feed to an ATS.

Operating Rules

1. Every factual claim you put in the resume must come from the user or a source they gave you. Unverifiable equals cut or framed as opinion. No confident unverified claims, ever.
2. Numbers are sacred: if you did not get a number from the user, do not write one. [to confirm] beats a plausible guess every time.
3. One skill, one job. This skill writes resumes. It does not write cover letters, LinkedIn profiles, or interview scripts; say so and stop if asked for those.
4. Keep SKILL.md as the operational core. Bulky verb lists, the ATS checklist, and tailoring examples live in references/. Do not duplicate them here.