A resume that machines and humans read perfectly
Recruiters spend an average of 6–8 seconds on an initial resume scan (Ladders, 2018). In that time, they're looking for: role fit, years of experience, company names, and red flags. They're not reading your prose — they're pattern-matching against a mental template.
CLN aligns perfectly with how resumes are actually read. Operators create visual anchors. Indentation creates hierarchy. One fact per line means nothing is buried.
PROFILE: Alex Chen — Senior Backend Engineer = 8 years building distributed systems at scale = specialty: event-driven architectures, Go, PostgreSQL @location: San Francisco, CA (open to remote) @email: alex@example.com | github.com/alexchen | linkedin.com/in/alexchen —— EXPERIENCE —— . Senior Backend Engineer @ Stripe (2022–present) = payment processing pipeline, 99.99% uptime SLA + reduced p99 latency from 340ms to 89ms + led migration to event sourcing (12-person team) | Go, Kafka, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes . Backend Engineer @ Datadog (2019–2022) = metrics ingestion pipeline, 2M events/sec + built auto-scaling system saving $180K/year + mentored 4 junior engineers (2 promoted) | Go, ClickHouse, AWS, Terraform . Junior Developer @ TechStartup (2017–2019) = full-stack web application development | Python, Django, React, PostgreSQL —— EDUCATION —— . B.S. Computer Science @ UC Berkeley (2017) * focus: distributed systems, databases —— KEY SKILLS —— | languages: Go (expert), Python (proficient), Rust (learning) | infra: Kubernetes, Terraform, AWS, GCP | data: PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, Kafka, Redis | practices: event sourcing, CQRS, observability
The + lines are your accomplishments — the only lines that matter. Recruiters scanning for impact will find them instantly because they all start with the same symbol in the same column. The | lines are your tech stack — searchable by ATS, visible to technical reviewers. The = lines give context without bloating the entry.
PROJECT: OpenMetrics Exporter = open-source tool for converting custom metrics to OpenMetrics format @status: active, 1.2K GitHub stars @role: creator & maintainer + adopted by 3 companies for production monitoring + featured in CNCF newsletter (Oct 2025) | Go, Prometheus client library, GitHub Actions | github.com/alexchen/openmetrics-exporter
Keep your CLN resume as your "source of truth." When you need a traditional PDF, extract and format from it. When you need a cover letter, pull the + lines relevant to the role. When updating LinkedIn, copy the = and + lines directly. One source, many outputs.
Nine symbols. Four spaces. Infinite clarity.