A resume a Trust & Safety hiring manager actually reads

A Trust & Safety job at a well-known app or site gets several hundred applications. The person reading them is usually the manager you'd work for, not a recruiter, and they're reading between meetings. Your resume gets a few seconds. Its only job in those seconds is to earn a second look.

Good news: the bar is low. Most resumes list duties. Hardly anyone says what changed because they were there.

Show how big the job was

A hiring manager wants to know how much judgment you've had to use, on how many people, at what volume, and what happened when you got something wrong. Which software you used matters a lot less. Software is easy to learn, and every company uses different tools anyway. A list of three programs says nothing about whether you can make a hard call.

Before
  - Reviewed user reports in Zendesk
    and internal tools
  - Enforced community guidelines and
    escalated as needed
  - Took part in policy discussions
    with partner teams

After
  - Handled ~400 of the hardest cases a
    week in harassment and self-harm,
    the two with the tightest deadlines
  - Rebuilt how urgent self-harm cases
    are passed up after an audit found
    31% missed the 4-hour target;
    misses fell to 4%
  - Wrote the first rules on groups of
    accounts working together to fool
    people, now used by 60 reviewers at
    three outside sites

Numbers you already have

People think they have nothing to count because nobody gave them a dashboard. You probably know some of these:

• Volume: how many cases, tickets or appeals you handled a week, and what kind.
• Reach: how many users, countries or languages your decisions covered.
• Quality: your accuracy score when your work was checked, and the team average if you beat it.
• Time: a deadline you shortened, or a backlog you cleared and by how much.
• Adoption: how many reviewers used a rule, template or process you wrote.
• Money or risk: a scam pattern you spotted, and what it was costing.

If you really can't find a number, describe the decision instead. "Decided to leave it up, and wrote down why" beats any list of software.

Don't hide your outsourcing work

Lots of people in this field start at an outsourcing company that reviews content for big platforms, and many of them leave it off or play it down. Don't. That's where the highest volumes and the hardest content are, and every experienced hiring manager knows it.

What they want to see is that you did more than hit your numbers: the sessions you ran to get reviewers deciding the same way, the gaps in the rules you pointed out, the new people you trained. Name the platform you worked on if your contract allows it. If it doesn't, say what kind of platform it was.

Coming from another field

Most people here came from somewhere else, so you're in good company. The trick is to name the judgment that carries over, and skip the old job title. Content moderation means applying a written rule to a messy case, quickly. So does handling insurance claims, sorting patients in an emergency room, responding when a student tells a teacher they're being hurt, or checking that a company follows the law.

Here's what carries over from four common backgrounds, and how to say it:

• Handled the hardest customer support cases? That shows judgment under time pressure. Say: "Handled the hardest cases for X, at Y a week."
• Law enforcement or military? That shows investigating and gathering evidence. Say: "Built cases from public sources and wrote them up for a decision maker."
• Teaching or social work? That shows protecting people at risk. Say: "Handled reports of harm under a mandatory reporting policy."
• Compliance or audit? That shows rules, evidence, and decisions that hold up. Say: "Wrote the rules, then proved people followed them."

Format, quickly

• One page if you have under ten years of experience, two if you have more. Never three. Nobody has ever finished page three.
• Most recent job first. Resumes sorted by skill instead of by job look like you're hiding something.
• No photo, no date of birth, no marital status, whatever people do where you live.
• Send a plain PDF. Half of all application websites will scramble it anyway, which is why the first line under each job has to say how big it was.
• Skip the summary paragraph at the top unless you're switching fields. Then keep it to two lines: what you did, and what you want.

One last thing. People in Trust & Safety talk to each other constantly, and one friendly introduction beats every formatting tip on this page. If a job matters to you, find someone who does it and ask them a real question.