By Richard Eib, Jersey Hired
There is something slightly uncomfortable about telling someone their resume isn't very good.
A resume is personal. It represents years of work, promotions, accomplishments, difficult projects, long hours and decisions that have shaped someone's career. If you've been working for 10, 20 or 30 years, reducing all of that experience to two or three pages is difficult enough without somebody coming along and telling you that the document you've carefully constructed isn't doing you any favors.
But after more than 25 years in recruiting, I've seen enough resumes to know that many candidates significantly overestimate the effectiveness of their own.
That doesn't mean you're not qualified. It doesn't mean you haven't had a successful career, and it certainly doesn't mean another employer wouldn't value your experience. It means the document you are using to communicate that experience may not be doing a particularly good job of it.
This distinction becomes incredibly important during a job search because employers don't initially have access to the person behind the resume. They don't know that you were the person everyone called when something went wrong, that you transformed an underperforming department, that customers loved working with you or that you quietly saved your employer hundreds of thousands of dollars by fixing a process nobody else had bothered to question.
They know what is on the page.
If what is on the page doesn't communicate your value quickly and clearly, your experience may never get the opportunity to speak for itself.
Your Resume Has One Job
People frequently try to make their resume accomplish too much. They want it to document their entire career, explain every responsibility they've ever had, demonstrate their personality, showcase every skill they've acquired and somehow persuade an employer to hire them.
That's not really its job.
The primary purpose of a resume is to generate enough interest for somebody to want a conversation with you.
It doesn't have to tell your entire professional story because that's what interviews are for. It needs to provide enough relevant evidence to convince the person reviewing it that speaking with you would be worthwhile.
This is where many resumes go wrong. Candidates try to include everything because everything feels important to them, but the employer isn't evaluating your career based on what matters most to you. They are trying to determine whether your background solves the problem they currently have.
If they need an Operations Manager with experience leading large teams, improving productivity and managing multimillion-dollar budgets, those things need to be obvious. If they have to read through half a page about responsibilities that have little relevance to the position before discovering that you've managed 75 employees and a $12 million budget, you're making the recruiter's job unnecessarily difficult.
Your resume should not require detective work.
You're Probably Writing Too Much About What You Did and Not Enough About What You Achieved
One of the most common problems I see is a resume that reads like a job description.
“Responsible for managing the sales team.”
“Responsible for customer relationships.”
“Responsible for overseeing daily operations.”
“Responsible for preparing monthly financial reports.”
There is nothing technically wrong with any of those statements. The problem is that they tell me what your employer expected you to do rather than whether you were particularly good at doing it.
Imagine I'm reviewing two candidates for a sales leadership position. One tells me they were “responsible for managing a regional sales team.” The other tells me they “led a 14-person regional sales team that increased annual revenue from $8.2 million to $11.6 million over three years while improving customer retention.”
Which one gives me more reason to pick up the phone?
The second candidate hasn't necessarily had a more impressive career. They have simply communicated it more effectively.
Whenever possible, your resume should provide context around your accomplishments. Revenue generated, money saved, productivity improved, team size, customer retention, projects delivered, territories managed, budgets controlled and other measurable outcomes help an employer understand the scale and impact of your work.
Not everything can or should be reduced to a percentage, and resumes filled with suspiciously precise statistics can become just as irritating as resumes containing none. The point isn't to invent metrics because somebody on the internet told you every bullet needs a number. The point is to give the reader enough information to understand what changed because you were there.
The Person Reading Your Resume Doesn't Know What You Know
This sounds obvious, but it causes enormous problems.
When you read your own resume, you bring years of context with you. You know that the company you worked for was a $500 million business. You know your department was responsible for its largest customer. You know the project listed halfway down the page was considered almost impossible when you inherited it.
The recruiter may know none of this.
Even company names can create this problem. If you spent 15 years at a household-name corporation, very little explanation may be necessary. If you worked for a highly successful New Jersey business that is well known within its industry but virtually unknown outside it, don't assume the person reviewing your resume understands its size or significance.
A short piece of context can completely change how your experience is perceived. Saying that you were Director of Operations for a “New Jersey-based specialty manufacturer with $150 million in annual revenue and four U.S. facilities” immediately tells me something about the scale of the organization.
The same applies to your responsibilities. “Managed HR” could mean you were the only HR person at a 30-employee company or that you led a team supporting 3,000 employees across multiple locations.
Those are very different jobs.
Give the reader enough context to understand yours.
Your Resume Is Probably Trying to Please an ATS Instead of a Human Being
Few subjects in job searching have generated as much mythology as the Applicant Tracking System.
There are countless articles and videos promising to show candidates how to “beat the ATS,” as though an applicant tracking system is an adversary that needs to be outsmarted. This has led some candidates to create resumes packed with keywords, repetitive phrases and awkward language because they're terrified that software will reject them before a human ever sees their application.
Applicant tracking systems matter, and employers may use screening questions, keyword searches and other tools to help manage applications. Your resume should therefore use recognizable terminology that accurately reflects your experience and the type of position you are pursuing.
But don't destroy the readability of your resume in the process.
If a recruiter eventually opens the document and discovers something written primarily for a machine rather than a person, you've solved the wrong problem.
Use terminology that employers in your field actually use. If the job advertisement consistently refers to “talent acquisition” and you have spent ten years leading talent acquisition, there is no reason to hide that experience behind some creative alternative phrase. If your skills genuinely align with the position, make that alignment easy to identify.
Write naturally, communicate clearly and remember that the ultimate objective isn't to impress software. It's to start a conversation with another human being.
Stop Sending Exactly the Same Resume to Every Employer
I don't believe you should completely rewrite your resume every time you apply for a job. For someone actively searching, that could become a full-time occupation before they've even submitted an application.
However, if you're sending exactly the same document to every employer regardless of the position, you're probably missing opportunities.
Tailoring a resume doesn't mean changing your history. It means adjusting the emphasis.
Suppose you have substantial experience in operations, supply chain management and procurement. One position may heavily emphasize supplier relationships and cost reduction, while another focuses on warehouse operations and distribution. Your career hasn't changed between those applications, but the aspects of it most relevant to each employer have.
Your resume should reflect that.
Review the job description and identify what appears to matter most. If you genuinely have that experience, make sure it isn't buried somewhere the employer is unlikely to find it. You may change your professional summary, reorder skills or emphasize different achievements within a position without rewriting the entire document.
Think of it as changing the camera angle rather than changing the story.
Your Professional Summary May Be Saying Absolutely Nothing
I have seen thousands of words wasted at the top of resumes.
“Results-driven professional with a proven track record of success and excellent communication skills who thrives in fast-paced environments and works well independently or as part of a team.”
What does that actually tell me?
Almost everybody wants to be considered results-driven. Nobody writes that they have terrible communication skills, dislike achieving anything and collapse under pressure. These phrases occupy some of the most valuable space on your resume while providing almost no information that differentiates you from another candidate.
A professional summary can be useful, particularly for an experienced candidate, but it should quickly establish who you are professionally and what you bring to the table.
An HR leader might emphasize the size and type of organizations they have supported, their areas of specialization and experience leading teams. An operations executive could establish industry experience, scale, number of locations and areas such as continuous improvement, supply chain or P&L responsibility.
If you removed your name from your resume and handed the summary to ten people with similar backgrounds, could someone identify which one belonged to you?
If not, it probably needs work.
You Don't Need to Include Everything You've Ever Done
Experienced candidates often struggle with this because removing something from a resume can feel like erasing part of their career.
It isn't.
A resume is a marketing document, not your permanent employment record.
If you have 25 years of experience, the employer probably doesn't need six detailed bullet points explaining what you did in a junior position in 2003. That role may have been extremely important to your career development, but its relevance to the position you're pursuing today is likely limited.
Your most recent and relevant experience should generally receive the greatest attention. Older positions can often be condensed, particularly when including extensive detail would push the document to an unnecessary length.
There isn't a universal law stating that every resume must be exactly one page or exactly two pages. The appropriate length depends on your experience and the type of work you do. A senior executive with a substantial career will naturally need more space than someone who graduated three years ago.
The question isn't whether your resume is two pages or three.
The question is whether everything on those pages deserves to be there.
Design Matters, but Probably Not in the Way You Think
A resume doesn't need to look like it was created by a graphic designer.
In fact, elaborate designs can sometimes make the document harder to read. Multiple columns, charts, skill-rating graphics, icons and unusual formatting may look impressive on a template website but can distract from the information an employer actually needs.
Clean formatting wins.
The person reviewing your resume should be able to identify your current role, previous experience, dates, skills and major accomplishments without searching for them. Consistent headings, sensible spacing, readable typography and a clear hierarchy are far more important than visual gimmicks.
And please resist the temptation to represent your abilities using progress bars.
If your resume says you are 85% proficient in Microsoft Excel, I have no idea what that means. Are you comparing yourself with the average person, an accountant, a data analyst or whoever happens to know the most about Excel at Microsoft?
Tell me what you can do instead.
Your Resume and LinkedIn Profile Need to Agree
Recruiters frequently move between a candidate's resume and LinkedIn profile, and inconsistencies between the two can create questions that don't need to exist.
The documents don't have to be identical. In fact, I don't think they should be. LinkedIn gives you room to provide additional context, demonstrate your professional interests and show a little more personality.
The fundamentals, however, should align.
If your resume says you joined a company in 2021 while LinkedIn says 2019, somebody may wonder why. If the job title on your resume is significantly more senior than the title shown on LinkedIn, that may raise another question. If your resume presents you as a specialist in one field while your LinkedIn profile is positioning you for something completely different, the employer is left trying to determine which version is accurate.
None of these things automatically eliminates a candidate, but why introduce unnecessary doubt?
You control both documents. Make sure they support each other.
AI Can Help Your Resume, but It Can Also Make It Sound Like Everyone Else's
Artificial intelligence has made it remarkably easy to produce polished resume language, and there is nothing inherently wrong with using it to help improve your document. AI can be useful for identifying weak wording, organizing information, spotting repetition and helping you think differently about how you describe an accomplishment.
The danger comes when candidates outsource their entire professional voice to it.
If every accomplishment becomes “spearheaded strategic initiatives,” every project is “cross-functional,” every problem is solved through “leveraging synergies” and every paragraph sounds as though it came from the same corporate thesaurus, the resume may technically sound impressive while communicating very little.
AI should help you explain your actual experience more clearly, not manufacture a generic executive version of you.
The strongest resume is still based on specifics: what you did, the circumstances in which you did it, the scale involved and what happened as a result.
Technology can improve the presentation.
It cannot invent the substance.
Spelling and Grammar Still Matter
This might sound painfully obvious, but mistakes on resumes still happen.
A single typo probably isn't evidence that someone is incapable of doing a job, and I think recruiters occasionally become unnecessarily dramatic about minor errors. At the same time, your resume is one of the few parts of the hiring process over which you have almost complete control.
There is no deadline preventing you from reading it again.
Proofread the document carefully and then have someone else read it because you will inevitably start seeing what you expect to see rather than what is actually written. Check dates, company names, punctuation and formatting as well as spelling. Make sure the tense is consistent and that you haven't accidentally left an old phone number or email address somewhere on the document.
Small details won't get you hired, but avoidable mistakes can create an impression you didn't intend to make.
Be Careful With the Advice You Receive
One of the difficulties with resumes is that everyone has an opinion about them.
Ask five recruiters to review your resume and there is a reasonable chance you'll receive five different answers. One will tell you to remove the summary, another will insist you need one. Someone will say two pages is the absolute maximum, while another will tell you three pages are perfectly acceptable. One person hates color. Another thinks your resume needs more personality.
Some advice is useful. Some is preference disguised as a rule.
That is why I would focus on principles rather than trying to satisfy every opinion. Is the document easy to read? Does it clearly explain what you do? Does it demonstrate impact rather than simply listing responsibilities? Is the most relevant information easy to find? Does it accurately represent your experience? Is it targeted toward the type of work you want next?
If the answer to those questions is yes, you're probably heading in the right direction.
Read Your Resume as Though You've Never Met Yourself
This is probably the most useful exercise I can suggest.
Put the resume away for a day or two, then come back and try to read it without mentally filling in the gaps.
Imagine you know nothing about this person other than what appears on those pages.
What do they actually do?
What are they particularly good at?
What have they accomplished?
How senior are they?
What size organizations have they worked for?
What kind of job do they appear to want next?
Why should somebody interview them?
If those answers aren't relatively obvious, the resume isn't finished.
Your Career May Be Better Than Your Resume Makes It Look
This is the point I would want job seekers to remember.
A bad response rate doesn't automatically mean you have a bad career.
If you've applied for 30 or 40 positions that genuinely match your background and you're consistently receiving rejections without interviews, your resume is one of the first things I would examine. Not because I assume you're unqualified, but because there may be a disconnect between the experience you possess and the way you're communicating it.
That is fixable.
Go through the document and remove the generic language. Add context where it is missing. Replace lists of responsibilities with evidence of impact. Make your target clearer. Give your most relevant experience the space it deserves and stop forcing the reader to search for the reasons they should interview you.
Then ask somebody who understands your profession to read it and tell you what they think you do.
Don't ask whether they “like” your resume.
Ask what they learned about you from it.
The difference between those two questions matters because a resume doesn't need compliments. It needs results.
Your career may be considerably more impressive than your resume currently suggests.
Make sure the person on the other side of the application gets the opportunity to see that.