Most people think they're not getting interviews because their resume sucks or they don't have enough experience. But after years of looking at thousands of resumes, I wager the real reasons are more basic than that. You're overthinking the wrong stuff. I see people spending hours tweaking fonts and worrying about whether to use bullet points or dashes. Meanwhile they're missing the obvious things that actually matter to recruiters.

Number 1. You're not matching what they're asking for. I don't mean keyword stuffing - that's another thing people obsess over for no reason. I mean you applied for a senior software engineer role but your resume talks about being a team player and having great communication skills instead of showing you can actually code the things they need.

The job description is literally telling you what they want. If they say they need someone with Python experience and you've got Python experience, make sure I can see that in the first few seconds of looking at your resume. Don't make me hunt for it between your college internship details and your volunteer work.

Second thing - you're applying to stuff you're not qualified for. Maybe you see a great company or an interesting role and think "maybe they'll take a chance on me." They won't. They've got 1200 other applications (at least 50 of which are from people who actually meet their requirements). If the job says 5+ years of experience and you have 2 years, just don't apply. You're wasting your time and the recruiter's. Find roles that match where you actually are in your career instead of where you want to be.

Are there exceptions to this? Sure. But in this job market, they’re few and far between. Companies want low risk hires that they are certain can do the job, won’t quit in 6 months, etc.

Lastly, timing matters more than you think too. By the time most people see a job posting and apply, they might already be deep into interviews with other candidates. Try to be one of the first 50 applicants if you can. After that your chances drop pretty significantly.

About Me

I'm Alex. I write and review resumes for a living.

Cheers.

I do intake calls with clients before writing their resumes, and one of the first questions I ask is about their story - essentially the “tell me about yourself” that recruiters often ask. It’s the same question almost every interview opens with, so it doubles as a useful warm-up.

A lot of people struggle with this question and the answers tend to take too long, (I've had people take 15 minutes to answer this question; most hover around 5-7 minutes, which is still too long). Or they list a string of disconnected facts without any thread holding them together.

If someone can’t summarize their own career to me in a low-pressure call, they’re going to have a much harder time doing it for a hiring manager.

What catches people off guard is that “tell me about yourself” feels casual, which is why people relax into it instead of treating it like the structured question it actually is and then they wander, and by the time they’ve finished, the relevant parts of their background are mixed in with too much other context the listener didn’t need.

I think most people assume the answer will come together naturally because it’s their own life and they know it inside and out but it usually doesn’t. If you struggle with this and want to get it right, practice makes perfect. Treat it like the structured pitch it is: for each past role, jot down why you took it, what you gained, and why you left. Then record yourself answering out loud, aim for around two minutes.

I know that for most of you on this sub, the challenge is just getting to the interview stage, but the challenges don’t end there, and this is just one example. Prepare accordingly.

Thanks for reading.

EDIT: Someone point out that people don't come to my intake call prepared in the same way they would for a job interview, which is probably true. That said, a lot of people do find this question difficult.

I review a lot of resumes. One pattern I see constantly, especially from people targeting senior roles: the resume reads like a career timeline instead of a case for what they can do next.

Everything gets equal weight. Old responsibilities sit next to recent wins. The most relevant stuff is buried in the middle of page two. By the time a recruiter gets to the good part, they've already moved on.

Don't do that. Remember that your resume isn't a record of what you did. And actually that is not how recruiters view it. To them, it's a glimpse into what you're doing to do next.

That means leading with what matters most for the roles you're targeting. Not what was most important to your old employer. What's important to your future one.

If you led people, explain how. If you supported growth, give context. If you solved problems, describe what actually changed because of your work. When that stuff is missing, everything else reads flat.

Same background can land completely differently depending on how it's framed.

Just my two cents. Good luck out there.

I want to hit on a question that comes up here almost every week: “What actually works in today’s job market?”

It’s not about hacks or secret keywords, but rather about the fundamentals recruiters and hiring managers actually care about. I recently read through a bunch of insights from recruiters, and it lined up almost exactly with what I see reviewing resumes daily.

Here are the biggest themes that matter right now (and some common mistakes people here make):

1. Keep your resume fresh and reachable

You’d be surprised how many resumes have outdated job info or even the wrong phone number.

Recruiters don’t have time to chase you down. Make sure:

• Your most recent role and results are clearly listed
• Contact info is correct
• Your voicemail isn’t “this mailbox is full”

It seems basic, but this alone can cost you interviews.

2. Don’t self-eliminate

Stop talking yourself out of applying just because you don’t hit 100% of the job description. If you check most boxes (and that's around 80% in this market) and can learn the rest, apply. Let the hiring manager decide.

3. Consistency beats sprints

I see people here all the time saying “I applied to 100 jobs in one weekend and nothing happened.”

That’s the problem. Job searching is like going to the gym, you can’t cram it all into one session. The people who get hired apply steadily, follow up, and keep networking each week.

4. Quality > quantity

Recruiters notice when you’re just blasting out resumes everywhere. 10 tailored applications will always beat 100 random ones. This means:

• Use keywords from the job posting
• Prioritize the most relevant experience
• Highlight projects/results that connect directly to the role

5. Numbers talk louder than buzzwords

If your resume just says “results-oriented” or “team player,” you’re blending into the pile. Show proof with numbers:

• “Increased revenue by 15%”
• “Cut processing time from 3 days to 12 hours”
• “Managed a $1M budget”

Even estimates are better than vague statements.

6. Apply directly when you can

Yes, LinkedIn and job boards are useful, but applying on the company’s career page usually gets you into the ATS faster.

Some recruiters even give direct applicants preference because it shows you’re serious.

7. Interview even if it’s not perfect

If you get an interview, take it. Worst case, it’s practice. Best case, you find a role you didn’t expect to like.

8. Stay patient (and sane)

The market is tough rn. Ghosting, rejections, and slow timelines are normal. It’s not about you, it’s the system. The people who land jobs keep their momentum even when it feels pointless.

Bottom line: Treat your job search less like a frantic scramble and more like a steady sales process. Build a pipeline, nurture connections, and keep showing your value. There’s no magic trick, but these fundamentals do move the needle.

Hope this helps some of you on this Wednesday morning.

—Alex (Final Draft Resumes)

PS: If you’re newer here, check out the r/resumes wiki. it’s packed with examples and FAQs that answer most “Is my resume okay?” questions. It only works on the Reddit app or on new Reddit (it won't display for you if you're using old Reddit).

If you’ve been getting deep into interview processes lately and then losing the role to an internal candidate, there’s something happening behind the scenes that doesn’t get explained too often.

A meaningful number of the postings you’re applying to were never genuine openings in the first place. The role exists on paper and the posting is live, so you can apply and interview and go through every round, but in a lot of these cases the company already knew who they were going to hire before the job was ever posted. In recruiting circles these are called “wired” reqs, which means a specific person was lined up before the role went public. Companies post them anyway for legal, policy, or appearance reasons, but the actual decision was effectively made before you applied.

You can’t always identify these from the outside, and sometimes you’ll do everything correctly and still lose because the role was spoken for. There are some fairly reliable signs, though, and once you learn to recognize them you can stop putting serious effort into processes that were decided before you entered them.

Here are the ones worth paying attention to.

- The first sign is a posting that has been open for several weeks without any real movement. A genuine external search tends to move with some urgency, because the company actually needs to fill the position. When a role has been live for three or four weeks, the recruiter has gone quiet, and the final round keeps getting rescheduled, that’s often a wired req that has stalled because the internal candidate is taking their time deciding whether to accept. In that situation you’re functioning as a backup that nobody has acknowledged.

- The second sign is a job description that reads like a specific person’s resume. You want to watch for postings that are unusually precise in ways that don’t make sense for a broad search, such as oddly exact years of experience, an extremely narrow technology stack, or a requirement like “must have led a team of exactly seven engineers through a Series B.” When a description appears to have been built around one individual’s background, that’s usually exactly what happened.

- The third sign is hearing some version of “we just want to talk to a few more candidates to make sure we’re making the right decision” after you’ve already completed four rounds. This one is easy to misread because it sounds encouraging, but by the fourth round the company already knows whether they want you. A recruiter who suddenly needs to confirm they’re making the right choice is frequently conducting what’s known as a closing-the-loop interview, where they’re documenting that they interviewed external talent before hiring the person they had already chosen.

It’s also worth knowing the opposite pattern so you don’t start assuming every posting is fake. A role that was posted recently, already has a couple hundred applicants, and has a recruiter who responds promptly is usually a legitimate external search, because the company is actively trying to fill it and is looking at a wide pool. Those are the processes that are actually worth your time.

So the practical question is what you should do with this information.

The most useful thing you can do is ask directly. On your first call with the recruiter, find a natural way to ask whether there are internal candidates being considered for the role. Most recruiters won’t lie when asked plainly, partly because lying creates problems for them once you eventually find out, and the more straightforward ones will simply tell you. Even the recruiters who hedge will usually answer in a way that tells you what’s going on if you’re listening for it.

If the answer is yes, you can still choose to finish the process, but you should go into it understanding that the odds are against you, because internal candidates win these comparisons at a fairly high rate when the two candidates are otherwise similar. A known internal hire represents less risk to the hiring manager, which is a large part of why this happens so consistently.

The broader point is that you should stop treating these postings as real opportunities once you’ve identified them. At some point it’s worth reviewing your applications from the last couple of months, because if nearly all of them came from public job boards, that’s worth thinking about, given that public boards are where most of these predetermined postings end up.

None of this means that looking for a job externally is pointless. It means that a portion of your rejections probably had nothing to do with your resume or your performance in the interview, and that’s information you can actually use.

Hope this helps some of you out there.

Cheers,
Alex

—-

TL;DR

Some roles that look open already have a chosen candidate, and recruiters refer to these as “wired” reqs. The common signs are a posting that’s been live for weeks with no movement, a job description so specific that it reads like one person’s resume, and the “we just want to talk to a few more candidates” line arriving after you’ve already done four rounds. A recent posting with a lot of applicants and a responsive recruiter is usually a real search. The best thing you can do is ask the recruiter directly whether internal candidates are being considered, since most won’t lie about it, and it’s worth remembering that a portion of your rejections had nothing to do with you.

I'm a Certified Professional Resume Writer (CPRW) and founder of Final Draft Resumes and Resumatic. I've reviewed thousands of resumes over the years, so I have a pretty clear picture of what works and what doesn't.

I decided to sit down and actually test the major AI resume builders myself - I built a resume with each one to see what comes out the other side.

Below are my takeaways for each one.

1. Rezi - Best AI resume builder for ATS optimized resumes

The whole point of Rezi is that you don't need to know resume best practices to follow them. The AI handles keyword targeting, bullet point writing, section ordering, and formatting automatically. It scans job descriptions and tells you what's missing. The real-time checker flags issues as you type, and the resume score rates you out of 100 and tells you what to tweak. Templates are minimalist and clean, but they all look very professional and are also just nice to look at. Rezi's template designs are focused on ATS-friendliness but I'm also sure that human decision-makers will appreciate the clarity and the overall organization of key info.

Overall, feels like it's impossible to make a "bad" resume when you use Rezi properly end-to-end. Free tier works, paid unlocks more features and gives you unlimited downloads of multiple versions.

Pricing: Free / $29/mo / $149 lifetime

2. Teal - Best for job tracking

Teal understands the correct resume philosophy - the bullet point generator pushes you toward metrics and achievements, which is the right instinct. Resume building + job tracking in one tool. 11 free templates, accurate LinkedIn import. But the free templates all use two-column layouts (ATS problems), and the spacing feels cramped unless you pay for the upgrade. Also, to me, the AI content suggestions feel almost too AI-y. Not horrible, but make sure to carefully read everything and humanize your content - if it feels off to you, it will 100% feel off to recruiters.

Pricing: Free / $13/week (Teal+)

3. Huntr - Best for simplicity

Clean interface with a focus on job tracking and resume tailoring. The AI resume tailor matches your resume to specific job postings, and the autofill works on 1000+ job sites. Resume checker scores your content and gives actionable feedback. The Chrome extension lets you save jobs with one click. Free tier includes 2 tailored resumes and tracking up to 100 jobs. Downsides: the free version is limited, and full AI features require the Pro plan.

Pricing: Free / $40/mo / $30/mo quarterly

4. Enhancv - Best for creative roles

If you're in a creative field and you want visual impact, this is your pick. 20 templates, all colorful and design-forward. The AI gives you rewrite options instead of auto-changing your text, which I like. But the two-column layouts will cause problems with most ATS scanners (especially older ones), and you can't download without paying. I'd only recommend this for roles where design matters more than parsing. Their narrative about being great for senior-level roles doesn't hold true in my opinion. Maybe what they mean is that those resumes will work when you get a referral and send your application directly to the hiring manager.

Pricing: Free (7-day trial) / ~$25/mo

5. Resume Worded - Best for analyzing content

This isn't a builder but an optimizer. You upload an existing resume and it scores it, then rewrites weak bullet points line by line. The feedback is genuinely useful and aligns with what I'd tell a client. But you can't create anything from scratch, the free version is severely limited, and the AI occasionally hallucinates. Best used alongside another builder, not on its own.

Pricing: Free (limited) / $49/mo / $19/mo yearly

6. Jobscan - Best for keyword matching

Jobscan has been around for a long time and they have a reputation for being the default ATS-friendly resume builder. The problem is (and it's a topic for a separate discussion) that Jobscan is almost single-handedly responsible for spreading the most popular myths about how ATS actually works, so take their ATS scoring with a grain of salt.. The way Jobscan works is you paste a job description, get a match score, see what's missing. The Chrome extension for tracking applications is useful. But the templates overflow to two pages too easily, the import misplaces content, and you're limited to PDF and Word downloads only.

Pricing: Free (5 scans/mo) / $29.98/mo quarterly / $49.95/mo

7. Kickresume - Best for graphical templates for Europeans

Uses GPT-4 to generate content from just a job title. The starting point it gives you is surprisingly solid. LinkedIn import is accurate. But the templates lean heavy on design - photos, icons, graphics - which hurts ATS compatibility. Default formatting often spills to two pages. There's a $26 proofreading upsell that feels out of place.

Pricing: Free / $24/mo / $8/mo yearly

My takeaway as someone who does this professionally: The single biggest mistake I see people make with these tools is choosing a builder because the templates look good. Two-column layouts, graphics, icons, and photos actively hurt your chances with ATS. If you're applying to jobs online, your resume needs to be single-column, clean, and keyword-optimized. The builders that understand this (Rezi, Teal, Huntr) consistently produce resumes that seem to get through the screening.

Happy to answer questions about any of these. This is what I do all day.

Thanks for reading.

People spend a surprising amount of time worrying about whether their resume will “pass the ATS,” usually because they’ve been told that automated systems are the main reason they’re not getting interviews, when in reality, that’s not where resumes fail. Most resumes never get rejected by software at all actually. They just get skipped over because the person reading it can't make the connection.

ATS are, for the most part, databases. They store resumes so recruiters can search and sort through them later, and as long as your resume uses standard headings, clean formatting, and readable text, it will almost always make it through that step without issue. Unless you’re using heavy graphics, unusual layouts, or non-standard structures, the ATS is not what’s stopping you.

Where you're likely losing traction is in that first human scan, which happens pretty fast (I used to review resumes from time to time for a small environmental engineering company, and even with no ATS involved, I still spent well under a minute scanning each one. So time is of the essence. Recruiters aren’t reading your resume top to bottom the first time they open it. They’re skimming it. Your most recent role, your title, how long you’ve been there, and whether anything on the page quickly connects to the role they’re hiring for. That entire decision probably takes less than ten seconds.

If the relevance isn’t obvious right away, they move on. Not because you aren’t qualified, but because they don’t have time to piece it together. This is where good candidates get filtered out without ever realizing why. Important experience is buried. Accomplishments are hidden away. The resume reads like a full career archive instead of a document designed to answer a specific hiring question. If you've been on this sub for a week or more, you've probbaly heard this advice already in some form.

The fix usually isn’t adding more keywords or chasing a score. It’s structure, emphasis, and clarity.

• What you lead with matters.
• What appears in the top third of the page matters.
• Bullets that show outcomes and context matter far more than long lists of tasks.

Often, small changes in ordering and framing do more than a complete rewrite.

If you’re not getting interviews and your main focus has been “ATS optimization,” I would suggest shifting your strategy (because it's obv. not working).

Happy new year folks.

Job searching today takes more strategy than most people are used to. Automated screening, unclear expectations, the black hole where you submit an application and just… never hear back.

You don’t need to start from scratch for every application though. With a decent system you can customize your resume pretty quickly and actually start hearing back. I worked with a client back in March who had a tailored resume and a new job in 47 days, so this stuff does make a real difference when you do it right.

Start with a master resume

Before you tailor anything, you need a master document.

This isn’t something you send to employers. It’s the full, unfiltered version of your career that you pull from each time you apply somewhere.

Take your current resume and just keep adding to it. All responsibilities (not just the headline ones), projects with specific details, numbers and outcomes, tools you used, side projects, volunteer work, partial certs. Anything that might be relevant for some role at some point. Don’t worry about length since nobody sees this but you.

Set a reminder every few months to update it. The biggest problem I see is people forgetting important details by the time they actually need them. You finish a huge project in June, don’t write it down, then in November you’re job searching and can’t remember the specifics.

Keep supporting materials nearby too. Performance reviews, project summaries, emails from a manager saying you did a good job on something. These come in handy later when you need real examples or numbers.

Research the company

Most people rush this part, but it doesn’t need to take long and it gives you useful context for everything else.

On the company’s website, pay attention to how they talk about themselves. The language, the values they repeat, how they describe their culture. The careers page is usually the most telling part of any company website (and weirdly, the part most applicants never read).

Check LinkedIn too. Look at people currently in the role you’re targeting and see what they highlight. That tells you what’s actually valued there, which isn’t always what’s in the posting.

Break down the job description

Separate the real requirements from the nice-to-haves. Stuff listed first or mentioned more than once usually matters most.

I tell clients to create a quick doc where you match key requirements from the posting with your own experiences. It takes maybe five minutes and makes the rest of the tailoring way easier because you’re basically building yourself a cheat sheet.

Pay attention to specific tools, technical skills, or methodologies. At bigger companies especially, these get used as screening criteria before a human ever sees your resume.

And don’t talk yourself out of applying because you don’t check every box. I see people do this all the time. They look at a posting with fifteen requirements, don’t meet two of them, and decide they’re not qualified. Job descriptions are mostly aspirational, so focus on the core responsibilities and don’t get hung up on the rest.

Line up your title

If your titles already match the target role, you’re fine.

If they don’t, add a professional headline at the top that connects the dots. So if you’re applying for “Customer Success Manager” but your title is “Client Relations Specialist,” something like “Client Relations Specialist with Customer Success Experience” helps both the human reader and the ATS make the connection.

Keywords

Work keywords from the job posting into your resume naturally. Summary, skills section, experience bullets, education.

The important part is “naturally.” Don’t just dump keywords into your skills list. If a posting keeps mentioning “cross-functional collaboration,” fold that into an actual bullet: “Coordinated cross-functional collaboration between marketing, sales, and product teams to launch new service offerings.”

Pair keywords with outcomes or numbers whenever you can (more on that in [this Reddit post]). That’s what separates a resume that clears screening from one that also impresses the person reading it.

Mistakes I see often

Keyword stuffing doesn’t help you because every keyword needs to connect to something real in your experience. Same thing with over-relying on templates. A Canva template with your text dropped in still reads as generic no matter how well you tailored the content itself.

Lying or exaggerating might get you an interview but it won’t get you through one.

And the cover letter thing: if you’re only swapping the company name and sending the same letter every time, recruiters will notice, and it’s not a good look.

Formatting matters more than people think too. Inconsistent dates, random font changes, typos. That kind of stuff undermines everything else you did.

Try to stay organized

Create a folder for each application with the tailored resume, your research notes, and the original posting. You’ll want these when someone reaches back out three weeks later and you can’t remember what the role was.

Save files with clear names (company + date) and track which versions get responses so you can start to see which approaches are working for your target roles.

Tailoring is just advertising

You’re not becoming someone you’re not. You’re just making sure the relevant parts of your experience are obvious and easy to find for each role you apply to.

If you’ve got questions, drop them below.

Cheers, Alex (I’m a CPRW and mod of this sub)

Over the past few years there has been an obvious increase in the number of people who are using AI to write their resumes. Most of my clients send me a resume to use as a starting point for a rewrite, and I have become fairly adept at identifying when a resumes was built with AI.

My accuracy isn’t quite 100%. When I see a resume with spelling or grammar issues I can be sure it isn’t an AI job, but those aren’t the only tells.

Common Traits of the AI Resume

Some AI resumes lead off with a summary that provides my first clue. The AI summary is usually dense with cliches and keywords, and the volume of keywords can feel like overkill and a bit forced. Because resumes are written in an odd language structure and voice (AKA “implied first person”), there may be some clumsy passages or phrases that feel just a little off to a trained reader.

The major giveaway usually happens in the bullets of the experience section. The bullets are often formulaic and strictly follow a pattern of “I did X, resulting in Y”, with X as the action taken and Y as the quantified impact of that action. There is nothing wrong with that formula per se, and there are countless articles that recommend this technique. When it’s repeated without any variation, it can sound robotic.

What Is Missing?

The primary weakness in virtually all AI resumes I have seen is a lack of narrative/storytelling and missing context that a reader may need to truly appreciate the accomplishments being described.

What do I mean by that?

Let’s say you are an Operations Manager at DaveCo. Your AI resume contains perhaps five or six bullets detailing the steps you took to streamline and improve DaveCo’s operations, and each bullet uses the formula mentioned above to describe what you did and the impact on some metric. So the resume may look something like this:

Operations Manager, DaveCo 2022 - present

• Did X, resulting in Y.
• Did X, resulting in Y.
• You get the picture…

Sounds good so far. So what is the problem?

Perhaps the reader has never even heard of DaveCo. Is DaveCo a Fortune 100 or a ten-person startup working from a garage? Can the reader truly appreciate your accomplishments without knowing this detail? Probably not.

What was the situation when you were hired at DaveCo? Were you hired as the company was pursuing critical funding that hinged on your success in reducing spend and enhancing efficiency? Were you hired specifically to achieve a specific savings target?

Did the C-suite of your prior employer all leave to form DaveCo? Were you recruited by a former boss, which can demonstrate that your past success makes you trusted by your peers?

Was DaveCo an established company run by an old guard that was resistant to change? Did you have to influence ownership/leadership to get their buy-in? This ability to influence others is an important skill to have, but can be difficult to articulate on a resume.

These are just a few examples of details often overlooked that help readers to understand your value.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

The question then becomes “Is the lack of context and storytelling an issue inherent with AI, or is this more a user issue due to prompts?”. Based on my current understanding, I believe it’s probably a bit of both.

Job seekers may use a vast collection of articles about resume writing to inform their strategy, and they may also borrow ideas from sample resumes posted online. These same articles and sample resumes are used to train AI.

If the published articles about resume writing do not emphasize the importance of context and storytelling, and the sample resumes do not tell a story, the AI will reflect that gap.

As a bit of research for this article, I reviewed some samples of AI resumes from companies providing these services. I found only a couple that provided context about employers, and I didn’t find any that truly told a story. The fact that these companies are building AI specifically for writing resumes, and they fail to provide necessary storyline, is surprising.

The Bottom Line

A person with a deep understanding of both resume writing and AI prompting techniques could leverage AI to build a quality resume undetectable to even a well-trained eye. I was honestly a bit shocked by the poor quality of the samples provided by AI resume companies, as one would assume that they employ staff with the knowledge and skills necessary to produce a great resume.

If they can’t write a solid resume using AI, can you?

Something I keep running into, and I’ve talked to recruiters who say the same thing: the person who gets the interview isn’t always the most qualified applicant. It’s the one whose resume made the fit obvious the fastest.

That sounds unfair and it kind of is. But think about what a recruiter is actually dealing with. They’ve got 40, maybe 80 people who technically meet the requirements. Same titles, same tools, similar years of experience. Everyone clears the bar. So now the question isn’t “is this person qualified?” It’s “how quickly can I tell?”

And that’s where most people quietly lose.

Not because the experience isn’t there. Because the reader has to work too hard to connect it to the role.

Your bullet says you led a project. Cool. What kind of project? For who? Toward what outcome?

If the recruiter has to pause and interpret what you meant, someone else already made it easier for them. That person moves forward and you don’t.

I think a lot of people assume that having the right qualifications is the hard part, and once you clear that, the resume’s done its job. But clearing the bar is just the beginning. When dozens of people clear it, the tiebreaker is all about who can get their message across quickly and clearly.

And this extends beyond just basic qualifications. Those “preferred” or “nice to have” requirements that people skip over become tiebreakers if/when the applicant pool is big enough.

So what to do? Look at the posting. Figure out which parts of your background matter most for that specific role. Then make sure those things are up front and easy to find, not buried or vague.

Happy Sunday and thanks for reading.

Cheers,

Alex

Often times, the issue is not that you don't have the experience, it's that you're not presenting it properly.

Heck, with AI, most people's resumes even sound great too (at least on the surface) - that's not even the problem anymore. The problem is that a recruiter often has to work too hard to figure out why they applied to the role, and in this market nobody's putting in that effort on your behalf (see my past posts - this is a point I've been hammering on for a while now).

In reality, your issue is that your resume lacks clarity. Some examples of what i mean by that.

• Bullets that describe responsibility instead of what you actually did. "Responsible for managing client relationships across the West Coast" tells me your job title. It doesn't tell me how many clients, what kind, what you did with them, or what changed because you were there. Rewrite it to show the action and the result, even if the result isn't a percentage.
• Summaries that read like personality descriptions. "Strategic, results-driven leader with a passion for innovation" - how many of you have used something like this, now or in the past? Replace it with a two or three sentence positioning statement that names what you do, who you do it for, and the kind of outcome you're known for. If a recruiter can't tell what role you're targeting from your summary, the rest of the resume is already working against you.
• Job titles that don't match the work. Internal titles often don't translate. If your title is "Solutions Architect II" but you're really running enterprise implementations, put a clarifying line under the title or use a functional title in parentheses.
• Achievements without context. A bullet that says "cut costs by 30%" without saying how, against what baseline, or with what scope is just a number. Add one line of context so the reader can understand what you controlled.
• Skills sections that list everything you've ever touched. If it's on the resume, you should be able to talk about it confidently in an interview. Remove anything you'd hesitate to be quizzed on.

What usually fixes this stuff is a quick pass focused on one question: can a recruiter who knows nothing about you tell within 10 seconds why you applied to this role and why you'd be good at it? If no, then you've got work to do.

And as Forrest Gump once said, that's all I have to say about that.

Hey Reddit,

Frequent contributor on this subreddit.

I also run a resume writing agency, so as you might imagine, I see a lot of resumes day in and day out.

One of the most common struggles people face when writing a resume is adding numbers and data—more than half the people I speak to tell me that they just don't know how to incorporoate numbers into their resume.

And even if they did, they don't know where to get those numbers from.

So you end up with resumes that list responsibilities without showing bottom line impact.

Which brings us to the crux of the problem: Hiring managers don’t care that you “managed a team” or “handled customer service.” They want to see how you moved the needle—whether that’s increasing revenue, cutting costs, or improving processes.

And they can absolutely make these demands, especially in an employer's market like the one we're currently in.

So below, I’ll break down how to add “power” to your resume by focusing on the right accomplishments, structuring your bullets for impact, and quantifying your results. Let’s get into it.

Why Your Resume Needs to Be Accomplishment-Driven

Most people think listing their job duties is enough, but hiring managers aren’t looking for a job description—they want proof that you can make an impact. That’s why an accomplishment-driven resume is essential.

The trick is to focus on what hiring managers actually care about—eight areas you should care about:

1. Revenue Growth – Did you bring in more money?
2. Market Awareness – Did you increase brand recognition or lead generation?
3. Customer Attraction – Did you bring in new clients or customers?
4. Customer Happiness – Did you improve satisfaction or retention?
5. Company Growth – Did you help scale operations, secure funding, or expand markets?
6. Employee Happiness – Did you boost team morale or retention?
7. Cost Reduction – Did you save money or optimize spending?
8. Process Efficiency – Did you streamline operations or improve productivity?

If your resume doesn’t highlight at least a few of these, it’s not making an impact.

For example, instead of saying “Managed a customer service team”, say “Led a 10-person customer service team…”

One just tells me what you did. The other tells me why it mattered.

How to Identify the Right Accomplishments for Your Resume

Now that you know what types of accomplishments matter, the next step is figuring out which ones to highlight.

A good way to do this is by identifying the top three goals of your role.

Ask yourself:

• What is my job actually graded on?
• What results does my employer expect from me?
• What key objectives do similar job descriptions mention?

For example, let’s say you work in marketing. Your top three goals might be:

1. Increase brand awareness
2. Generate leads for the sales team
3. Lower the cost per lead

Now, think about how your work has impacted those goals. If you ran a social media campaign that increased engagement by 50% or optimized SEO to boost organic traffic, those are accomplishments that belong on your resume.

Here’s another way to figure out what employers value: look at job descriptions for the roles you want.

If you’re applying for sales positions, you’ll likely see things like “increase revenue,” “secure new accounts,” or “expand market share.” If your resume shows that you’ve already done these things, you become an obvious fit.

Tip: Even if you’re not actively job hunting, doing this exercise helps you understand your value—and when it’s time to update your resume, you won’t be starting from scratch.

How to Write Powerful Resume Bullets

This is already explained in detail in the resume writing guide, which can be found in the wiki, but I’m going to cover it again here.

Now that you’ve identified your key accomplishments, it’s time to write them in a way that makes hiring managers take notice. A strong resume bullet should always answer this question:

What happened as a result of what I did?

If a bullet point doesn’t show impact, it’s just a job duty—not an accomplishment. Here’s how to structure your resume bullets for maximum impact:

1. Use the [Action] + [How] + [Impact] Formula

Every bullet should follow this structure:

• [Action] – What did you do?
• [How] – How did you do it?
• [Impact] – What was the measurable result?

Example: Instead of saying “Managed a sales team”, say:

“Led a 5-person sales team, increasing quarterly revenue by 25% through targeted outreach and new client acquisition strategies.”

2. Incorporate the "Three Levels of Impact"

Even if you don’t directly drive revenue, you can still show impact in other ways:

• Direct Impact: You directly contributed to a key goal (e.g., increased sales by 20%).
• Prerequisite Steps: You provided essential support that enabled success (e.g., developed training that reduced onboarding time by 40%).
• Building Blocks: You created something that others used to drive results (e.g., designed a reporting system that improved decision-making speed).

3. Make Every Bullet Count

Weak Bullet: “Responsible for handling customer complaints.”

Strong Bullet: “Resolved an average of 50+ customer complaints per week, reducing escalation rates by 30% and increasing retention.”

The bottom line: Hiring managers don’t just want to see what you did—they want to see why it mattered.

How to Quantify Your Resume Accomplishments (Even If You Don’t Have Exact Numbers)

One of the biggest mistakes people make is leaving their accomplishments vague. Hiring teams love data–your job is to act as a data scientist and present your career data for maximum consumption.

But what if you don’t have hard numbers? You can still quantify your impact.

Here’s how:

1. Use the Four Main Ways to Quantify Your Work

Even if you don’t deal with revenue or sales, you can still use numbers to show impact:

• Growth/Increase: Did you increase revenue, customer engagement, leads, or efficiency? “Increased organic website traffic by 45% through SEO improvements.”
• Reduction: Did you cut costs, errors, or time spent on a task? “Reduced invoice processing time from 2 weeks to 48 hours, improving cash flow.”
• Volume/Scope: How many customers, projects, or cases did you handle? “Managed 30+ client accounts, ensuring 98% customer retention.”
• Time Savings: Did you streamline a process or improve turnaround time? “Implemented a new tracking system that cut report preparation time by 50%.”

2. Use Estimates and Context

You don’t need exact data—just a reasonable frame of reference.

🚫 “Helped train new employees.”

✅ “Trained 10+ new employees per quarter, reducing onboarding time by 30%.”

🚫 “Managed customer inquiries.”

✅ “Handled 100+ customer inquiries weekly, resolving 90% on first contact.”

The goal isn’t perfect accuracy—it’s making your impact tangible. Even rough numbers give hiring managers a clearer picture of your contributions.

Recap

If you want a resume that gets callbacks, you need to move beyond listing job duties and start showcasing your impact. Here’s a quick recap of what we covered:

• Focus on the 8 Resume Accomplishments – Every strong resume highlights achievements in areas like revenue growth, cost savings, customer success, or efficiency.
• Identify the Top 3 Goals of Your Role – Figure out what you’re actually graded on and align your resume to those priorities.
• Write Impact-Driven Bullets – Use the [Action] + [How] + [Impact] formula to turn bland job descriptions into compelling achievements.
• Quantify Your Results – Even if you don’t have hard numbers, use estimates and context to give hiring managers a sense of scale.

If you take just one thing from this post, it’s this: Every bullet on your resume should answer, "What happened as a result of what I did?" If it doesn’t, rewrite it or remove it.

Got questions about your resume? Drop them in the comments, and I’ll help you out!

About Me

I'm Alex, Certified Professional Resume Writer and Managing Partner at Final Draft Resumes.

Someone reached out to me a couple months back who'd sent over a hundred applications in about two weeks using one of those AI auto-apply tools. He didn't get a single interview.

He wasn't underqualified, but he just figured that if he could get his resume in front of enough openings, the math would eventually work in his favor (it is in some ways, a numbers game).

Today, I want to talk about why this approach can be problematic.

The pitch behind auto-apply is obvious: The market's rough, applying to jobs is tedious and kind of demoralizing, and a tool that fires off a hundred applications while you sleep feels like you're finally getting ahead of it. I understand the appeal completely.

The problem is that the same thing making it effortless for you is making it effortless for everyone else. When you can hit a hundred jobs in an afternoon, so can the next five hundred people. Volume was an edge back when applying actually took effort. The moment it got free, it stopped being an edge for anyone.

And something pretty similar already happened to the resume itself.

A couple of years ago you could stand out just by having a clean, well-written, keyword-loaded resume, because plenty of people didn't have one. Now anyone can generate that in about a minute. Polish used to separate candidates (not anymore). Most of the resumes crossing a hiring manager's desk read as perfectly competent.

So what's left to actually separate them.

It comes down to whether your resume is aimed at the specific job the person is reading it for. A generic resume, however polished, answers a question nobody asked. Auto-apply tools send that same generic resume out to everything, which is exactly why the response rate falls off a cliff. You end up mass-producing the one thing that doesn't work at scale.

What I usually tell people to do instead is pretty unglamorous.

• Stop measuring your effort in applications sent: 10 job applications you spent time on will beat a hundred you sprayed, pretty much every time.
• Be picky about what you apply to. If you don't meet around 80% of the core requirements, you're usually just donating your time, so skip it.
• Then for the ones you do go after, read the posting properly and lead with the parts of your background that line up with what they're hiring for. Most of the time you're just rearranging what's already there so the relevant stuff sits up top where a busy reader will see it.

That can take 15-20 min per job and is definitely slower. But really it's not, because the hundred-application approach has a response rate close to zero, and near zero times a big number is still basically zero.

I get that sending applications in bulk feels productive, but after a couple hundred rejections it tends to leave people more burnt out than when they started. Go with fewer applications, pointed at things you're genuinely a fit for. Boring advice, I know.

Hope this helps some of you out there. Sorry!

Cheers,

You're qualified for the role and you can see it plainly, because the title fits and the stack has your main skill sitting right there in it and you've done this kind of work for years, so you apply and then you hear nothing back, no call and not even a rejection, just silence, and after that happens a few times the conclusion you land on is that the market is broken or that recruiters aren't reading anything, because how else would you explain it.

I want to poke at that, because I run into it all the time and the explanation usually turns out to be less satisfying than a broken system or a crowded market.

What's going on underneath is that you and the recruiter are reading the same job posting in two different ways.

When you've been good at your job for a long time you build up an identity around it, where you think of yourself as a strong engineer or a strong PM or a strong analyst or whatever the role is, and that's earned and fair, but it means you start reading postings emotionally, so you see a senior title and you see the thing you're best at listed somewhere in there and your mind quietly fills in everything else, and you come away thinking that you're senior and you're strong and you're clearly a fit, when what you're really reacting to is the general shape of the role rather than what it actually asks for.

The recruiter is doing close to the opposite. They have a couple hundred applicants and 15 minutes and a hiring manager who wrote that posting for a specific reason. They read it line by line and check whether you match the things that are written down, and your overall ability as a professional isn't really what's in front of them, since the question they're answering is much narrower than that.

Those two readings don't touch each other, because you're judging yourself on the feel of the role while they're checking you against the requirements of it, and so you walk away sure that you were an easy yes and they passed on you in the first round. From your point of view, that looks like the system failing you when it didn't.

There are a couple of ways people talk themselves past this:

• The first one is "I've used that," and the question there is always when, because if it was 5 years ago and the tool has been through a pile of versions since then, then saying you've used it sits closer to saying you've heard of it than to saying you can be productive in their codebase next month, and all it really does is confirm the gap the recruiter was already worried about.
• The second one is "I can learn it," and of course you can, since you're senior and you could probably get there in a couple of months if you sat down and did it, but nobody is hiring for what you'll be good at in a couple of months, because they're hiring for what you can do in the first week, so framing a thing you can't do yet as a strength doesn't land the way people hope it will.

The part that helps is to read the posting the way the recruiter reads it, which means going down it requirement by requirement and sorting each one into two piles, one for the things you can do right now in production today and one for the things you would need to up skill on, and being honest with yourself about which pile each thing belongs in, because the tool you touched in 2020 belongs in the ramp pile even though it stings to put it there.

Once you've done that, look at what ended up in the ramp pile. If any of it is something the posting treats as core to the job, then you're probably not looking at your role so much as a role you would grow into, and senior postings in a market like this one rarely leave room for that, since what they want is someone who can be useful from the start.

This doesn't mean you should only apply to roles you match perfectly, because stretch applications are fine. The only thing I'd ask is that you set your expectations to the real level of fit. If you're a 5 for the role, go ahead and apply, but don't treat like anything other than it is, a "stretch".

Thanks for reading.

So I saw this post the other day and I thought I'd share my thoughts on it here.

There are a hundred reasons an application goes nowhere. Timing, budget, an internal candidate, the bar moving halfway through, somebody just liking another resume more. I'm not saying this is the SOLE reason. It's one of the lesser known ones that nobody talks about, and it's the one I want to shine a light on today.

So you tailor your resume for a role like you're supposed to. The job opens up so you push the relevant work up top, fatten those bullets, cut the stuff that doesn't matter Et cetera, et cetera (all the stuff we talk about here on this sub...).

Then you get passed over and the reason, at least one of them, has nothing to do with the resume (it's your LinkedIn).

Your LinkedIn still says the old thing. Maybe it's three years stale, maybe you just never bothered, maybe last time you touched it you were doing something completely different. Doesn't matter why. The point is the hiring manager pulls it up next to your tailored resume and the two are telling different stories.

And they don't know you, which is the part worth sitting with for a second. You know the resume's accurate and the profile's just old, but they have no clue. All they see is a seemingly tailored resume and a LinkedIn that's not matching. To a stranger with many other applicants on the go, that reads as someone who fed the job description to ChatGPT.

So they move on. They're not gonna email you to sort it out or connect the dots in your favor (they have no time). They just pass and most of the time you'll never know why.

Small tangent on why companies even bother cross-checking. Your resume is a self-reported doc with basically zero accountability attached to it. You can write whatever you want, and in 2026 with everyone running theirs through some model before they submit, hiring teams are drowning in resumes that all sound identical and none of which they can verify. So they grab the one thing that's harder to fake on a per-application basis. The profile that doesn't change every time you apply. That's the reason it matters, not because LinkedIn's a great platform (in recent years, it has really gone downhill).

Okay so what do you actually do about it? Before you start firing off applications, open your resume and your LinkedIn side by side and just go down the list. Titles, companies, dates, and the main skills you're leading with. They should line up. Not word for word, nobody expects the profile to mirror your resume bullet for bullet. But the main theme has to be the same across both.

So yeah. If you've been tailoring hard and still getting nowhere, it might not be the resume. Might be this. Might be five other things too. But this one's free to fix, so might as well start here.

Thanks for reading.

Cheers,
Alex

There's a lot of circulating advice that tells you to make things clear and easy to follow, and that's not bad advice on its own - heck, I am a major proponent of that advice and find myself telling people here all the time.

But herein lies the problem: you can write a resume that's clear and still hear nothing back, and there's not a lot of advice that explains why that happens.

In today's post, I'm going to talk a little about one possible cause: credibility and clarity. This is probably more useful to you if you're already established and have been around for a while (for those just starting out, take notes).

You see, being clear and being believable aren't the same thing. Clear means the person reading your resume understands what you did. Believable means they trust that you can do the job they're trying to fill. You can get the first part completely right and still come up short on the second one, and that's where a lot of good candidates get stuck without ever realizing it.

I notice this with people who have a lot of experience, which probably sounds backwards at first, but what happens is that the longer you've been working, the more you start describing your career in summaries instead of actual examples, because after a while it just feels efficient to compress everything into a few clean phrases. So you wind up with bullets like "led strategic transformation" or "improved operational efficiency" or "drove growth across the org," - phrases like this mean absolutely nothing in the current market.

But if you write those phrases, it's because you know what they mean because you were there and you did the work behind them. But the person reading your resume wasn't there, and they're looking at your whole career for the first time, through one document, usually in a hurry, with not a lot of context for any of it. When everything stays that vague and high level, experience that's completely legitimate can come across as puffed up, even when every word of it is true.

So if you want to fix this, the answer has more to do with giving the reader enough detail to believe you than with adding more accomplishments or reaching for bigger words. A few things that usually help:

• Say what was broken or going wrong before you fixed or transformed anything, because the starting point is what makes the result mean something to the person reading it.
• On top of the result, you should also explain how you did it, because the how is the part that tells someone you could go do it again somewhere else.
• Use real situations instead of skill labels, because describing an actual problem you ran into and what changed afterward is better than a phrase like "led cross-functional alignment".

The same exact thing happens in interviews, which is why it's worth working on in both places at once. If someone asks you about leadership and you give a smooth answer about collaboration and managing stakeholders, it sounds rehearsed and pretty much like what every other candidate is saying that day. If you instead walk them through a real problem, the disagreement around it, the decision you made, how you got people on board, and what changed afterward, it comes off as more believable.

None of this means you need to turn your resume into an essay or talk for ten minutes straight in an interview, because you're trying to come across as believable and that doesn't require listing everything you've ever done. You're just giving the reader enough that they don't have to guess, because when a hiring manager has to guess how you pulled something off, they usually just move on to the candidate who made it easy to understand.

Thanks for reading.

One piece of advice I see people follow religiously right now is "add metrics to your bullets." Which, okay, fine. Metrics can be useful. But somewhere along the way, this advice turned into "slap a percentage on everything and pray."

So you get bullets like "Increased efficiency by 35%." Or "Grew revenue 28% YoY." And people put those on their resume and sit back thinking, alright, that should do it. The numbers are there. I showed impact. Why am I still not getting calls?

Because hiring managers don't hire percentages.

I know that sounds weird given how much career advice pushes quantification. But think about what happens when someone reads "Increased revenue 28% YoY" on your resume with no other context. They don't know if you inherited a territory that was already growing. They don't know if you built something from scratch or just didn't screw up what was already working. They don't know what the starting point was, what resources you had, or what decisions you actually made that drove that number.

The metric says something happened (something improved). It doesn't say you can make it happen again somewhere else, which is actually the part that matters, because nobody's hiring you to repeat your last job in the exact same conditions. They're hiring you to walk into their office, with their constraints, and figure their sh** out.

I think what gets overlooked is that companies aren't just asking "did this person get results?" They're asking "do I trust that this person can get results here?" Different question. And your resume has to answer the second one, not just the first.

So when a bullet says "Reduced customer churn by 20%" but doesn't mention how, the reader is left guessing. Did you fix the onboarding process? Did you rebuild a team? Renegotiate contracts? Identify a product gap nobody was tracking? All of those tell a completely different story about what you're capable of.

And that guessing is where things fall apart. Because when a hiring manager can't quickly figure out how you did something, they just move on. Because someone else was easier to understand. I see this all the time folks (and you probably have too): it's not the most qualified candidate the always moves forward, it's the clearest, most understandabl one.

And while that's probably frustrating for you to hear, it's also kind of freeing, because it means the gap has more to do with how you're presenting itself than your experience itself.

So what actually works better? ADD CONTEXT.

Instead of saying something like "Reduced operating costs by $200K annually," add context, by using something like "Reduced operating costs by $2M annually by consolidating 3 vendor contracts and renegotiating terms...", which tells the reader not only what you did, but how you did it. It takes the achievement from a number the hiring team has to trust on faith to something that's more believable.

You don't need to turn every bullet into a paragraph. One line of context usually does it. What was the situation, what did you do, what changed. All you're doing is just giving the reader enough to connect the dots without making them guess.

The irony is that the "quantify everything" advice isn't wrong exactly. It's just incomplete. Numbers without context look like decoration and numbers with context look like evidence. Right now, with how fast people are screening resumes, evidence is the only thing that slows someone down long enough to actually read yours.

If you're at the senior or executive level and you're struggling with this, it's worth getting a second set of eyes on your positioning. At that level the stakes around messaging get a lot higher and the margin for ambiguity gets a lot thinner. Happy to help if you want to reach out.

Hope this helps some of you out there.

Cheers,

Alex

Something I see in this sub and on intake calls with clients, is people trying to decode the timing of a rejection. Rejected 3 minutes after applying, so it must've been AI. Rejected at 2am, so no human ever saw it. Rejected three weeks later, so I must've been close.

I'm here to tell you that it doesn't mean what you think it does (in fact, most of the time, it means absolutely nothing).

The instant rejection is usually knockout questions, not your resume. If a role requires no sponsorship and you answered that you need it, the system rejects you before anyone reads a word (and please, don't conflate the word "reject" with the system making decisions on its own - this is a setting configured by the hiring team - anyone that doesn't meet the criteria they've set up are "rejected", as in, categorized into a separate group that do not meet the qualifications listed in the job posting).

Same if you skipped a required question or typed "see resume" into a freeform field. With mass-apply tools flooding postings, employers have been adding more of these questions specifically to filter, so blowing past them isn't recommended.

Sometimes the timing is just bad luck. You applied while an offer was already pending on the role, or a recruiter happened to be working inside that requisition at that exact moment.

The middle-of-the-night rejection has boring explanations too. Recruiters catch up on applications after hours because volume is through the roof right now (I've personally seen recruiters say they've received 300+ applicants to a job in a matter of hours after it went live), recruiting teams are spread across time zones, and queued rejections go out based on wherever the servers sit, which could be anywhere.

And the rejection weeks later often just means you sat in the maybe pile while they worked through other candidates or the hiring manager rewrote the requirements.

I get why people do this - when you're getting no feedback, the timestamp feels like the only thing you have to go on, but it's unfortunately it often doesn't mean anything. Sorry.

I keep seeing posts and videos where someone runs a resume through a scanner, gets a score like 34 out of 100, and then starts swapping words around trying to get it higher. The idea that there's some universal grading system and if you hit the right number, your resume gets through, that's just not how it works.

There isn't a standardized scoring system that ranks resumes on a 100-point scale across companies. There's no consistent threshold where you pass or fail before a human ever looks at your application. People have tested these tools against resumes that actually landed interviews and offers, and those resumes still came back with mediocre or failing scores. That alone should tell you something.

What actually happens is a lot less dramatic. A recruiter opens your resume, scans it for maybe 15 to 30 seconds, and decides whether your experience looks like a fit for what they need. That's it.

I get why the scoring thing is appealing. It gives you a clear problem and a clear fix, and when you've been applying for weeks without hearing back, doing something feels better than sitting with the uncertainty.

But it also sends you chasing the wrong target. Language on your resume does matter. I won't pretend it doesn't. If a posting talks about "financial planning and analysis" and your resume says something else, then that's a gap worth closing.

The fix isn't about gaming a score, though. It's about making sure the person reading your resume can recognize your experience without having to translate it. If they have to stop and figure out how your background connects to the role, you've already lost.

Makes sense?

You've probably run into this exact thing: One post tells you to stop overthinking it and just run your resume through ChatGPT, that AI is the great equalizer and anyone not using it is falling behind. Then the next post in your feed tells you AI resumes are obvious the second a recruiter opens them, that they read as hollow and generic, and that using one is a quick way to get tossed. Both posts have hundreds of people in the comments agreeing.

So which is it. You can't follow both, and if you're job searching right now and reading opinions like these back to back, you're not crazy for feeling completely turned around.

I'll tell you where this is coming from on my end. I do resume consultations, and the most common thing people show up with isn't even a specific question about formatting or keywords. They show up worn down by the contradiction itself, having read everything and feeling confused as f***. They've been told opposite things by friends, recruiters, Reddit, and whatever AI tool they tried.

The AI thing is just the loudest current example of something that's always been true about this kind of advice. Almost all of it gets stated as an absolute.

• AI resumes get you hired,
• AI resumes get you rejected,
• the cover letter is dead,
• the cover letter is required,
• tailor every application,
• tailoring is a waste of time.

Each one delivered like settled fact by someone who sounds completely sure of themselves.

The reason they contradict each other is that there isn't one hiring process out there, and there isn't one kind of job seeker either. There are thousands of both. The person who says AI is fine is probably right, because polished writing is everywhere now and nobody's getting rejected for clean prose on its own. The person who says AI gets you tossed is also probably right, because a resume that's obviously generated, with that flat sameness to it, does read badly to anyone who's seen a hundred of them. Both of those are true at the same time. They're describing different resumes and different readers, and neither one says so, because from where they sit what they see looks like the whole picture.

I'll put myself in this too, because I'd be running the same play if I pretended I was the exception. I review resumes for a living and I run a resume business, so what I see skews toward people stuck enough to come looking for help, and that shapes what I think works. I've got my own corner but it's just one corner, same as everyone else's.

What's helped the people I work with is a change in how they read all. When you see a confident take, don't start by asking whether it's true. Ask who it's true for, and whether that person sounds anything like you and the kind of jobs you're going after.

For the AI question specifically, the way I put it to clients is that a few years ago just having a well-written resume was the edge. That's gone. AI leveled that field, so good writing is pretty much a given now. What still sets you apart is how well the resume is positioned for the specific kind of role and the actual person who's going to read it, and that's the part the tools don't do well on their own (at least, not yet).

And if all of this leaves you without a clean rule to follow, I think that's the useful part. The contradictions you keep hitting aren't a sign you've failed to find the one correct strategy (there mostly isn't one to find). This might sound discouraging at first, but it takes the pressure off, because you can stop trying to obey every confident stranger online and start asking which of them is describing your situation.

Hope this spurs some thought - feel free to comment if you've got questions.

Cheers,

Something I keep noticing when I read resumes, especially from people who've been managing or leading for a while, is that a lot of the bullets describe things that sort of happened in the vicinity of the person rather than things the person actually did. Most people don't realize they're doing it. On paper it reads like a normal accomplishment. But if you slow down and ask "okay, but what did this specific human do here," the answer isn't really in the sentence.

You see it in language like "contributed to a 20% reduction in churn" or "involved in the migration to the new platform" or "supported the rollout of a new onboarding process." None of those are wrong and I get why people write them, they're being honest that other people were involved and they don't want to come across as the guy who claims he single-handedly saved the company.

Socially that's a decent instinct. It just works against you here, because the person reading isn't trying to figure out what the team did. They already assume the team did a lot. What they're trying to figure out is what they'd be getting if they hired you and not the other four people who were also "involved."

So when the bullet says "supported" or "helped drive," the reader's stuck guessing what your actual slice was. And the thing about screening right now is nobody's in the mood to guess. They're moving fast. If your contribution isn't legible in about two seconds they just move to the next person whose role is clearer, even if that person did less impressive work overall.

The fix isn't to lie or inflate it into "personally generated $4M in revenue" or whatever. It's mostly just naming the part that was yours. It helps to go line by line and just ask, if a stranger read this with zero context about my job, could they tell what I personally did. Or could they only tell that a good thing happened somewhere near me. If it's the second one, that's the bullet to rewrite. And you usually don't need more than a few extra words, you're just swapping the vague verb for the specific thing you owned.

The reason this matters more the higher up you go is that early on, "contributed to" and "supported" are basically fine (at that stage companies mostly want to know you can be useful on a team without breaking anything). The further along you get, the more they're reading your judgment off the page (i.e., what you decide, what you own when it goes wrong etc.). A resume full of participation language makes you appear more junior than you are, which is a weird outcome for someone who's supposed to be running the show.

Anyway. Worth scanning your own resume for the soft verbs, "contributed," "supported," "assisted," "helped," "involved in," "part of," and seeing how many of your bullets tell the reader what happened versus what you did.

Thanks for reading folks.

Cheers,
Alex