Common Resume Mistakes From Someone Who Gives Lots Of Feedback
Hi, [r/resumes](r/resumes)! I wanna start by saying that this entire post is human-typed, I'm not here to sell you anything like a ton of other posters, and [my cat is adorable as hell.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Catsmirin/s/ASQ3DE6sPI)
I spend a lot of time poking through resume subreddits for fun and giving feedback (check my comment history for proof!) so I see the wide spectrum of great to god-awful-abysmal level resumes. Very proud that my suggestions have been directly helpful in landing people some awesome jobs.
I want to talk about some of the things I see all the time in this subreddit that's decreasing your chances of getting an interview:
\* Two column resumes. For the love of everything holy, stop using them. They're significantly more prone to parsing errors
\* Exceeding one page when you have less than ten years of experience, especially if you're still in school. There are ALWAYS ways to be creative with framing your experience to keep it to one
\* Excessively verbose bullets and/or bullets that consistently occupy more than three lines of text per. Candidly: nobody's reading allat
\* Em-dashes every other bullet. We know you used Chat, Claude, or Gemini and didn't change a darn thing when your resume is written at a doctorate level but the body of your post asking why you can't get a job is at a third-grade level
\* Listing your Skills section vertically with individual bullets corresponding to an individual skill. It's a waste of space, group by function and use commas
\* Writing bullets that lack quantification and don't describe what you actually accomplished for the company. "Responsible for managing social media accounts” is a task, “grew Instagram engagement 47% YOY” actually gives context. If your job isn't numbers-based, try and talk about time saved, processes improved, and direct business impact!
\* Typos (improper use of capitalization is a big culprit), grammatical errors (often poor comma usage), stylistic inconsistencies (if half of your bullets end in a period and half of them don't after you put "attention to detail" as a Skill... I don't believe you), and mismatched fonts (pick one and stick to it)
\* Letting your content go beyond the bounds of the right margin for your date ranges (everything should be organized neatly)
\* Describing your Skills using circular/likert scales (how am I supposed to know what 3/5 circles for Photoshop means)
\* Contact information that goes longer than two lines. When possible, contact information should be on one line (if you have a portfolio/Github, totally fine to let it go to two lines). You also don't need to write "Phone:" or "Email:", that's a given and wastes space
\* Listing your Intern role from 10 years ago when you're an established senior career professional. It detracts from your positioning, just leave it for reference on your LinkedIn
\* Writing your content in paragraph form without breaking it into bullets
\* Not customizing your LinkedIn URL to remove the buncha numbers at the end of it. It's REALLY easy to do and shows that you have a basic understanding of the platform + saves you valuable space in the Contact Information line
\* Bolding every other word. It makes your content impossible to read and devalues its usage
That's it, that's the whole post :)