I Sent The Same Resume Out For Six Years. One Line Of It Was Doing Nothing At All.

Have you ever looked at your resume and said, “I’m confident this is good, and I can submit this?” 6 years, I thought I had exactly that: a good resume. Nothing fancy, not horrible, just good. Same formatting, probably a couple more typos than I thought, but I kept grabbing interviews from it, so good enough, right? Every few years, I would change the top line, and that would be my aging and updating process.

And then came last spring-or was it the one before?-when I was noodling on a friend’s resume. For the first time in ages, I looked at a resume with a reader’s eye-and considered giving my own the same treatment. Out of arrogance, mainly, and a vague expectation it’d validate me.

Here’s what: the first problem it raised was a heading I actually thought was pretty good.

The first thing it flagged was a heading I'd been rather proud of

I put this section back in 2019 because it seemed more significant than Experience, and I was proud of that moment of brilliance for some reason, most likely on a train.

As it turns out, that kind of heading is exactly the type that will trip up the parser software. The newer ATSs that most companies are using tend to look for a limited, predictable range of headings-Experience, Education, Skills, and the like. When they see something more creative, they’re not sure what to do with it. And the bad news? That section of your resume may be completely passed over.

Six years. My document’s finest hour, I’d venture, hidden beneath a heading that was biding its time.

Not the error itself-what hurts is that I couldn’t know. You never get reasons with rejections-nothing, just silence, and you convince yourself that it was the competition, or the market, or that they’d already picked someone internally, all of which are often true, all of which are always easy to convince yourself of.

Eleven lines about 2017

Eleven! And four lines about the job I’d just left behind. So common I’d never noticed before. A resume grows the way a garden grows-you keep adding to it and you almost never go back and cut anything out. 2017’s job? Eleven lines. 2018? That’s all I had then. By last year it should have been two lines, or one, and that space should have gone to the job I’d just left.

If you have held jobs for more than 5 years, go look at your resume and count how many lines you have for each role. I’d wager the oldest job is significantly over-represented. This is the single most straightforward correction to almost anyone’s resume and the single least likely to be made. Why? Because reading your own resume is painful, humbling work, and better to avoid.

Not one number in the top half. Not one.

The top third of the page - the only part anyone reads for sure - was completely empty. Just verbs. Managed, led, delivered, supported, coordinated. Words that sound good when you type them, but to someone scanning forty resumes before lunch, mean nothing.

“Managed client reporting” as opposed to “Managed reporting for 14 accounts, bringing down monthly turnaround from five days to two.” The same job, the same truth, but only one of those is ever repeated back to a co-worker.

I wrote it the first way because it seems like bragging when you have numbers, and because I didn’t think I knew the numbers to the decimal point. Which is a pathetic reason, and I would not argue it with anyone. Nobody is going to check if you had 14 accounts or 13. What they want is an idea of how much you could be relied on, and a rough, honest number gets that where a verb never will.

Worth noting too, since this is sandwiched between a good deal of other genuine crap about resumes-there’s an entire collection of resume “hacks” people still fall for plaguing the interwebs, white-text keyword stuffing being the most frequently asked about, and no. Just don’t. But putting a real number to a real action is not a hack. It’s just describing it honestly.

What really helped was it not looking at me

Which is an unsatisfying thing to land on, and it sounds a bit like a sales pitch, so bear with me.

I’d read that document maybe two hundred times, maybe more. I’d read it on the bus. I didn’t see it anymore, at all. The heading problem sat there for six years while I stared right past it every time because when you’ve written something yourself you read what you meant rather than what’s there. We all do this. It’s why writers have editors.

There are a few ways around it. Your industry buddy that will be brutally honest, our number one choice and the hardest to get. Reading out loud is surprisingly effective. Or there’s the resume audit tool that gives you instant resume feedback within 2 minutes, which is the one I used, because it was 11pm and I wasn’t calling anyone.

The straightforward message about the automated path, whether that’s a resume audit tool or any AI powered resume checker: it’s good for structural things. Parsing mistakes, missing chunks, keyword shortages for a particular position you’re applying for, the format errors that you don’t see but a machine surely will. It’s not very good at measuring the quality of your writing. So don’t take the feedback personally-take it as a to-do list of things to look at rather than a critique of you as a person, and do the rewriting yourself.

Ninety minutes, start to finish

And here’s the other thing to remember about this. That fixing five or six real problems wasn’t a big project. It was one evening, and most of CV optimization, it turns out, is taking things out rather than putting things in.

Renamed all the headings to the boring, predictable version. Killed the 2017 section from eleven lines down to two. Slipped Skills further up the page. Put numbers to six bullet points-approximate, but correct. And cut out a personal statement which I want to be clear I wrote myself and then sent to strangers, voluntarily, for years: “a motivated professional with a passion for delivering results.”

I rebuilt the whole thing off a resume builder template rather than fighting my old Word file and its 2019 margins, which saved me the fiddly forty minutes of making a document look deliberate.

Now, what about you? How many lines does your most senior job have? Are you ready to give your resume a fresh look?