Your First Resume Isn’t A Lying Problem. It’s A Labelling Problem
Have you ever sat in front of a blank resume at 19 and thought, right, but what do I actually put on this thing?
Mine was about two thirds white space and I remember being properly embarrassed by it, in the way you can only be embarrassed by a document when you’re 19. Contents, in full: school, predicted grades, and 3 weeks of work experience at a solicitor’s office where I photocopied things and was once trusted to go out and fetch everybody’s lunch.
That was it. I set the font to 13pt to fill the page, which fools nobody and makes you look like you’re shouting very slightly.
What I didn’t put on it-because it genuinely never occurred to me that it counted as anything-was 2 years running the fixtures and the money for a five-a-side league. Booking pitches. Chasing 11 people for subs every month. And on one memorable occasion spending about 25 minutes managing a genuinely furious man about a double-booked slot.
Scheduling, cash handling and conflict resolution, sitting right there in my actual life, while I typed “hardworking and motivated individual” into the gap at the top of the page.
It doesn’t. It means there was a time when you were responsible for something happening, and then it happened. That’s the whole test. Whether money changed hands is a detail about the arrangement, not a detail about what you did.
Which makes the list much longer than you think. Society treasurer, the group project you ended up running because nobody else was going to, helping out in a family business-which an enormous number of people leave off entirely because it feels like it doesn’t count when the owner is your uncle-volunteering, coaching a kids’ team, running the Instagram for something that isn’t yours. Any hobby with money, deadlines or other people in it. All 3 of those and you’re basically describing a small operation.
I’d add anything you taught yourself and then used on something real. Not a certificate. A thing that exists somewhere. You built a site for your mum’s business, you made a little tool that does one job, you ran the numbers on something and somebody then went and acted on them.
Most of what’s written about how to write a resume for a first job skips this bit entirely, I’d venture, and goes straight to layout.
And none of the above is an argument for inventing anything. Why? Because made-up things come apart in the interview, where somebody asks one follow-up question and then watches you go quiet for about a second and a half. Everything I’ve just listed is true and already happened to you. The job is labelling it properly, not manufacturing it.
“Treasurer, Film Society” tells somebody nothing whatsoever. “Treasurer, Film Society-ran a £1,400 annual budget across 30-odd events, took it over mid-year when the records were a mess and rebuilt them” tells them you can be handed something broken and not panic about it. Same role. One of those is a reason to interview you and the other is just a word.
Numbers again. And I do know they feel like they’re for people with proper jobs, but they’re carrying more weight here precisely because your stuff doesn’t come with a job title anyone recognises. Nobody has the faintest idea what being treasurer of a film society involves. The number is how you tell them the size of it. £1,400 isn’t an impressive sum of money and that’s completely fine-what does the work is that you were trusted with it and didn’t lose it.
Nearly every application you send goes through software before a person reads a word of it. That software is reading your document rather than looking at it, and it’s reading for a small, predictable set of section names. So, in order of how much trouble each one causes:
Use the boring headings. Not “My Journey”. Not “What I Bring To The Table”. Experience, Education, Skills.
No tables, no text boxes, no two-column layouts with a sidebar running down the side. These look tidy on your screen and come out of the parser as one scrambled paragraph with your phone number somewhere in the middle of your degree.
No graphics for skill levels. Those 5-dot proficiency ratings where Excel gets 4 dots-the machine reads nothing at all from that, and the human reading it has no idea what your 4 dots for Excel means next to your 4 dots for Spanish. Neither do you, if you’re honest about it.
One file, PDF, named the way a person would name it. Firstname-Lastname-Resume.pdf. Not resume_final_v3_USE_THIS.pdf, which I have been sent, by an adult.
All of which is exactly the sort of thing that goes invisible once you’ve been staring at your own document for a few weeks. I managed to carry a broken heading around for years without noticing-I sent the same resume out for 6 years with a heading that was quietly breaking it-and that’s a mistake I’d have swerved completely if anyone had told me any of this at 19.
The quickest way round the whole business is to not build the document from scratch at all. Start from one of the ATS friendly resume templates and drop your content into a structure that’s already laid out to be read properly. Smart resume templates sound like a gimmick until you’ve spent a Sunday arguing with Word about margins and then found out in March that none of it parsed anyway.
2 pages is for people with 10 years of material who need to cut. For you, 2 pages means padding, and padding is extremely visible from the other side of the desk. It’s the 13pt font. It’s the 3-line personal statement about being passionate. It’s “Interests: socialising, music, travel”, which describes every human being who has ever lived.
Cut the personal statement especially. “A motivated and hardworking individual seeking an opportunity to develop” is 4 lines of the most expensive space on the page saying absolutely nothing at all. If you want something up there, make it 1 line and make it specific-what you’re after, plus the one true relevant thing about you. Or leave it off entirely and open with Education, which is completely normal and has never got anybody rejected.
But read the ad, pick out 2 or 3 things it’s asking for that you have got in some form, and make sure those exact words appear in the top half of your page. If they want “customer-facing” and you’ve worked a till, put customer-facing somewhere. If they want attention to detail and you rebuilt a set of broken records, say so near the top rather than in the final bullet of the final entry, where it will not be read.
10 applications where you’ve done that beats 40 where you haven’t. Boring advice, obviously. Also just true, and I ignored it for about a year, because sending 40 felt like effort and sending 10 felt like giving up.
The point is you only have to get through the first one. After that it stops being a document you write and becomes a document you edit, and every real thing you do from then on gets added to it. Inside 2 years the problem flips over completely-suddenly you’ve got too much and the skill becomes cutting things out.
So get the boring version down this week. True things, labelled properly, 1 page, in a layout a machine can actually read. Then go and look at what’s actually out there, because the resume only exists in order to get used, and sitting on a perfect one you never send is somehow the most common version of this entire mistake.
Mine was about two thirds white space and I remember being properly embarrassed by it, in the way you can only be embarrassed by a document when you’re 19. Contents, in full: school, predicted grades, and 3 weeks of work experience at a solicitor’s office where I photocopied things and was once trusted to go out and fetch everybody’s lunch.
That was it. I set the font to 13pt to fill the page, which fools nobody and makes you look like you’re shouting very slightly.
What I didn’t put on it-because it genuinely never occurred to me that it counted as anything-was 2 years running the fixtures and the money for a five-a-side league. Booking pitches. Chasing 11 people for subs every month. And on one memorable occasion spending about 25 minutes managing a genuinely furious man about a double-booked slot.
Scheduling, cash handling and conflict resolution, sitting right there in my actual life, while I typed “hardworking and motivated individual” into the gap at the top of the page.
Nobody tells you what "experience" actually means
You assume it means jobs. Paid, titled, start date, end date, a manager somewhere who’d confirm you existed.It doesn’t. It means there was a time when you were responsible for something happening, and then it happened. That’s the whole test. Whether money changed hands is a detail about the arrangement, not a detail about what you did.
Which makes the list much longer than you think. Society treasurer, the group project you ended up running because nobody else was going to, helping out in a family business-which an enormous number of people leave off entirely because it feels like it doesn’t count when the owner is your uncle-volunteering, coaching a kids’ team, running the Instagram for something that isn’t yours. Any hobby with money, deadlines or other people in it. All 3 of those and you’re basically describing a small operation.
I’d add anything you taught yourself and then used on something real. Not a certificate. A thing that exists somewhere. You built a site for your mum’s business, you made a little tool that does one job, you ran the numbers on something and somebody then went and acted on them.
Most of what’s written about how to write a resume for a first job skips this bit entirely, I’d venture, and goes straight to layout.
And none of the above is an argument for inventing anything. Why? Because made-up things come apart in the interview, where somebody asks one follow-up question and then watches you go quiet for about a second and a half. Everything I’ve just listed is true and already happened to you. The job is labelling it properly, not manufacturing it.
Lead with what you did, not what you were called
My mistake was leading with titles, because that’s the shape a resume has and I was copying the shape without understanding why it was that shape.“Treasurer, Film Society” tells somebody nothing whatsoever. “Treasurer, Film Society-ran a £1,400 annual budget across 30-odd events, took it over mid-year when the records were a mess and rebuilt them” tells them you can be handed something broken and not panic about it. Same role. One of those is a reason to interview you and the other is just a word.
Numbers again. And I do know they feel like they’re for people with proper jobs, but they’re carrying more weight here precisely because your stuff doesn’t come with a job title anyone recognises. Nobody has the faintest idea what being treasurer of a film society involves. The number is how you tell them the size of it. £1,400 isn’t an impressive sum of money and that’s completely fine-what does the work is that you were trusted with it and didn’t lose it.
On formatting-boring is correct, and I mean genuinely boring
This is where first resumes go wrong in a way that’s trivially easy to fix and very easy to get wrong if nobody’s told you.Nearly every application you send goes through software before a person reads a word of it. That software is reading your document rather than looking at it, and it’s reading for a small, predictable set of section names. So, in order of how much trouble each one causes:
Use the boring headings. Not “My Journey”. Not “What I Bring To The Table”. Experience, Education, Skills.
No tables, no text boxes, no two-column layouts with a sidebar running down the side. These look tidy on your screen and come out of the parser as one scrambled paragraph with your phone number somewhere in the middle of your degree.
No graphics for skill levels. Those 5-dot proficiency ratings where Excel gets 4 dots-the machine reads nothing at all from that, and the human reading it has no idea what your 4 dots for Excel means next to your 4 dots for Spanish. Neither do you, if you’re honest about it.
One file, PDF, named the way a person would name it. Firstname-Lastname-Resume.pdf. Not resume_final_v3_USE_THIS.pdf, which I have been sent, by an adult.
All of which is exactly the sort of thing that goes invisible once you’ve been staring at your own document for a few weeks. I managed to carry a broken heading around for years without noticing-I sent the same resume out for 6 years with a heading that was quietly breaking it-and that’s a mistake I’d have swerved completely if anyone had told me any of this at 19.
The quickest way round the whole business is to not build the document from scratch at all. Start from one of the ATS friendly resume templates and drop your content into a structure that’s already laid out to be read properly. Smart resume templates sound like a gimmick until you’ve spent a Sunday arguing with Word about margins and then found out in March that none of it parsed anyway.
1 page. 1 page.
If this is your first resume it goes on 1 page, and there’s no exception to that which applies to you yet.2 pages is for people with 10 years of material who need to cut. For you, 2 pages means padding, and padding is extremely visible from the other side of the desk. It’s the 13pt font. It’s the 3-line personal statement about being passionate. It’s “Interests: socialising, music, travel”, which describes every human being who has ever lived.
Cut the personal statement especially. “A motivated and hardworking individual seeking an opportunity to develop” is 4 lines of the most expensive space on the page saying absolutely nothing at all. If you want something up there, make it 1 line and make it specific-what you’re after, plus the one true relevant thing about you. Or leave it off entirely and open with Education, which is completely normal and has never got anybody rejected.
Then change it a bit for each one
Not the whole thing. Nobody’s rewriting a resume 12 times from nothing.But read the ad, pick out 2 or 3 things it’s asking for that you have got in some form, and make sure those exact words appear in the top half of your page. If they want “customer-facing” and you’ve worked a till, put customer-facing somewhere. If they want attention to detail and you rebuilt a set of broken records, say so near the top rather than in the final bullet of the final entry, where it will not be read.
10 applications where you’ve done that beats 40 where you haven’t. Boring advice, obviously. Also just true, and I ignored it for about a year, because sending 40 felt like effort and sending 10 felt like giving up.
Your first one will be bad and it genuinely doesn't matter
Mine was. The 13pt one. I sent it to about 20 places, heard back from 1, and got a kitchen job largely on the basis that I could start on the Saturday.The point is you only have to get through the first one. After that it stops being a document you write and becomes a document you edit, and every real thing you do from then on gets added to it. Inside 2 years the problem flips over completely-suddenly you’ve got too much and the skill becomes cutting things out.
So get the boring version down this week. True things, labelled properly, 1 page, in a layout a machine can actually read. Then go and look at what’s actually out there, because the resume only exists in order to get used, and sitting on a perfect one you never send is somehow the most common version of this entire mistake.
Content Writer
Casey Jordan
Casey Jordan is the pen name for our Content Manager at JustJobs.Info, sharing expert career advice and real-world insights. Casey champions clarity, privacy, and encouragement, helping every reader approach their job search with confidence.
