A recruiter's first pass through a resume takes somewhere between six and thirty seconds. In that window they are not evaluating you — they are looking for a reason to move on to the next document. The mistakes below are the reasons they find most often, in rough order of how much damage each one does.
Writing duties instead of achievements
This is the single most common problem, and it is the one worth fixing before any other. A duty describes the role; an achievement describes you in it. Anyone with your job title could have written the first version below.
Responsible for managing the company's social media accounts.
Grew LinkedIn following from 4K to 31K in 14 months, driving 22% of inbound demo requests.
A summary that says nothing
"Results-driven professional with a passion for excellence seeking a challenging role" is four lines of prime real estate spent on nothing. If the sentence would be equally true for a different candidate in a different industry, delete it. A useful summary states what you do, at what level, and the one outcome you are known for.
No numbers anywhere
Numbers are how a reader calibrates scale. "Managed a team" could be three people or thirty. If you genuinely have no metrics, use countable facts instead: how many accounts, tickets, students, sites, or releases. Almost every job produces something countable.
Length that fights the content
One page under about eight years of experience; two pages beyond it; three only for executive or academic histories. The failure is not length itself, it is padding — a second page of early-career detail signals that you cannot tell what matters.
Formatting that breaks the parser
- Contact details trapped in a Word header or footer.
- Two-column layouts carrying the work history.
- Skill rating bars — unparseable and unfalsifiable.
- Creative section headings in place of Experience and Education.
- A photo, in markets where it is not the convention and where it invites bias claims.
The same resume sent everywhere
A generic resume is weakly relevant to every posting and strongly relevant to none. You do not need to rewrite it each time — change the summary line, reorder the skills to match the posting's priorities, and rewrite the top two bullets of your current role. That is fifteen minutes for a materially better match.
Unexplained gaps and vague dates
Removing months to hide a four-month gap creates a bigger problem: it looks like concealment, and it will be asked about. State the gap in one clause — "career break, caregiving" — and let the reader move on.
The rest of the list
- An unprofessional email address. A free mailbox is fine; a nickname from 2009 is not.
- "References available upon request." Assumed, and it costs a line.
- Listing every technology you have ever opened. Keep the list to what you would be comfortable being tested on.
- Typos in the first three lines, where they are most likely to be seen.
- A file named resume-final-v3-USE-THIS.pdf. Use firstname-lastname-resume.pdf.
- A LinkedIn profile that contradicts the resume — different dates or titles is a genuine red flag during a background check.