Took me 6 months to figure out I was formatting my resume wrong the whole time

Kept wondering why I wasn't getting callbacks until a friend in HR told me my resume had a table of contents and bullet points that went on for 3 lines each. Anyone else look back at their old resumes and cringe at what they thought was good?

2 comments

2 Comments

pipergonzalez19d ago

Laughing because my old resume literally had a "References available upon request" line at the bottom like it was still 1995. Spent way too much time making things look "pretty" with weird fonts and borders that probably got me auto-rejected by every ATS system out there. The real kicker was thinking longer bullet points made me sound more experienced when really I was just wasting everyone's time. Honestly surprised I ever got hired anywhere with that garbage formatting.

joseph_lewis9219d ago

The table of contents thing is hilarious (but also painful) because I did something similar. My old resume had a whole page of just fancy headers and dividers like it was a menu at a fancy restaurant or something. Thought I was being clever with the design until I found out robots just skip all that visual clutter anyway. Those 3-line bullet points got me too - I was basically writing short stories about stocking shelves at my first job. A buddy told me to just cut everything down to one or two lines max and suddenly my phone started ringing. Sometimes the hard part is unlearning all the bad advice you picked up from random blogs online.