Most rejected resumes are not badly written. They are undifferentiated: a list of responsibilities that could belong to any of the other two hundred applicants. Below are the mistakes that come up again and again when reviewing real documents, roughly in order of how much damage they do, along with the specific fix for each one.
1. Listing duties instead of results
This is the single biggest problem, and it accounts for more weak resumes than everything else combined.
Before: "Responsible for managing social media accounts and creating content."
After: "Rebuilt the content calendar around customer stories, growing organic reach 3x in a year and generating around 40 inbound enquiries per quarter."
A job description says what the role involves. Your resume should say what you specifically did with it and what changed. Ask of every bullet: could my predecessor have written this exact sentence? If yes, it describes the job, not you.
2. No numbers anywhere
Numbers make claims checkable and give the reader a sense of scale. Without them a reader silently assumes the smallest plausible version of everything you describe.
If you think your work is unquantifiable, you are looking for the wrong numbers. Consider volume (tickets, accounts, patients, sites), money (budget, revenue, savings), time (cycle length, turnaround), people (team size, people trained), and frequency (reports produced, events run).
Two caveats. Do not invent figures; you will be asked how you calculated them. And do not put a percentage on everything, because a bullet list of percentages stops registering. Two or three strong numbers per role is plenty.
3. Sending the same document everywhere
Untargeted applications are the reason people conclude the market is broken. A generic resume is optimised for no role in particular, so it loses to the applicant who spent twenty minutes reordering their bullets against the posting.
Keep a master document and cut it down per application. Reorder bullets so the relevant ones come first, and change the summary to name the target title. That is the whole exercise. It is editing, not writing.
4. An objective statement instead of a summary
"Seeking a challenging position with a forward-thinking organisation where I can utilise my skills" tells the employer what you want. They are not hiring to solve your problems.
Replace it with three or four lines saying what you are, how long, in what domain, and one thing you achieved. Worked rewrites across a range of roles are the fastest way to see the difference.
5. Two-column and heavily designed layouts
Designed layouts look considered on your screen and often parse into scrambled text in the employer's system, interleaving sidebar content with your job history. Text boxes, graphics and skill icons routinely fail to extract at all.
Unless you are applying for a design role where the document is a portfolio piece, use a single column with real text. Our 28 resume templates are built this way deliberately, and you can confirm any document parses correctly with our free ATS checker before you send it.
6. Contact details in the header or footer
A special case of the previous mistake, and common enough to deserve its own entry. Parsers frequently ignore header and footer regions, so your name, phone number and email vanish. Put them in the body of the document at the top.
7. Skills nobody can verify
"Team player", "excellent communication skills", "detail-oriented", "hard-working", "self-motivated". Every applicant claims these; none of them are evidence. Worse, "detail-oriented" on a resume with a typo actively works against you.
List skills a hiring manager could test: named software, languages, methodologies, certifications, regulatory frameworks. Demonstrate the soft skills inside your experience bullets instead. "Ran the weekly cross-functional planning meeting for engineering, sales and support" shows communication far better than claiming it.
Also delete proficiency bar charts. A graphic claiming you are 80 per cent proficient in Python conveys nothing and cannot be parsed.
8. Too long, or padded to fill a page
One page under roughly ten years of experience, two pages beyond that. Academic and research fields have their own conventions. Three pages for a mid-career commercial role reads as an inability to prioritise.
The opposite failure is padding: enormous margins, 14-point body text, a "Hobbies" section listing reading and socialising, and a "References available on request" line that has been assumed by default for decades. If you genuinely have half a page of material, use a tighter layout rather than inflating it.
9. Going back too far
Ten to fifteen years of detailed history is usually enough. Older roles can be compressed into a short "Earlier career" block with titles, employers and dates only.
Keeping four bullet points on a job you left in 2006 does two things, neither good: it uses space that should describe your recent work, and it flags your age to anyone inclined to discriminate.
10. Unexplained gaps and vague dates
Gaps are normal. Hiding them is what causes trouble. Using years only ("2019 - 2022") to conceal a nine-month break reads as evasive to any recruiter who has seen it before, and most have.
Use month and year consistently, and give a gap over six months a one-line entry: "Career break - full-time caregiving, 2023 - 2024" or "Redundancy and job search, 2024". One line closes the question. Silence leaves it open.
11. Typos, tense drift and inconsistency
Spellcheck catches misspellings, not wrong words. "Manger" for "manager" and "pubic" for "public" both pass. Read the document aloud, and read the bullet points backwards from the last one, which breaks the pattern-matching that makes you skim your own writing.
Check tense: present for your current role, past for everything else, applied consistently. Check formatting: the same date style, the same punctuation at the end of bullets (either all have full stops or none do), the same heading sizes throughout.
12. The wrong company name
It happens constantly, and it is an immediate rejection because it proves the application was mass-produced. Anywhere you name the employer, including the file name and the cover letter, check it as your last action before submitting.
While you are there, name the file sensibly. "resume_final_v7_USE_THIS_ONE.pdf" arrives in the recruiter's folder with that name on it.
13. An unprofessional or dead email address
Use firstname.lastname or a close variant at a mainstream provider. Also check that the address is one you actually monitor, and check the spam folder during an active search. Losing an interview invitation to a filter is an avoidable and painful way to end a process.
14. Personal information that should not be there
Leave out date of birth, marital status, number of children, nationality, religion, national insurance or social security number, and full street address. A photograph is conventional in some countries and a liability in others; in the UK and US markets, leave it off.
This is partly privacy and partly self-interest: information a hiring manager is not allowed to consider still influences decisions once they have seen it.
15. Links that do not work or should not be there
Include a LinkedIn URL, and a portfolio or GitHub link if relevant to the job. Check every link opens. Check your LinkedIn profile is public and consistent with the resume, since recruiters check it almost immediately after reading the document. Our LinkedIn optimiser will flag mismatches between the two.
Leave off personal social accounts unless they are professionally relevant.
16. Burying the strongest material
The top third of page one is the most valuable space in the document. If your best achievement is the fourth bullet under your second job, most readers will never see it.
Lead each role with its strongest bullet rather than the most chronological one. If a project from an earlier role is your best proof for this application, consider a short "Selected Projects" block near the top.
17. Jargon and internal shorthand
Acronyms that only exist inside your last employer are invisible to everyone else. So are internal titles: "Customer Happiness Ninja" cannot be searched for and does not tell a recruiter your level.
Write the recognised market title and put the internal one in brackets. Spell out an acronym on first use with the short form after it, which also covers whichever version a recruiter searches for.
18. Claiming things you cannot support
Inflating a job title, extending dates to cover a gap, listing a degree you did not finish, or claiming a tool you used once. All of it is checked more often than people expect, through references, background screening, or a technical interview five minutes long.
Being caught costs the offer, and being caught after starting costs the job. Where the truth is awkward, present it accurately and briefly: "Completed two years of a BSc in Chemistry" is honest and perfectly acceptable.
19. Writing for the wrong reader
Your resume is usually read first by a recruiter who is not a specialist in your field, and second by a hiring manager who is. Documents written entirely for one of those readers fail with the other.
A deeply technical resume with no context loses the recruiter, who cannot tell whether your work was significant. A resume written in vague business language loses the manager, who wants to know exactly what you built and with what. The workable approach is a bullet that carries both: what you did in plain terms, with the specifics attached. "Rebuilt the settlement pipeline as event-driven services in Go, cutting end-of-day reconciliation from four hours to twenty minutes" satisfies both readers in one sentence.
20. Treating the document as finished
A resume written during a job search and then abandoned for four years is a resume that has forgotten most of what you did. By the time you next need it, the projects are hazy and the numbers are gone.
Update the master version every few months while you are still in the job, whenever something completes and while the figures are in front of you. It takes ten minutes at the time and saves an evening of reconstruction later. It is also useful for its own sake: a person who cannot fill in six months of achievements has usually learned something worth knowing about their current role.
A ten-minute final pass
- Cover everything but the top third of page one. Is your target job and your strongest evidence visible there?
- Read every bullet and mark any that describe a duty rather than a result. Rewrite them.
- Count your numbers. Under three across the whole document is too few.
- Check dates, tenses and punctuation for consistency.
- Check the company name and the file name.
- Run it through a parser to confirm nothing is being lost.
- Give it to someone who hires and ask what job they think you want.
None of this is difficult, and it is worth more than another twenty applications. If you would rather not manage the formatting side by hand, build the document in our free resume builder and spend your time on the bullets, which is where the decision is actually made.
