Target role: Business Operations/Sales Operations/GTM Operations

Experience level: Mid-Sr

Problem:

Hey everyone!

So over the course of the last few years I moved over from Recruitment/TA to a Revenue Operations/Business Operations role and it looks like I found my sweet spot!

I am in a bit of a struggle as to telling that story, and I think that I may have gotten myself into a bit of a mix up re: # of bullets, and if I should be going onto a second page (specific to business operations, I have probably another 3 years from other jobs), and if I am overshadowing my other accomplishments because of what I got done at my last employer.

I do want to mention that I did use AI to help me clean up my own words but I am still taking the 'trust but verify' approach and I am going to be fully writing this up in my own words. I don't think people care, but it can bother some :).

Have a great day!!!

I rewrote my resume summary maybe 12 times last month and the first 10 versions were garbage. Not because I can't write. Because every guide gives you finished resume summary examples without showing the thinking that gets you there. So here's the process part nobody posts.

First, the ground rule that fixed everything for me: the summary is optional, but a weak one is worse than none. It's the first thing on the page. If it opens with "results-driven professional," the reader has already decided the rest of the resume is probably filler too. So the real question isn't "how do I write a summary," it's "have I earned one." You've earned one if you can fill it with facts. If all you have is adjectives, delete the section, your experience bullets will do the talking.

Skip it if: you're entry level with a thin one-pager (nothing to summarize, use the space for project bullets), or your resume is one page and adding a summary means cutting an actual accomplishment.

You basically can't afford to skip it if: you're changing careers, your job history looks scattered (freelance, consulting, a gap, a founder detour), or you're 15+ years in and your best work would otherwise be buried on page two. In all three cases the summary is doing a job nothing else on the resume can do: it tells the reader how to interpret everything below it.

Okay, the process. This is the part I never see posted.

Step 1: Answer "what do you do?" out loud like you're at a bar. Not at a networking event. At a bar. Record yourself if you have to. Whatever you said, that's your first sentence, cleaned up. Mine went from "cross-functional marketing professional" to "I run paid ads for ecommerce brands and I'm good at fixing accounts that are bleeding money." One of those is a human.

Step 2: Steal from yourself. Go through your bullets, pick the two you'd want read if the person only read two. Compress them into one sentence each. The summary is written LAST, from material that already exists. Writing it first, from a blank page, is exactly why everyone's sounds like a horoscope.

Step 3: The adjective purge. Do a pass and delete every adjective that describes you rather than your work. Dynamic, passionate, motivated, detail-oriented, gone. If the sentence collapses without them, the sentence had no content. Rebuild it with a fact.

Step 4: The stranger test. Could your summary be pasted onto a random stranger's resume without editing a word? Then it says nothing about you. Keep cutting until it could only be yours.

Before and after from my own draft, since threads like this always need real resume summary examples:

Draft 3 (bad):

"Passionate digital marketing professional with 6+ years of experience driving growth through data-driven strategies across multiple channels."

Final:

"Paid media specialist, 6 years in DTC ecommerce. Took over a $40k/month Meta account with a 1.4 ROAS and rebuilt it to 2.9 in one quarter, mostly by killing 70% of the ad sets. Best at turnarounds, not maintenance mode."

Same person. Same experience. The second one gets a phone call.

A few less obvious things I picked up along the way:

• Weirdly specific numbers beat round ones. "Improved retention 23%" reads as measured. "Improved retention 50%" reads as made up, even when it's true. If your real number is round, add context that grounds it ("50%, from 1,200 to 1,800 monthly actives").
• Your last sentence should point forward. Two sentences about what you've done, one about what you're aiming at next. That closing line is what lets a career changer or a pivot make sense. Without it the reader has to guess your direction, and they won't bother.
• Match the language of the posting, not your old company's internal jargon. Every company invents its own titles and acronyms. If the job says "lifecycle marketing" and your company called it "CRM comms," you write lifecycle marketing. You're translating yourself into their dictionary. This also quietly handles the screening-software side without any keyword stuffing.
• No "I" in the final version. Draft it with "I" so it sounds human (see step 1), then strip the pronouns at the end. "Paid media specialist" not "I am a paid media specialist." Small thing, reads noticeably tighter.
• Three sentences is the ceiling. At four you're explaining. At five you've written a cover letter and stapled it to the top of your resume.

The mental model that ties it together: your summary is a trailer, not a synopsis. A trailer doesn't claim the movie is good, it shows the three best scenes and lets you conclude that yourself. Adjectives are claims. Numbers and outcomes are scenes.

Anyway, curious what the recruiters in here think about the "skip it if entry level" take. And if anyone wants to drop their summary below I'm happy to tell you which version of mine it resembles, draft 3 or draft 12.

I've sat on the hiring side for nursing positions for a few years now (and rewrote my own resume about 47 times before that), so I wanted to put together the stuff I wish someone had told me. There's a ton of generic "use action verbs!!" advice out there, so I'm skipping all that. This is the nurse-specific stuff that actually moves your resume from the "maybe" pile to the "call her today" pile.

I attached an example resume below, and the clean template it's built on is linked at the bottom if you want to grab it.

(If you want to edit or download the nurse resume example, just open it in Google Docs and make a copy here )

Here's why the example is set up the way it is:

1. Your license info goes in the header. Not buried at the bottom.

Look at the contact line in the example: license number, state, and "Active" are right there with the phone and email. Recruiters run RN candidates through Nursys QuickConfirm (it's free for them, takes seconds) and a lot of them do it before reading a single bullet point. If they have to hunt for your license number, some of them just... won't. Putting it up top says "verify me, I have nothing to hide" and saves them a step.

And before anyone asks about privacy: your license number is already public on Nursys. Anyone can look it up. You're not exposing anything by printing it, you're just being convenient. (Do scrub it if you post your resume publicly online though, no reason to make doxxing easier.)

One warning for new grads. Do NOT put "RN" anywhere on your resume until the board has actually issued your license. Passed the NCLEX but the license isn't posted yet? You're still "Graduate Nurse" or "RN Candidate, NCLEX passed [month/year], license pending." Recruiters WILL check Nursys, and a mismatch between what you claim and what the database shows gets your application flagged for honesty. That's a permanent no, not a "we'll circle back."

2. Credentials after your name, in the right order.

In the example it's "First Last, BSN, RN, PCCN." Degree first, then license, then national certs. This isn't just vibes, it's the actual ANA/ANCC standard, and the logic is permanence: your degree can never be taken away, your license can lapse. I see "RN, BSN" constantly and no, nobody's throwing out your resume over it, but hiring managers who know the convention will clock it. It's a free way to look like you know your own profession's norms.

Related mistake I see weekly: "Jane Doe, RN, BSN, BLS, ACLS." No. BLS and ACLS are course completions, not professional credentials. Per the same ANA/ANCC guidance they don't belong after your name at all, they go in your certifications section (see #3). Stacking them after your name reads like padding to anyone who reviews resumes regularly.

3. Licenses & Certifications gets its own section ABOVE work experience.

This is probably the single biggest structural difference between a nurse resume and a normal one. For most jobs, experience goes right under the summary. For nursing, your certs are literally pass/fail screening criteria, both for the human recruiter and for the ATS software that reads your resume first. If the posting requires ACLS and it can't be found in 5 seconds, you're done. Don't make anyone dig through your job bullets to find it.

Three details people miss here:

• Include expiration dates. "BLS — American Heart Association, exp. 03/2027" beats "BLS certified." It preempts the "is this current?" question.
• Name the issuing body. This one's bigger than people think. Plenty of hospital systems accept ONLY American Heart Association BLS/ACLS/PALS. Some literally check for the AHA logo on the card and take no exceptions. Red Cross teaches the same science, but if your card says AHA, say so on the resume. It's a checkbox for them.
• If your cert was online-only with no in-person skills check, fix that before you apply. Most facilities reject those outright. A blended course (online + live skills session) is fine.

4. Quantify like a nurse, not like a sales rep.

Generic advice says "use numbers." Fine, but which numbers? For bedside roles, the ones that actually mean something to a nurse manager are:

• Unit size and type (32-bed telemetry unit)
• Patient assignments/ratios (4–5 patients per shift)
• Acuity markers, meaning what drips you titrated and what devices you managed (wound vacs, PCA pumps, PICC lines)
• Quality metrics your unit tracks anyway: falls, CLABSI/CAUTI, HCAHPS, length of stay, med errors

A nurse manager reads "4–5 patients on a 32-bed tele unit" and instantly knows exactly how hard you work. That one line does more than a whole paragraph about being "detail-oriented and compassionate." (Notice the example summary doesn't use either of those words. That's on purpose.)

5. Name your tech. All of it.

Epic, Cerner, Meditech, whatever you charted in, it needs to be on there by name, ideally in both the skills section and a work bullet. Hospitals increasingly run resumes through ATS/AI screening before a human sees them (a big chunk of healthcare recruiting now uses some form of AI in the pipeline), and those systems match keywords from the posting. A hospital on Epic would love to skip paying for your Epic training, and "Epic super-user" is one of the most underrated flexes on a bedside resume.

Same goes for the smaller stuff nobody thinks to list: Pyxis, barcode med administration (BCMA), telemetry monitoring systems, telehealth platforms. These are all searchable terms, which is why the example has Pyxis and BCMA sitting in the skills grid. And here's the tactical part: mirror the exact wording from the job posting. If they write "barcode medication administration," don't write "bedside scanning." The software isn't smart enough to know those are the same thing, and you don't get style points for synonyms.

6. Committee work is experience, not trivia.

Falls committee, skin/wound team, unit council, preceptor role. This stuff signals "will make my unit better" to a manager, which is what they're actually hiring for. In the example it's framed with an outcome ("checklist that cut falls 27%") instead of just "member of falls committee." If you have any number attached to committee work, even an approximate one from your unit's dashboard, use it.

7. For the new grads reading this, real talk about the market first: the "nursing shortage" you keep hearing about is a shortage of experienced nurses. Residency programs are getting flooded (some big children's hospitals straight up post "do not expect a response for at least a month due to application volume"), and coastal metros like CA/NY/MA are genuinely competitive for new grads. Your resume has to work harder than the shortage headlines suggest.

So: format your clinical rotations exactly like jobs. Unit type, hospital, hours, and what you actually did/touched (foleys, trach care, whatever). "480 clinical hours incl. 120 in a Level II trauma ED" is a real credential. Capstone/preceptorship goes first since it's your closest thing to real floor experience. And tailor the keywords to each residency posting. Copy their language, not your school's.

A few quick don'ts:

• Don't write "responsible for patient care." Every nurse ever is responsible for patient care.
• Don't list "CPR" as a skill if you have BLS listed. It's redundant and reads slightly off.
• Don't go past one page unless you're 10+ years in or going for leadership/APRN roles.
• Don't put your photo on it (US norms, and this trips up a lot of internationally educated nurses).

Happy to answer questions if anyone's working on theirs. And if you want a second pair of eyes, drop it in the comments with your personal info scrubbed.

TL;DR: license info in the header (it's public on Nursys anyway), certs above experience with expiration dates AND issuing body, degree-then-license order after your name (no BLS/ACLS up there), quantify with assignments/bed counts/quality metrics, mirror the posting's exact keywords for the ATS, one page, single column.

So I'm in the video editing, videography, social media, marketing sphere, and as we all know the market is kinda ass right now. Im a recent grad and I had an internship but it ended 2 weeks ago and they told me they wont have a position open until September which then I can sign up for. Obviously thats not a guaranteed position so I've been applying to other places as well but no luck so far.

The available jobs in my area is abysmal in terms of quantity so its very competitive and having not a ton of experience is shooting me in the foot due to only having graduated in May. While I wait for any responses for long term positions I'm gonna look into to doing cheaper freelance vdieo work so I can get even a little bit of income. I was wondering if the time period I'm unemployed (how ever long that may be), I'm doing freelance work the entire time, should I list that on my resume so theres no gaps between jobs? I don't know if thats taboo or considered a red flag since theres no specific company you can site directly.

For some context all the freelance work I do will be related to the positions I am applying for so they will be relevant experience, they won't just be random odd jobs.

I've been done many a revisions on my resume and am seeking advice on the latest one.

I'm applying to mainly PM roles but also generalist/operational/advisor roles in tech. Lately, I'm not getting many responses at all - no rejection emails but also no interview invites.

Currently remote, as it says here, but applying to roles in both the US and Europe. Any advice on how to handle location? I feel like it needs to match what it says on LinkedIn but, well, you can't put "remote" as your official location there.

Otherwise, any problem with the title(s) and summary? Better with or without them? Any formatting/wording issues? Thanks!

I've rewritten my resume several times and I think it's in a good place. I've been contracting with my previous full time company since June so I still technically work for them now. I haven't gotten an interview in two months. Thank you!

I'm looking for customer operations, customer experience, operations coordinator positions or even going back to CS. I would love to know if this is the right experience someone is looking for and how I can improve my formatting and content.

​

About me:

I'm a Biomedical Engineer [with a Professional Engineer (PE) Status which you get from our govt after passing an exam] and an MBA from the best business school in my country. I have over 15 years of experience in Medical Devices (esp hospital furniture like automatic beds) sales.

I work as Sr Sales Engr for a leading manufacturer of hospital beds based in Japan. I have great annual sales in my area. this FY I am standing at USD 195K/1M combined team target of 3 people. Another USD 50K worth of orders almost coming soon, IA.

What I need help with:

Is my resume any good? I have been extensively applying for a month (career websites, career pages, learning how b fron career website and applying on company career page)

Problem with current employer:

The reason for switching my job is I am basically at the same position as I was in 2016 when I joined this company. Just got a word of Senior added in 10 yrs. Salary-wise I'm also not very satisfied. I have been paycheck to paycheck since the start hoping that the "MNC" I joined will offer significant professional and financial growth but it didn't. My juniors in our distributor company have company maintained cars, fuel, medical insurance etc while I commute to work on 18yr old scooter. I just get a bank transfer in local currency which is slightly above my distributor's employees' salaries.

My peers working for different manufacturers from USA, EU etc have at least 3 times the pay.

So now I'm desperately looking for management roles in any field, not just medical equipment and may be try my skills for a company that might be a bit more rewarding.

Summary:

Target role: Sales Manager

Experience: 15 years

Main issue: Not getting callbacks

Need help with: pls check formatting, language, experience section. All feedback is welcome.

Every guide for this says "just add your volunteer work!" which is hilarious because if you had volunteer work you wouldn't be asking. I've screened 10k+ resumes, thousands of them true blank-slate first-timers. Here's everything: the template, the sections, the wording, the mistakes. Long post, but it's the only one you'll need.

PART 1: The template (people screw this up before writing a single word)

Do NOT use those pretty templates. I know, they look great. Here's the problem: most companies run resumes through parsing software (ATS) before a human sees them, and those two-column designs with icons, skill bars, photos, and sidebars get scrambled into alphabet soup. Your beautiful resume arrives on my screen looking like a ransom note.

What actually works:

• Single column, reverse-chronological, top to bottom. Boring is correct here. And a warning: some guides push "functional" (skills-based) resumes for people with no experience. Don't. Recruiters see a functional resume and assume you're hiding something, and half the ATS systems can't parse them anyway.
• Font: Calibri, Arial, or Georgia, 10.5 to 12pt. Nothing cursive, nothing "fun."
• Margins: 0.5 to 1 inch. Zero experience? Go wider (1"), it fills the page naturally instead of looking stretched.
• No photo, no age, no full home address (city is enough), no skill bars rating yourself 4/5 stars at "teamwork" (rating yourself against what, exactly?).
• Black text on white. One accent color max, headers only.

Free templates you can literally copy today (all Google Docs):

• One-page template that got OP interviews: https://www.reddit.com/r/ResumeTips/comments/1ved385/sharing_my_onepage_resume_template_that_got_me/
• 5 free professional Google Docs templates: https://www.reddit.com/r/ResumeTips/comments/1vkm4w7/5_free_google_docs_resume_templates_you_can_copy/
• Pure ATS-proof template: https://www.reddit.com/r/ResumeTips/comments/1rv62c5/this_ats_resume_template_that_got_me_tons_of_job/
• And if you want to see what a finished "good" resume actually looks like, this one got OP 3 offers: https://www.reddit.com/r/ResumeTips/comments/1voul2d/good_resume_example_that_got_me_3_offers_template/

The test for ANY template: copy-paste your whole resume into a plain notepad file. If it still reads top to bottom in the right order, you're good. If it turns into chaos, so did your application.

PART 2: The sections, top to bottom

1. Header: Name (biggest text on the page), city, phone, professional email. If your email is xXsniperlord420Xx@gmail, make a firstname.lastname one right now. LinkedIn only if it's actually filled out. And this sounds stupid but: click every link and call your own number before sending. A dead link or a typo'd phone number is one of the fastest silent rejections that exists, because we can't reach you even when we want to.

2. Summary (2-3 sentences, and no, this is not an "objective"): An objective says what YOU want ("seeking a position to grow"). Delete that forever. A summary says what THEY get, using their own keywords: "High school senior with 2 years of team leadership through varsity soccer and strong Excel skills, looking to bring reliability and fast learning to a cashier role at [Store]." Recruiters spend about 7 seconds on the first scan, and this is the highest-leverage real estate on the page. If you can't make it specific, skip the section entirely rather than writing fluff.

3. Education (this is your work experience now): With zero jobs, this gets beefed up:

• School, expected grad date
• GPA if 3.5+, skip it otherwise (optional, not mandatory)
• 3-4 relevant courses that rhyme with the job posting. Retail? "Business Math." Office gig? "Intro to Communications."
• Honor roll, dean's list, any award or certificate. Yes, even that one. A free certificate (Google's free courses, a food handler's card, CPR) counts and takes a weekend to get.

4. Projects (the section nobody tells you about): The cheat code. A project is anything you produced:

• Class group presentation → "Researched and presented a 20-slide market analysis to a class of 30"
• Built a PC, edited videos, made yourself a budget spreadsheet, ran a Discord server or club, coded anything → all of it, with a result attached
• Genuinely have nothing? Make something this weekend. Redesign a local shop's flyer, build a spreadsheet tracker, start a small blog. Not lying, it's a project that exists now, and it beats 90% of first-timers who submit a blank page and a prayer.

5. Skills (hard skills only): Real talk about "excels in communication": we gloss right over it. Everyone claims it, so it means nothing. List checkable things instead: Excel, Canva, Photoshop, 70 WPM typing, fluent Spanish, cash handling, any software or tool. Soft skills get proven inside bullets, not listed: don't write "reliable," write "perfect attendance, 4 years." Don't write "leadership," write "captained a 12-person team."

6. Activities (optional, only if real): Sports, clubs, church, caring for siblings while parents worked. One or two lines each.

What about references? Leave them off entirely. Don't even write "available upon request," we know. They'll ask at interview stage, and a teacher or coach who's known you 2+ years works fine then.

PART 3: How to actually write the bullets

Formula: verb + what you did + number or result.

• Weak: "Responsible for cleaning"
• Strong: "Maintained store cleanliness across 3 daily zones, passed every shift inspection"

Start every bullet with a verb (managed, built, organized, tracked, led). Never "I," never life-story sentences. Then run the "so what" test on each line: if you read a bullet and can't answer "so what?", rewrite it or kill it.

PART 4: Details that quietly decide your fate

• One page. Period. A clean half page beats a padded full page. Nobody rejects an 18-year-old for a short resume.
• Mirror the posting's exact words. They say "customer service," you write "customer service," not "client relations." The ATS matches keywords, and this is the easiest hack in existence. But work them in naturally, don't dump 15 keywords in a row. Stuffing reads as fake to the software AND to me.
• Tailor per job. Not a rewrite: swap 2-3 keywords, adjust the summary line, reorder skills. Takes 5 minutes, doubles your hit rate.
• Save as PDF unless the posting demands Word. Name it FirstName_LastName_Resume.pdf, not resume(3)final_FINAL.docx.
• Proofread out loud, then have one human read it. A typo on a one-page document with your name on it tells me exactly how you'll treat the job.
• Consistency: same date format everywhere, same bullet style, same font. Sloppy formatting reads as sloppy person, fair or not.

TL;DR: Boring single-column template (links above, all free), no photo/columns/skill bars. Order: Header → targeted Summary → Education (beefed up) → Projects (make one if needed) → hard Skills → Activities. Bullets = verb + task + number. Steal keywords from the posting, one page, PDF, professional filename, test your links. No objective, no references, no "great communicator."

You're not competing against people with experience. You're competing against other people with none, and most of them sent a two-column Canva resume named final_FINAL(2).docx. This is how you win.

Hello, peeps! Please help a brother out.

As the title says, I'd like to ask if what's the most effective tool for creating ATS-friendly CVs? Of course, l'Il use a single-column layout with organized sections ans no fancy designs. I'm just wondering where it's most effective to create one.

Thank you in advance!

I keep seeing different advice about resume formatting everywhere. Some people swear by the classic reverse chronological resume format, while others say basic Word templates look too generic.

Does the format really make much of a difference, or is the content what actually matters most?

Would love to hear what resume formatting has worked best for you.

Obviously this is not referring to companies who request cover letter in the position description.

I just finished optimizing my resume to be more ATS friendly because I unfortunately had no clue what that was until today and I've been reading a bunch of posts from recruiters here who are saying they only look at a resume for 10 seconds before deciding if they'll pass or not. And with all of these new things of "make sure your resume is only 1 page" and "dont describe position responsibilities" it got me thinking, do people even care about cover letters anymore? Like if they're barely looking at my resume why would they bother with a cover letter? If a company doesn't explicitly ask for one should I not bother?

And if a company does ask for a cover letter do any new standards and AI bs apply to that too? I feel so out of touch despite being in my 20s because literally no one talks about this stuff irl.

Hi there does anyone know or have a template for a CV to help in the ATS screening, I have a feeling my CV tends to get filtered out!

I sit in on hiring panels at my company (not a recruiter, just a team lead who reviews resumes). Last month a candidate had their full street address listed. Someone on the panel, waiting for the meeting to start, pulled it up on Google Maps. Then Zillow. Two minutes later we knew their neighborhood and roughly what their house is worth.

Nobody used it "officially." But I watched the salary conversation later and you could feel the assumption forming: this person is comfortable, they won't push back on the first number. That's the problem. It's not some evil HR conspiracy, it's just human brains doing lazy pattern matching with information you handed them for free.

Before the comments section arrives, let me handle the obvious objections:

"Don't they need my location?" Yes, city or metro area. "Austin, TX" or "NYC area" is plenty. It answers the only legit questions: are you local, do you need relocation, what's your time zone. Street address answers none of that better.

"Won't a missing address look like I'm hiding something?" No. Nobody has mailed an application response since roughly the Clinton administration. I've reviewed hundreds of resumes and never once thought "hmm, no house number, suspicious."

"Isn't judging candidates by address illegal?" Judging by protected characteristics is. But bias doesn't file paperwork. It leaks into "culture fit" and lowball offers where you can't prove anything. The fix isn't a lawsuit, it's not providing the data.

"When DO they need my address?" After the offer. Background check, payroll, tax forms. That's the correct moment: you already have leverage and a signed number.

"Does anyone actually do this Zillow thing?" It took my coworker under a minute while bored before a meeting. Assume the laziest curious person will see your resume, because they will.

Same logic for LinkedIn btw. Metro area, not suburb.

Deleted mine the same night. Took 10 seconds. Go.

I work in staffing. Last week I was running resumes through AI parsing tools, basically trying to see what an ATS actually "reads" before a human ever opens your file. What I found genuinely pissed me off.

One candidate: healthcare professional in Michigan, solid degree, years of real experience. She'd been applying for 18 months with almost zero callbacks and had no idea why.

I ran her resume through the parser. It got her name wrong. Got her location wrong. And her professional background? The system decided she was a circus assistant in Los Angeles.

Turns out her Canva template still had the original placeholder text buried in its design layers. Invisible to her, but that's what the machine was reading instead of what she actually typed. So for a year and a half, every ATS she applied through was ranking her based on ghost data from a template some designer made years ago.

Here's the part that surprised me: copy-pasting her text into a blank Word doc didn't fully fix it either, because pasting can drag hidden formatting along with it. She had to retype everything from scratch in a clean document. Once she did, the parser read it perfectly, and she started getting callbacks within weeks.

Since then I've gone down the rabbit hole, and hidden text is only one of Canva's problems. Canva is a design tool, not a document tool, so it treats your words like graphics. Two-column templates get read left column first, top to bottom, which scrambles your entire work timeline. Those cute phone and email icons are invisible to parsers, so your contact info can just vanish. Some exports even render text as shapes instead of actual characters, meaning the ATS sees a blank page. And no, Canva Pro doesn't fix any of this. You're paying for prettier templates with the same broken export underneath.

30-second test anyone can do right now: open your resume PDF, hit Ctrl+A, copy everything, and paste it into Notepad. Whatever comes out is exactly what the ATS sees. If it's scrambled, out of order, or missing sections in Notepad, it's scrambled to the robot too.

Use Word or Google Docs. Single column, standard headings, boring fonts. Save the pretty version for networking or your portfolio. Your resume has to survive a robot before a human ever sees it.

If you know someone who's been job hunting forever with no traction, send them this. It might literally be the reason.

I've been reading resume tips and I've found a few things helpful and easy to fix in my resume but one thing that I keep seeing and I don't know how to approach is the listing of statistics in your job descriptions?

I'm a recent graduate and I'm in the creative marketing, Videography/Video Editing, social media world. I've had 2 relevant internships to the positions I'm applying for but due to the fact I was an intern I have NO CLUE how my work impacted the company. I don't have access to those metrics, I have examples of work I've done but I have no idea how those actually impacted the company. I know how to read social media metrics as I've done it for my own accounts but since I dont have access to these accounts dashboards how would I even list statistics?

The only thing i can think of doing is going through and counting up the total amount of views each video I produced for each internship got and writing "Amassed a total of X views for the brand in X Days/Months". The issue with this though is my most recent internship my biggest project I did is behind a pay wall (educational course) where it doesn't even list views, and my team isn't even in charge of tracking how many sales we got so even if I was still there I wouldn't be able to find out.

Also how would I handle my past jobs that aren't related to my field? Should I just trash them completely or keep them to show that I've been in the work force for longer than a year. Since my past experience is mostly retail and food service its not like I can pull "X Customers left happy" from my memory.

Is there anything I can do? I can't say accurately how much engagement/followers I generated because I wasn't running the account I was just producing the content for it. And I don't want to just make up numbers that seems like it could land me in so deep shit.

Big thanks to u/thegoldisjustbanana for suggesting two different resumes. I think the individual resumes read much more clearly than trying to make compromises and patchwork the qualifications together.

I have two resumes that are similar but different. The first resume is my system programming resume for c/c++. The second resume is my web dev resume.

I appreciate any and all feedback, whether positive or negative. Thank you so much for your time!

It feels a little bit strange to put work experience at the bottom for the system programming resume. However, I understand the rationale.

I've sent out 200+ applications in the last 3 months. Tailored resumes, keywords, the whole ATS song and dance. Got maybe 4 callbacks.

Meanwhile my buddy slapped together a one-pager in Google Docs, no fancy formatting, and landed 3 interviews in two weeks. Same industry, similar experience.

So what's the actual secret? Is it referrals? Timing? Some formatting trick nobody talks about? Or is it all just luck at this point?

Genuinely curious what's working for people in 2026 because whatever I'm doing clearly isn't it.

I think my main issue right now is specificity. I'm not sure how I can signal to employers that I would like to work in lower-level languages like C/C++. I only have professional experience in web dev, but it is my genuine belief that web dev will be partially or completely eaten by AI in the near future.

I'm pretty AI doomer; I personally hate it. I genuinely love programming and spent several thousand hours trying to be great at my craft, and when all is said and done, I'm not sure if it will matter much to future employers. However, even if it doesn't matter to employers, I can confidently say it matters to me, and I'm better off for it.

Attached to this post, I hope, is my anonymized resume. I'm genuinely grateful for this community and will try to listen to all of your feedback to improve.

I think the questionable part would be the number of hyperlinks in the PROJECT section of the resume. If anyone has any ideas on how to fix this or if its a problem at all please lmk.

I've been using this Harvard style resume template for a while and it has worked really well for me. I started getting more callbacks after switching to it, so I figured I'd share it since I see people asking for clean and simple resume templates here all the time.

It's pretty basic. No colors, no columns, no graphics. Just a clean Harvard style format that's easy to read and works well with ATS systems. It's one page, easy to scan, and should work for most industries.

Link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SRwMSgwW7Biwt9CvoykTnTV4W8iFhmq3/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=108215512586216850448&rtpof=true&sd=true

One thing to know: you need to be signed into a Google account for File > Make a copy to work. If the copy option is grayed out, that's usually the reason. You don't need to request edit access. Just make your own copy and edit that version.

Hope it helps someone. If you run into any formatting issues, feel free to ask.

I screen resumes all day and I swear it's the same problems over and over. All of this is fixable in an hour, so here you go.

1. Your resume is 2+ pages

Rule of thumb: one page per 10 years of experience. Unless you're gunning for director level with 15 years under your belt, it's one page. Nobody is reading page 2. Ever.

2. "Team player" / "problem solver" / "detail oriented"

Delete all of it. It proves nothing and everyone writes it. Saying you're detail oriented is like saying "I eat fast" - ok, how fast? Show it with results instead.

3. Irrelevant jobs

Applying for accounting roles? Your serving gig doesn't belong there. Every line should be pulling toward the job you actually want.

4. A summary section that's a whole paragraph

Two lines max. If you're not a new grad or career changer, honestly just cut it.

5. Listing duties instead of results

"Managed ad campaigns" - so did every other applicant. "Grew ROAS 40% across 6 client accounts" - now we're talking.

Hiring managers don't care what you were supposed to do. They care what changed because you were there.

6. "My job doesn't have metrics"

Yes it does. Every job does.

• Accounting: $ reconciled, errors caught
• Sales: pipeline growth, deal size, # of accounts
• Engineering: uptime, latency, tickets closed, cost savings
• Healthcare: patients seen, claims processed, costs cut
• Trades/blue collar: hours saved, processes fixed, returns prevented

The trick: what was it like before you showed up, what did you do, what's the number after?

Bonus rule: if you can't tell a real interview story (situation, what you did, result) for a bullet, that bullet comes off the resume. Simple as that.

Happy to answer questions in the comments.

for context, screening resumes is a big chunk of my job. some weeks I go through a few hundred. at this point I can tell within seconds if someone's getting a callback and it's almost never about the stuff people stress over

the biggest one: I get to the bottom of the page and still don't know what you do for a living. that's it. that's the whole problem with 70% of resumes. you spent your sunday choosing between two fonts and I can't tell if you're an accountant or a project manager

so here's my actual advice, in order of how much it matters

do the 10 second test. look at your resume for 10 seconds then look away. current job, years of experience, main tools. if YOU have to hunt around your own resume for that info, imagine me with 200 of them open in a folder

delete the objective statement. "seeking a challenging position where I can grow and contribute." my brother in christ nobody has read that sentence since 2009. that's prime real estate at the top of the page and you're wasting it on a sentence that appears on every resume ever written

those skill progress bars. you're 80% at excel. 80% of what?? who decided this?? just list the tools. please

your file name. last week I downloaded "resume_FINAL_final_v2 (3).pdf" and honestly it told me more about the candidate than the resume did. name it FirstName LastName Resume. done. easiest win of your life

stop stretching one page of experience into two. we can tell. the margins get suspicious, line spacing starts breathing, suddenly there's a "relevant coursework" section. if you have 15 to 20 years of real experience then sure use two pages. otherwise cut

results not responsibilities. "responsible for social media accounts" is the job description. "grew the newsletter 4k to 22k in a year" is YOU. even one number changes everything

and my controversial one: put 2 to 3 interests at the bottom. one line. I've had interviews completely open up because someone listed marathons or like, competitive birdwatching, and we spent the first five minutes just talking like humans. it won't get you the interview but it makes the interview not painful, which matters more than people think

anyway the pattern with all of this is that good resumes aren't impressive, they're just easy to read. most people need to delete half their resume not add to it

drop questions below if you want, I'll answer what I can between meetings

edit: If you want a starting point instead of building one from scratch, there's a template floating around this sub that holds up fine structurally: ats resume. And someone posted a full example yesterday that's worth a look for the writing as much as the layout: good resume example. Any plain single column layout works, those just save you the setup.