Make your resume back up the story
Your resume is evidence for the story you just wrote. Most resumes fail in the same few ways. Here they are, each with its own link.
The resume is intertwined with the story work in step two. Do them together: the story tells you what the resume has to prove, and writing the resume tells you whether you can prove it.
Each mistake below has its own permanent link, so if someone sent you here from a comment on your resume, that’s why.
How long recruiters actually look at your resume#
A person skims it for five to ten seconds before deciding whether to read further. They’re looking for one thing: a reason to talk to you. Your job is to make that reason impossible to miss.
Gayle Laakmann McDowell, author of Cracking the PM Interview, says this is the thing most people haven’t internalized: nobody reads your resume, they skim it. It’s the real reason to keep it short, because a great accomplishment on page two simply goes unnoticed.
People are not reading your resume, they are skimming. You are looking for somebody saying yes after glancing for 10, 15, 20 seconds at your resume. ... When your resume is three pages, ... some great accomplishment might be on page two and somebody just doesn’t notice it.
That means your resume isn’t a record of everything you’ve done. It’s an argument, and it should read like one: what you’re for, then the proof.
Mistake: there’s no story#
The reader should finish your resume with a clear idea of who you are and what you’re good at, and the rest of the page should back it up.
The test: hand the top third of your resume to a stranger for ten seconds, then take it away. Can they say in one sentence what you’re for? If they say “some kind of manager?” or list three unrelated things, there’s no story.
Fixes:
- Lead with a one-line summary that matches the story from step two. Not a vague objective (“Seeking a challenging role…”), a claim: “Growth product manager. Four years taking fintech onboarding from leaky to compounding.”
- Order bullets within each role so the ones that support the story come first.
- Cut or shrink anything that pulls in a different direction, even if you’re proud of it.
“Growth product manager. Four years taking fintech onboarding from leaky to compounding.”
“Operations leader for fast-growing marketplaces. Ran supply planning across 40 cities through two years of 3x growth.”
“Enterprise account executive. Closes six-figure security deals with long, technical buying committees.”
Ethan Evans goes a step further and names the target role right at the top: “Senior product manager seeking director of product management opportunity.” He admits not everyone agrees, but his reasoning is hard to argue with. People stay vague because they’re afraid of ruling things out, and by not being specialized in anything, they end up the best candidate for nothing.
Say at the top of your resume what you want to do. ... I prefer to say senior product manager seeking director of product management opportunity. ... By not being specialized on anything, you’re actually not the best person for anything.
Mistake: two pages (should a resume be one page?)#
Should a resume be one page? Yes, for almost everyone, including people with 10 or 20 years of experience. Two pages is a bad sign. Early in your career you haven’t done enough to fill two. Later in your career, you’re supposed to show judgment about what matters and the ability to be concise, and a second page shows the opposite.
I’m two decades in and my resume is one page.
The exceptions are narrow: senior engineers and researchers with a long list of publications, patents or open-source work some readers expect to see, and countries where a long CV is the norm. If you’re not sure you’re an exception, you aren’t.
Mistake: listing duties instead of accomplishments#
“Responsible for the onboarding flow” tells the reader what was on your plate. It says nothing about whether you were any good.
Every bullet should answer: what changed because you were there?
Evans makes the hiring-side case. Nobody opens a role because they need more work done. They open it because a project is on fire or there’s a market to win, so your resume has to show you’ve solved that kind of problem before.
What work did you do? Sure, but what did it result in? Because results are what we look for in higher level people. We don’t want to hire someone to do work. We’re trying to hire someone to solve a problem.
Before: Responsible for managing the onboarding flow and coordinating with design and engineering.
After: Rebuilt onboarding with design and engineering; week-one retention rose from 31% to 44% in two quarters.
Speak simply. If a smart friend outside your industry couldn’t understand the bullet, rewrite it.
Mistake: the result is buried#
Readers skim the start of each bullet, so put the number or the outcome there, not at the end of a long sentence. The format for a resume bullet point: the result first, then how you did it, then any context the reader needs.
Buried: Partnered with sales leadership and RevOps to redesign territory planning and compensation, which ultimately led to a 22% increase in quota attainment.
Front-loaded: Raised quota attainment 22% by redesigning territory planning and comp with sales leadership.
Mistake: numbers without context#
A number on its own doesn’t tell the reader whether it’s impressive. Shobhit Chugh, a coach who has worked with more than a thousand product managers, gives the example: $10 million in new revenue is huge at a startup doing $20 million, and invisible at Google.
The second is the context of the impact. 10 million dollars of revenue might be awesome for a startup who had 20 million dollars. You’ve got a 50% increase. If you’re at Google, no one’s going to care at all at Google scale.
Add the denominator: “grew revenue 50% ($10M to $15M)” or “cut churn from 4.1% to 2.6% monthly.” If you can’t share exact figures, percentages and rough scale (“for a 200-person sales team”) still give the reader something to judge.
Mistake: claiming impact you can’t back up#
When you can’t honestly claim a big result, don’t inflate. Interviewers dig into resumes, and an inflated bullet becomes the worst ten minutes of your interview. Climb down the impact hierarchy instead:
- You drove an impressive result. You did something specific and it moved a number. Best case.
- Why what you did was impressive. The result was small or unmeasured, but the work was hard: a tight deadline, a tiny team, a messy legacy system.
- You were on an impressive team or product. You didn’t drive the result, but you were part of something that worked, and you can say what your part was.
- Scale and exposure. You worked around real competence and absorbed real processes. Running payroll for 8,000 people across 12 countries teaches you things running it for 20 doesn’t.
Level four is legitimate when it says what you did and what that environment required. It turns into name-dropping when it’s only the logo.
Name-drop: Member of the payments team at [famous fintech].
Legitimate: Ran month-end reconciliation for [famous fintech]‘s European payouts (€2B a month); built the close checklist the team still uses.
Mistake: leaving short jobs off your resume#
It’s tempting to leave off the job you held for seven months. Don’t. Lauren Ipsen, an executive recruiter, says hiding short stints is almost more of a red flag than including them. It happened, and the people you talk to will find out.
People will often, because they’re so afraid of that narrative, not include on their resume companies that they didn’t stay for a year. And in my personal opinion, that’s actually almost more of a red flag, because that did happen.
One short stint is normal: layoffs and pivots happen. A pattern is a real flag, and the answer is a clear one-line reason for each move, not omission. Be straight about dates and tell the story in the conversation.
Mistake: two columns, graphics and formatting that fight the reader#
Use one column, a plain layout and a standard font. Two-column resumes look tidy, but they’re harder to skim and often come out scrambled when software parses them. No skill bars, graphics, photos (in the US), icons or two-tone sidebars. Creative formatting makes a resume harder to skim and can garble the text when it’s parsed into an applicant tracking system.
Designers are a partial exception: your portfolio carries the visual argument, and the resume should still be easy to skim.
Mistake: the skills dump#
A block of 40 keywords (“Agile, Jira, Leadership, Excel, Stakeholder Management, SQL…”) tells the reader nothing, and the soft skills in it read as filler. Keep a short skills line only for hard, checkable things the role asks for: languages, tools, certifications. Show the rest through your bullets.
Mistake: long bullets and run-ons#
A bullet should be one line, two at most. If it’s three lines, it’s really two bullets or it has filler in it. Cut “successfully,” “various,” “in order to,” “helped to” and “utilized.”
Mistake: typos#
One typo makes a reader wonder what else you were careless about. Read it out loud, backwards if you need to. Have a friend read it. Run it through a spell checker and an AI, then read it again yourself, because both will miss things.
Mistake: education at the top#
After your first few years of work, what you’ve done matters more than where you studied. Put education at the bottom. Keep it at the top only if you’re a recent graduate or the degree is the qualification (a nursing license, a law degree for a legal role).
Do ATS systems reject resumes?#
My position: the robot that secretly rejects good resumes is mostly a myth, and worrying about it is a distraction.
Nickey Skarstad, a director of product at Duolingo, says it in four words: “It’s actually me.” She screens resumes herself, spends about 30 seconds on each, and gets thousands per role.
I actually am the person that’s reviewing resumes. People always are like, there’s a bot that does it. It’s actually me. I spend probably 30 seconds on a resume, maybe no more, because we will get thousands of resumes for an open role.
Most applicant tracking systems are databases and workflow tools. Recruiters use them to search, filter and skim. Where you do get auto-rejected, it’s usually from knockout questions you answered: work authorization, location, a required license. AI screening is spreading, but it’s looking for the same things a human recruiter is: a clear match between the role and your experience.
So do what helps humans and machines both:
- Use standard section headings (Experience, Education, Skills) and a text-based PDF or Word file.
- Use the job’s real language where it honestly describes your work. If they say “lifecycle marketing” and you did lifecycle marketing, call it that.
- Make your titles clear. If your official title was “Member of Technical Staff,” add what you actually were: “Member of Technical Staff (Backend Engineer).”
Don’t stuff keywords, and don’t paste the job description in white text. Recruiters see it the moment they open the file.
The specific questions people ask:
- Does ATS reject PDFs? No. A normal PDF exported from Word or Google Docs parses fine. A scanned image of your resume doesn’t, because there’s no text in it.
- Does ATS reject two-page resumes? Software doesn’t care about length. The human who skims it does, which is why one page still matters.
- Does ATS reject AI-generated resumes? It isn’t checking. The risk is that AI-written bullets all sound the same, and a human reader skims right past them. Use AI to edit, not to invent.
- Should you put a photo on your resume? In the US, no. It adds nothing a recruiter needs and can invite bias.
The real reason cold applications fail is volume, not robots. That’s why networking is how you actually apply.
Act as a busy recruiter who spends 10 seconds skimming each resume. I'm targeting this kind of role: [TARGET ROLE AND LEVEL]. My positioning story is: [YOUR TWO-SENTENCE STORY]. Here's my resume: [PASTE] 1. After 10 seconds on the top third only, say in one sentence what you think I'm for. Then say whether it matches my story. 2. List every bullet that describes duties instead of impact, and rewrite each with the result first. Where you'd need a number I haven't given, write [NUMBER?] instead of inventing one. 3. Flag any claim that sounds inflated or that an interviewer could easily poke holes in. 4. Tell me what to cut to fit on one page, starting with whatever doesn't support my story. 5. Point out typos, inconsistent formatting and filler words. Be blunt. Don't praise anything unless it's genuinely strong.
Tailoring comes later#
This is your base resume. You’ll tailor it for each company in about 30 minutes, as part of preparing for each conversation and application. That’s covered in step five.
- A stranger can say what you’re for after ten seconds on the top third.
- It’s one page, unless you’re one of the narrow exceptions.
- Every bullet starts with a result or a strong verb, and none describes duties alone.
- Every claim is one you can defend in detail in an interview.
- Someone other than you has proofread it.