Career advice

Resumes

3 resume mistakes hiring managers complain about most

By Jon King, recruiter and founder of Role Rewritten

I talk with hiring managers every week, and when the conversation turns to resumes, the same three complaints come up again and again. None of them are about experience. They're about how the resume looks and reads.

That's good news, because all three are easy to fix.

1. A layout that fights the reader

A hiring manager's first look at your resume lasts about 10 seconds. In that time, they want to find your current title, how big your job is, and one or two results. A layout that makes that hard gets set aside, even when the experience behind it is strong.

The usual problems:

• Dense paragraphs instead of short bullets
• Font so small it needs zooming, often to squeeze everything onto one page
• Dates and job titles scattered in different places for each job
• Graphics, skill bars, and color blocks competing with the words
• Three or more pages for a 15-year career

The fix: use clear section headings, put every job in the same format (title, company, dates in the same spot every time), keep bullets to one or two lines, and leave white space. For most experienced professionals, two pages is plenty. And keep a plain, single-column version for online applications, where hiring software has to read it before a person does.

2. Typos and grammar mistakes

This is the complaint I hear with the most frustration. A typo tells a hiring manager you didn't check your own work, and it hits hardest when the same resume claims "strong attention to detail."

The mistakes I see most often aren't the ones spell check catches:

• "Manger" instead of "manager." Both are real words, so spell check lets it through.
• A company's name spelled wrong, including former employers
• Tenses that switch back and forth inside the same job
• Dates written three different ways ("Jan 2019," "01/2020," "2021")

The fix: read your resume out loud, slowly. Then read it from the bottom up, one line at a time, which stops your brain from filling in what it expects to see. Check every company, school, and certification name against the official website. Then have one other person read it. A fresh set of eyes catches what you've stopped seeing.

3. A photo

For jobs in the U.S., leave the photo off. Many employers prefer resumes without them to avoid any appearance of bias in hiring, and some screen them out. A photo also takes up space you need for results, and it can confuse hiring software.

There are exceptions. Acting and modeling are the obvious ones, and resumes in some other countries routinely include a photo. But for a U.S. operations, sales, finance, or leadership role, a photo hurts more than it helps.

The fix: remove it, and put a good, professional photo on your LinkedIn profile instead. That's where hiring managers expect to see your face, and a profile with a photo gets far more attention than one without.

The common thread

All three mistakes make the hiring manager work harder to see what you've done. Your resume's only job is to make that easy. Clean layout, zero typos, no distractions, and your results right where they look first.