Your resume is probably not the problem

A decade of hiring taught me something that surprises nearly everyone who hears it: almost nobody who applies for a job is under-qualified for it. They are under-described.

These two problems look identical from the outside and behave nothing alike. An under-qualified applicant needs more skills. An under-described applicant needs better sentences. The second one is far more common, and it is fixable in an afternoon.

The duty list is the problem

Here is what most resumes are, structurally: a list of what you were responsible for. “Responsible for customer onboarding.” “Managed a team of four.” “Supported the Q3 reporting cycle.”

That is not a description of your work. That is a description of your job description. Anyone who has held a vaguely similar job could put their name against it, which is exactly why it disappears.

What a hiring manager is scanning for, usually without consciously knowing it, is evidence. What changed? By how much? Because of a decision you made?

Compare:

Managed a team of four.

Rebuilt the support rota across three time zones after two resignations in the same quarter. Response time went from nine hours to under two, and we stopped losing on-call weekends.

The second version is not a better-written sentence. It is a different claim entirely — one that can be checked, argued with, and believed.

A simple exercise

Take the three most important things on your resume. For each one, finish this sentence out loud, in plain language, as if you were telling a friend what you did:

“The thing I’m most glad I did was…”

Whatever comes out is usually better than what is currently on the page. Then add the number, if you know it. Most people know the number. They just never thought it belonged in the document.

If you genuinely do not know the number, go and find it. Ask the person who consumed your work. Count the thing. Roughly a third of the time the honest answer is “I have no idea, and I should have tracked that” — which is itself worth knowing.

What this is not

This is not an argument for making your resume extravagant. Nobody is impressed by adjectives. “Dynamic professional with a passion for synergy” tells a reader nothing they can use, and it actively costs you, because it signals that you are filling space.

Specificity is not embellishment. Inflating a number is a serious problem — do not do it, and if you are ever unsure where a figure came from, leave it out. But describing a real result accurately is simply saying what happened.

And if it still does not work

Sometimes the resume is genuinely fine and the problem is elsewhere: a narrow search, a mismatch between the title you use and the title the ad uses, a market that has no roles in it this quarter. That happens, and no amount of rewriting fixes it.

If you rewrite properly and the response rate does not move, come and talk to me before you spend another month on it. We can usually tell within one session whether the document is the problem or the search is.

If you would rather start with the document itself, the Resume Building package is a flat fee and takes about ten days. But try the sentence exercise first. It is genuinely free, and more than half the people who do it never need to book.