Advice provided by Jeannie Kim, Vice President Content, Zinnia Follow her on LinkedIn
As a hiring manager, and a manager of hiring managers, I’ve probably reviewed close to 1,000 resumes in my career. Here are the biggest mistakes I see people make over and over again (and what to do instead):
❌ Focusing on responsibilities rather than impact. If your title is “e-commerce editor,” someone reading your resume can probably guess at what your basic duties were—so don’t waste a lot of space listing them out.
✅ Emphasize the accomplishments you had in each role. What impact did you make to the team or the business? Did you increase traffic to your vertical by X%? Contribute to the highest-ever Black Friday/Cyber Monday revenue sitewide? Streamline the publishing process? Tweaking your bullet points to highlight impact will help you stand out from the crowd.
❌ Not tailoring your resume to the job you’re applying for. When I was hiring a Director of SEO Content at Policygenius, it was shocking how many resumes I got from very experienced editors that did not include the words “SEO” or “search” at all. They might have had the relevant experience, but how could I know that?
✅ Take the time to make sure your bullets match up to the job description. Don’t force the hiring manager or recruiter to guess at your qualifications; make it easy for them to see that you’re a great fit.
❌ Overstuffing your resume. I’m not strict about the one-page rule (though if you have less than 5 years of work experience, stick to one page!). But I once saw a resume where the person used four whole pages (!) to cover the last four years of their career. Unless you’re creating an academic CV, a resume is meant to be a synopsis of your career, with emphasis on the last 5-10 years—not an exhaustive accounting of everything you’ve ever done at work.
✅ Be ruthless about highlighting your biggest accomplishments in each role, and keep it to two pages or less. Once you’ve got 10-15 years of experience under your belt, your early career roles should start dropping off your resume altogether (let’s face it, they probably aren’t relevant anyway).
Bonus note: A big contributor to overlong resumes is summary statement bloat. If your summary statement is 3/4 of a page, that’s not a summary! Try for 4-5 lines—1/4 page at most—and put those big accomplishments under the relevant role instead.
I could go on at much greater length about each of these—which would you like to hear more about? And what are your favorite resume tips?
