Common Resume Mistakes
Most resume advice lists mistakes without ranking them, which leaves people fixing typography while a broken contact field quietly deletes their applications. The errors below are ordered by how much damage they do.
The top three are all mechanical. That is worth sitting with: the most expensive resume problems are usually not about writing at all, and they are the cheapest ones to fix.
The expensive ones
The first four are invisible from your side. You send applications, nothing comes back, and there is no feedback distinguishing "not selected" from "never arrived" — which is why testing the file mechanically matters more than any amount of rewriting.
| Mistake | What it costs | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Contact details in the header/footer | The whole application — no phone number parsed | Put them in the document body |
| Image-based or flattened PDF | Rejected as blank | Check text is selectable |
| Multi-column template | Garbled parse; skills merged into titles | Single column |
| Wrong or dead phone/email | Silence you cannot diagnose | Send yourself a test |
| Same resume to everything | Low response rate across the board | Fifteen-minute tailoring pass |
| Duties instead of results | Reads as anyone in the role | Add numbers to the top bullets |
The ones that lose the human read
None of these is fatal individually. Together they produce a document that is not wrong anywhere and not compelling anywhere either, which is the most common condition of a resume that quietly underperforms.
- Opening with a generic summary — four lines of stock phrasing at the top of the page sets the tone for everything under it.
- Bullets that all begin the same way, which makes the second and third invisible.
- A skills section listing basic office software, which signals a misunderstanding of what counts.
- "Responsible for" as the default construction, which describes a job description rather than a person.
- Three-line bullets, which get skimmed rather than read.
- An interests section added for volume, with no bearing on anything.
The ones that end things later
Inflated titles, stretched dates and unfinished degrees presented as complete all survive the application and fail at verification — sometimes after an offer, occasionally after a start date. The consequence is not a lost application but a withdrawn offer or a dismissal.
Precise invented numbers belong here too. They pass a screen and collapse in an interview with anyone who knows the domain, and the collapse discredits the rest of the document.
The rule that avoids all of it: every claim on a resume should be one you would be comfortable having checked by someone with access to the records. That is a lower bar than it sounds and it excludes exactly the right things.
The small ones that still register
Mixed tense within a role, inconsistent date formats, two different bullet characters, an unprofessional email address, and a file named `resume-final-v3`. Individually trivial; collectively they read as carelessness, which is a real signal for any role where care is part of the work.
Spelling errors are worth a separate mention because spellcheck does not catch the common ones — "manger" for "manager" is a correctly spelled word and appears on a remarkable number of resumes.
The reliable catch is reading it aloud, backwards by section, or having someone else read it. Your own eye supplies what should be there rather than what is.
Mistakes that are not actually mistakes
- A two-page resume, when there are two pages of relevant material.
- A gap of a few months, which most readers do not register.
- No summary section — entirely normal.
- Leaving off an old job that has no bearing, provided the dates are not misrepresented.
- A non-linear career, which is now common enough to be unremarkable.
- Applying without meeting every listed requirement, since postings describe an ideal rather than a threshold.
The pre-send checklist
Five minutes, every time. Open the PDF and try to select text. Copy the whole document into a plain text editor and check the order makes sense. Confirm the phone number and email by sending yourself a test message.
Then read the summary against the posting and ask whether it speaks to what the posting put first, check the first bullet of each role is the most relevant one, and confirm the file is named after you.
Finally, open it on a phone. A layout that breaks on a small screen is common, and a large share of first reads now happen there.
None of this is a rewrite. It is five minutes of mechanical checking on a document you have already finished, and it catches the class of failure that produces silence rather than rejection — which is the class you would otherwise never learn about.
Frequently asked questions
Mechanically, contact details placed in a document header or footer — some parsers ignore those regions entirely, producing a candidate record with no phone number. Editorially, listing duties instead of results.
Check the mechanics before rewriting anything: text selectable in the PDF, contact details in the body rather than a header, single-column layout, and a phone and email you have actually tested. Those failures are invisible from your side.
Individually rarely; collectively yes. Mixed tense, inconsistent dates and a stray misspelling read as carelessness, which is a genuine signal for any role where care is part of the work. Note that spellcheck misses "manger" for "manager".
Not when there are two pages of relevant material. It is a mistake when the second page exists because the margins were widened and an interests section was added.