My day job is resume parsing, the same kind of text extraction applicant tracking systems run on every application, and I see the raw output that candidates never get to see. Not posting any link, the rules here are clear and I agree with them. Posting the data because I think it is useful and I have not seen it anywhere else.

Last 17 days, 3,835 resumes. 81 percent had at least one thing that damages them in parsing. These were the most common, in order.

1. Skills section flattened into one blob, 41 percent. Skills laid out in a table or grid come out as "PythonSQLTableauExcel" with no separators. A recruiter searching for SQL will not find it. Fix: one plain line, items separated by commas or bullets, no table.

2. Name not detected, 26 percent. The parser could not work out which words were the candidate's name. Usually the name is in a header region, a text box, an image, or split across styled lines. Fix: name as plain text on the very first line of the body, nothing above it.

3. Em dashes, 19 percent. The long dash that Word auto inserts. Several parsers read it as a random character or drop the text either side. Fix: use a normal hyphen.

4. Icon bullets, 18 percent. Arrows, checkmarks, custom glyphs from templates. They come through as garbage characters at the start of every line. Fix: the standard round bullet.

5. Two column layout, 11 percent. This one is the worst when it hits. The sidebar gets read in the middle of your work history, so a skill list lands inside a job and dates attach to the wrong role. Fix: single column, always.

6. Ambiguous dates, 9 percent. "2019-21", "Summer 2022", dates in a different column from the job. Fix: Mon YYYY to Mon YYYY on the same line as the title.

7. Smart quotes, 8 percent. Curly quotes from Word. Mostly harmless but some older parsers mangle them. Fix: straight quotes, or just avoid quotes.

8. Name merged with the next line, 8 percent. "MUHAMMAD TANZEELHAYDER" style, because the name and headline were in a text box that lost its spacing. Fix: same as number 2.

9. Missing section headers, 8 percent. Creative headings like "Where I have been" instead of Experience. The parser cannot classify the section. Fix: boring headings. Experience, Education, Skills.

One more that does not show in the list because those files fail before they can be scored. Roughly one upload in ten is a scanned image or a photo of a resume. The text layer is empty, so the system receives nothing at all. Five second check: open your PDF and try to select the text with your cursor. If it will not highlight, you have a picture, not a resume.

What I would take from this. The top four problems are all template decisions, not content decisions. People spend hours on wording and lose the application to a skills grid they added in thirty seconds. Single column, plain text, standard headings, normal bullets, hyphens not dashes, export straight from Word. That is the whole list.

Happy to answer questions on any of these.

Edit: a few people asked whether the numbers are real. They come from a live counter that updates with every file parsed, not from memory. As of tonight it reads 3,951 files, 82 percent with at least one issue. Happy to explain how each one is tallied if anyone wants the detail.

A girl I work with recently got laid off and she was willing to share and discuss her salary with the other 2 of us on the team. We all have the same job. She was getting paid $67/hr ($12 more than me) and she can barely work a basic Excel function. I started thinking, I wonder if this girl is gassing up her experience on her resume so I went on LinkedIn to check. She lists this past role as a "Senior Data Analyst & Product Owner" - we are just data analysts and her functional skills are marginally above beginner level. All past data analyst roles are listed as Senior Analyst, which I can tell now that's a lie. Lists her degree as Clinical Psychology - only took me about 5 clicks and 3 webpages to see that her college didn't even offer that as a degree.

Just needed to vent. I feel like this happens way more than we think.

• Objective statements/summaries are dead. Use a short tagline for yourself under your name instead
• (For students especially) Hard pass on including GPAs on resumes: Your success is not/will not be defined by a GPA.
• Delete your Skills section: If anyone can say it, don't say it. Instead, make it clear what your skills are by describing your accomplishments/day-to-day in your work experience section
• I know this one likely depends on industry, but it's still a hill I will die on: No headshots on your resume.
• Start the document with work experience, not education. Put education after work experience.
• Don't use colors. White paper, black text, that's it.

What else? Do you have any resume hot takes? Let's hear them.

I've heard many people on the internet say that just lie in your resume and fake it till you make it, but what do they actually mean by that? Like what in actual terms do they mean?

Literally half the posts in this sub now are “I lied on my resume”. Where did this influx of behavior come from?

Is this the norm now? Personally I wouldn’t want anyone on my team whose ethics allow them to be acceptable with lying on their resume.

I’ve been reviewing resumes lately, and I’ve noticed something interesting... and far too common.

A lot of experienced professionals (20–30+ years in the workforce) have strong backgrounds, but their resume format hasn’t evolved with hiring expectations.

This isn’t exactly about age... although there seems to be a correlation. It’s about presentation.

Here are a few patterns I keep seeing that can make your resume feel like it was written on an MS-DOS after going to a Nirvana concert (sorry I'm PNW born):

• Graduation years from the 80s or 90s. Don't include them unless requested!
• Email addresses that include birth years or older providers. That means all you with Hotmail, AOL and even Yahoo! accounts.. c'mon... close them out. Small detail, but it shapes first impressions.
• Leading with “30+ years of experience.” Impressive, yes, but HR is scanning for impact, not timeline length.
• Listing every job since 1985. A resume is a marketing document, not a full career archive. Focus on the last 10–15 years unless older roles are directly relevant.
• Objective statements. “Seeking a challenging position…” feels last century. A short value-focused summary works better.
• Duty-based bullet points. “Responsible for…” doesn’t show impact. Metrics and outcomes do.
• Dense formatting. Big walls of text are hard to scan quickly.
• Tech skills buried inside job descriptions. If you have digital fluency, surface it clearly.
• Overly formal language. Clear and direct beats ceremonial wording. Times have changed.

Again—it's not exactly about hiding experience. Experience is an advantage.

We just need to remove signals that distract from your strengths.

Curious to hear from others over 40.

Have you updated your resume format recently? Did it make a difference?

Sorry if this post is against the rules.

I am a hiring manager and have been going through lots of resumes. Please put your full name as the name of the file you attach.

FirstLast.pdf

I receive large groups of resumes from my recruiter and when I am looking at 100 resumes, at least 25 of them are labeled as “resume.pdf”, or some other basic title. This makes it hard to find and share your resumes. Also, please don’t put “final” or any version number either.

Even better if you put the title in the resume too.

First Last Engineering Technician.pdf

I saw that once and I liked it.

Best of luck out there!

I got an offer and they've accepted me but I'm currently going through a background check. I lied on one job I worked at saying that I was there from 2020 to 2024 when in reality I was there from 2019-2020. How cooked am I and how could I possibly salvage this if I'm questioned about it? My other employment information is correct.

EDIT: Since I still get DMs once in a while from people asking me if I got the job:

Yes, I did. I only lied on the resume. When it came time for the background check, I put down all the real dates. As far as I know, the check cleared because I've been here at this job for 5 months now.

My advice: Please don't lie. It really eats away at you. And if you do lie, don't lie on the background check. I will not be responding to anymore DMs i get from now on.

So I was jobless for like 3 months and getting desperate af. Sending out resumes left and right, ghosted every time. Major bummer.

Then my buddy's like "dude, you gotta tailor that shit." I'm thinking yeah whatever, but fuck it, nothing else was working.

Spent a whole weekend redoing my resume for this one job I really wanted. Matched their fancy corporate lingo, shuffled stuff around, the works. Felt like I was bullshitting but sent it anyway.

Plot twist: They actually called me back. Had the interview yesterday and didn't totally bomb it.

Maybe I just got lucky, but figured I'd share in case anyone else is in the same boat. This tailoring thing might actually be legit.

Anyone else try this? Or am I just late to the party?

Okay so hear me out and hopefully I don’t get downvoted. I was a sex worker for several years (escort), and I’m really stuck in getting a job. I’ve lied in the past and said I used to have my own business, it worked but now as I mature I’m more aware that companies do background checks. Plus lately a lot of people are asking too many details about said business and even with chatGPT I can’t produce proper answers. It sucks. The last time I had a real job was 2012-2015 so I have to lie about the years as well. I wish it wasn’t like this. Otherwise my resume will have literally a 7 year gap. So far, I changed my story to that I do massage but it still gives me anxiety as I know you have to have credentials for that, although I’m not applying for those types of roles. I just want an entry level job.

Otherwise I also had 2 jobs but got fired after 3 months, so one I had to lie and say I worked there for a year. I honestly don’t know what to do. Any advice?

We did a little ATS experiment. The result? ATS doesn't want to scan your resume properly

And honestly, I’m no longer shocked by the stories of 12+ month job searches. ATS has become useless, and major ATS companies are benefiting from the broken system.

Basically, the longer your job search, the greater the profits for these companies.

Back to the experiment:

We took one resume, built it on different popular resume builders (Canva, LinkedIn, Zety, even created one from scratch in Google Docs), and uploaded each version to Workday, pretty much the ATS, used by most companies.

This is the % of data parsed correctly from resumes made by each of those tools:
- Rezi Standard: 58% - Kickresume: ~50% - LinkedIn PDF: 42% - Google Docs: 34% - Zety: 31% - ResumeIO: 26% - Teal: 26% - JobScan: 23% - EnhanceCV: 18% - Canva ATS (lol) Layout: 13%

Even the “best” template loses nearly half your info. ATS is butchering your resume before anyone even sees it. Some ATS systems (like Workday) let you fix the mess, but others, like Greenhouse, don’t.

And what made me really angry is that it isn’t a glitch. It’s a business model. The CV parsing industry loves this because they sell “fixes” for resumes that ATS can’t read. When we tried to talk to Workday (and some other ATS companies about actually solving the problem), they shut us down.

Why? Because they don’t want it fixed. Their profits depend on keeping job seekers stuck in this broken loop.

To try and fix this, we created an open-source ATS-compliant resume metadata standard. It's in the comments below. We do not intend to use this for commercial purposes.

It could actually fix the issue, but for that to happen, it would have to become the standard among resume builders (most of them won’t want it because they profit from people searching for jobs for longer) or among ATS providers (they don’t want it either for similar reasons).

For obvious reasons, we cannot push companies to use this open source standard. But I am hoping job seekers here in this community who are on their platforms could help.

I've been unemployed for ages and have landed 0 interviews in the past few months. My friend owns a small marketing agency and keeps telling me to include it on my resume so I can get rid of the unemployment gap because he will verify whatever I put with whoever calls him. I'm terrified to do so though because most of my initial job experience was abroad (which surprisingly isnt fake lol) so idk what the full hiring process looks like in the USA like would I be asked for paystubs? Or anything other than a reference? its impossible to make it an unpaid position without it being illegal af, but at the same time aren't there people that do shadowings and then list it a real job? Idk I feel like everyone is lying these days specially at entry level and thats part of whats making things so hard for the rest of us

this is literally the only thing thats stopping me because I do have the skills to do the job I'd be making up plus the type of job it'd helped me get. I just want to get a job before the end of the year and get out of this post grab unemployment hole I've been in

I graduated in May 2026 and I’m trying to figure out what I’m doing wrong with my job search.

My background is mainly in Data Science / AI / ML. I have multiple internships, a research assistantship, technical university work experience, and projects.

Until now, I’ve always kept my resume to 1 page.

For every role I apply to, I try to include only the experiences and projects that are most relevant to that specific position. That means I leave out some of my other experience just to keep the resume focused and within one page.

But after 1,700+ applications and only 2 first-round interviews, I’m starting to question whether this strategy is actually helping me.

I mainly apply to:

* Data Scientist
* ML Engineer
* AI Engineer / Applied AI
* Data Analyst
* Other early-career data/AI roles

I graduated in May 2026, so I know I’m still early in my career. But I also have enough internships, research, university work, and technical projects that fitting everything into one page means cutting a decent amount.

If I include all of the experiences that show my background properly, my resume would probably become 2 pages.

So now I’m stuck between:

**1 page:**More focused and tailored, but leaves out few experience and projects.

2 pages: Shows the full picture of what I’ve done, but I’m worried recruiters will think it’s too long for a new grad.

For recruiters, hiring managers, HR, or anyone hiring early-career candidates and people who are job hunting:

Would you rather see a strong 2-page resume from a recent grad if the experience is relevant, or should someone at my level still stay strictly within 1 page?

Also, after 1,700+ applications with only 2 first rounds, is there something else I should be looking at besides resume length?

Im so tried of applying and getting ghosted and rejected. Genuinely need clarity on what I should change because continuing the same strategy clearly isn’t getting me anywhere.

What happened to the industry, damn

As bad as your resume may be, at least it’s not at this level!

I’ve heard some pretty interesting ideas. Recently someone told me they lied about the current employment situation, and told recruiters they were still employed, in order to appear a more attractive candidate.

I definitely don’t endorse this, but thought it would be worth a discussion!

What about you?

Saw this hiring post-mortem from a startup, let’s call them Company X. Thought it was worth sharing.

They needed a mid-level backend engineer. Not a senior wizard. Just someone solid.

So, naturally, they did the "standard" playbook:

• $500 on a premium job board
  
• $1,200 for a resume database subscription
  
• Pulled their lead engineer into 10+ hours of resume screening
  
• Blocked out 3 afternoons for interviews

Here’s what they got:

• 80 applications
  
• 17 interviews
  
• 4 second-round ghostings
  
• 1 strong candidate who accepted… then backed out two days before joining

Total time: 6 weeksTotal cost (including internal time): ~$7,400Total hires: 0

The part that stung?

Most of their best candidates weren’t even actively applying. They came through referrals. Friends-of-friends. Warm intros. Zero ad spend. Just trust and timing.

Their conclusion?

“We tried to make hiring feel like a funnel. But our best shots came from people—not platforms.”

It made me think:

Maybe we’ve over-optimized for scalable hiring when effective hiring was always personal.

Would love to hear how others have cracked this. Especially for startups without a full-blown talent team. What's working better than job boards and paid listings?