I spent six years as a recruiter before I ever wrote a word for Jobsspotter, and in that time I read somewhere north of ten thousand resumes. Most of them blurred together. A handful I still remember — not because the candidates were geniuses, but because they made my job easy.

That is the part nobody tells you. A resume is not an autobiography. It is a favor you do for a tired person who has forty more to get through before lunch. Make that person’s life easier and you are already ahead of most of the pile.

So when friends ask me to “look over” their resume — and they always do, usually the night before the deadline — this is what I actually end up telling them.

Lead with what you did, not what you were assigned

“Responsible for managing the social calendar” tells me nothing. “Grew the company Instagram from 2k to 18k in a year” tells me everything. I do not need your job description; I can find that on the company’s careers page. I need to know what changed because you were in the room.

If you cannot put a number on it, describe the outcome anyway. “Rebuilt the onboarding checklist so new hires stopped missing their first-week training” is specific and human, even without a percentage attached.

Write for the robot, then rewrite for the human

Yes, an applicant tracking system probably reads your resume before a person does, and yes, it is hunting for keywords pulled straight from the posting. Put them in. But do not stop there, because the second reader is a human being, and people can smell keyword stuffing from across the room. Clear the filter, then sound like yourself again.

Fix the top of the page, not the bottom

Everyone agonizes over what to cut from the bottom. The bigger mistake is usually up top. That “Objective” line — “seeking a challenging role where I can leverage my skills” — I have read it a few thousand times and it has never once changed my mind. Swap it for two plain sentences about what you do and who you do it for, or delete it outright. That space is worth more empty than wasted.

The small things that quietly get people rejected

None of these are about talent. They are about attention:

• A typo in the very first line. It happens more than you would think, and it is the fastest no there is.
• Three pages for a five-year career. Knowing what to leave out is its own kind of confidence.
• An email address you made in ninth grade. A plain one costs nothing.
• A file named “resume_final_v3_REAL.pdf.” Rename it to your actual name — that is the file sitting in my downloads folder for a week.

One honest thing to end on

A good resume will not win you a job you are not suited for, and it cannot fix a market having a rough year. What it can do is make sure the roles you are right for do not slide past you over something fixable. That is the whole game — not perfection, just not getting filtered out for a silly reason.

When you are ready, the openings are waiting. Have a look at what is live on Jobsspotter, fix the top third of your resume tonight, and send it before you talk yourself out of it.

— Ethan