A friend of mine had been job hunting for 4 months with barely any callbacks.
She asked me to review her resume. I’ve done some hiring in previous roles, so I took a proper look—and honestly, the issues I found are extremely common.
Sharing here because I see these mistakes everywhere.
1. Two-column layout (looks great, fails ATS)
Her resume looked beautiful.
Two columns. Clean design. Very “professional”.
Problem:
Most ATS (Applicant Tracking Systems) cannot read columns properly. They scan left-to-right, top-to-bottom.
When I tested her resume using an ATS simulator, job titles were getting merged with dates from the other column.
To the system, her resume looked like gibberish → instant rejection.
Fix:
Use a single-column layout.
It’s boring. It works.
2. Listing job duties instead of accomplishments
Her bullets looked like this:
Responsible for managing social media accounts
Handled customer inquiries
Assisted with event planning
These tell me what she did, not how well she did it.
We rewrote them to:
Grew Instagram from 2k → 15k followers in 6 months using a daily content strategy
Resolved 50+ customer tickets weekly with a 95% satisfaction score
Coordinated 12 company events for 100+ attendees
Simple formula:
Action verb + What you did + Measurable outcome
3. No keywords from job descriptions
She was applying for marketing roles…
but her resume barely included words like:
- campaign
- analytics
- SEO
- content strategy
Guess what ATS systems filter on?
Keywords.
Fix:
Open 5 job posts you actually want.
Highlight common terms.
Make sure those words appear naturally in your resume.
(Not stuffing. Just alignment.)
4. “References available upon request”
This line does absolutely nothing.
Everyone has references available upon request.
Delete it.
Use the space for an actual achievement.
5. A generic objective statement
She had:
“Seeking a challenging role where I can utilize my skills and grow professionally.”
That describes… literally every human.
We replaced it with a short, specific summary:
Marketing coordinator with 3 years of B2B experience. Specialized in social media growth and event marketing. Increased engagement by 40% in previous role.
Much stronger.
The result
We spent maybe 2 hours fixing all this.
The following week:
She applied to 15 roles
Got 4 callbacks
Before this, she’d sent 60+ applications with almost nothing.
Is it 100% proof it was the resume?
No.
But the timing is very hard to ignore.
Resume optimization is boring.
It’s tedious.
It’s not fun.
But it matters way more than most people think.
If this helps even one person here get more callbacks, it was worth sharing.