Twelve resume mistakes hiring managers see every single day.

I've read something like 40,000 resumes in my career. Most of the mistakes are not novel — they're the same twelve patterns, in various combinations, across seniority and industry. Here they are, ranked roughly by how much damage they do.

1. Typos and inconsistent punctuation

The obvious one, but still the most damaging. A typo on a resume isn't just a mistake — it's evidence. You wrote this document to be read and you didn't proofread it. That signals something about how you'll treat other documents you produce at work.

Inconsistent punctuation is the subtle version of this. Some bullets end in periods; others don't. Some use curly quotes; others use straight. The resume looks like it was stitched together from different copies over time, because it was.

Fix: Read the resume out loud, slowly, before submitting. Run it through a grammar checker. Pick one punctuation style and apply it globally.

2. Walls of text

Long paragraph-style bullets that span three full lines each. Four-sentence summary blocks. Section headers lost in the middle of body text. The reader opens the PDF and bounces because they don't know where to start.

Fix: Every bullet, one line. Two lines is the maximum. Three lines means two bullets. Every section has whitespace around it. Every bullet starts with a verb.

3. Tense shifts within a role

This one flies under everyone's radar. Look at your current job's bullets:

The tense jumps from present to past and back. It reads as careless. Either current job is all present tense (because you're still doing it), or specific past actions within the current job are all past tense, but the mix tells on the author.

Fix: Current role: present tense, or past tense for specific shipped things. Be consistent inside a role. Past roles: always past tense.

4. Phantom achievements

This is the subtle one that kills interviews. A bullet that sounds impressive but falls apart when asked about in detail.

What did you actually do? How many people? What changed? When an interviewer asks "tell me more about this bullet," you should be able to talk for 10 minutes. If you're going to be stuck after 30 seconds, the bullet is a phantom. Cut it.

Fix: For every bullet, confirm you can answer three follow-up questions without panic: "What did you do, specifically? What was the result? What was hard about it?"

5. The "Objective" section

"Seeking a challenging role where I can apply my skills and grow professionally." This line has been written on perhaps three million resumes and has never once moved the needle on a hiring decision.

Objectives center the candidate's wants, when the reader cares about what the candidate offers. They've been out of fashion for 15 years. Recruiters notice them as a marker that the author hasn't updated resume conventions recently.

Fix: Delete the Objective. If you want a brief intro, write a Summary (see the summary guide) — a two-line compression of who you are, not what you want.

6. Starting every bullet with the same verb

Scan the left edge of your bullets. If four in a row start with "Managed," your verb muscles need a workout. "Managed the team, managed the budget, managed the process, managed the stakeholders" — after the second "managed," the reader tunes out.

Fix: See the verbs guide. Vary the left column. Use the verb that's most specific to what you actually did.

7. Inconsistent date formatting

"Jan 2022 – March 2024" in one role, "01/2022–3/24" in the next, "2022 to present" in the third. This tells the reader (and the ATS parser) that the author isn't paying attention to their own document.

Fix: Pick one format. "Jan 2022 – Mar 2024" is the cleanest. Apply it everywhere. Use "Present" (not "now," not "current") for the current role.

8. Including jobs from 15+ years ago

Unless a 15-year-old job is directly relevant — same company you're returning to, directly related specialty — it's just pushing your relevant experience farther down the page. At the first-pass glance, the reader sees "barista, 2008" before they get to the staff engineer role from 2024.

Fix: Cap the resume at 10–15 years of full work history. Older roles can live in a one-line "Earlier:" entry at the bottom ("Earlier: Product Analyst at Acme (2009–2011), Associate at Bain (2011–2013)."). Or just drop them.

9. Star ratings for skills

"Python ★★★★☆. SQL ★★★☆☆. Public speaking ★★★★★." This has always been a bad idea. The ratings are self-reported, the scale is meaningless ("what's a 3/5 at Python?"), and it signals that the candidate leaned on a template instead of writing their own skills section.

Fix: List skills grouped by proficiency level in plain text. "Primary: Python, Django, Postgres. Comfortable: Go, Redis, Docker." The reader can calibrate from there.

10. Photos on US resumes

In Europe, Latin America, and parts of Asia, a photo on your resume is standard. In the US, Canada, and UK, it isn't — and it actively causes problems. Many US recruiters are trained to immediately discard resumes with photos, because they create bias-liability concerns for the employer.

Fix: No photo on US/UK/Canadian resumes. For markets where it's standard, include a small, professional photo in the top-right corner.

11. Contact info in page headers

Because you learned the "put my name in the header so it shows on every page" trick from a Word template in 2009. Except: many ATSes skip headers and footers when parsing. Your name, email, and phone end up invisible to the system.

Fix: All contact info lives in the document body, at the top of the first page. No exceptions.

12. Filename "resume_v7_final_FINAL.pdf"

This lands in the recruiter's inbox. They forward it internally. Everyone sees that the file is named "resume_v7_final_FINAL_reviewed_by_amanda_v2.pdf." The signal: this person doesn't think about the end-to-end experience of being applied to.

Fix: Name the file with your full name: jane-smith-resume.pdf. Not a version number, not a role-specific name. Just your name.

A bonus mistake: optimizing for the wrong reader

This isn't in the numbered list because it's not really a formatting mistake — but it's the one I see most.

A candidate writes their resume for an imagined generic "hiring manager," which is like writing a novel for "readers." The actual reader is a specific person (or a specific role, or a specific team) with a specific current problem. Resumes that land are ones that feel aimed.

"Aimed" doesn't mean a different resume per application. It means the candidate has a clear picture of who the typical reader is and what they'd want to see. More on that here →

The short version

• Typos and inconsistency are the worst. Proofread.
• One-line bullets. Whitespace. No walls of text.
• Consistent tenses, consistent date formats, consistent punctuation.
• Every bullet you'd stand behind under cross-examination.
• No objective section. No star ratings. No photo on US resumes.
• Contact info in the body, not headers. Clean filename.
• Write for a specific reader, not a generic one.