Sending the same resume everywhere
This is the mistake that costs the most interviews, and it is invisible to the person making it. A general-purpose resume forces the reader to work out for themselves why you fit. In a stack of a hundred applications, nobody does that work.
The fix is not a full rewrite for every job. It is rewriting the top third — your summary and your first few bullet points — so that the connection between your experience and their advert is obvious in the first few seconds.
If the advert emphasises a specific skill three times, that skill needs to appear near the top of your resume, attached to something you genuinely did.
Describing duties instead of results
"Responsible for managing client accounts" tells a reader nothing they had not already assumed from your job title. It is a description of a role, not evidence of your performance in it.
Every significant bullet should answer the question "and what happened?". Retained a portfolio of thirty accounts through a pricing change with no churn. Cut reporting time from two days to four hours. Trained six new starters, four of whom are still with the company.
Where you have no numbers, use scale or consequence instead — team size, budget, geography, or what the organisation adopted because of your work.
Designing something the software cannot read
Two-column layouts, sidebars, text inside images, icons standing in for words, tables, and text in headers or footers all cause problems for applicant tracking systems. The parser either scrambles the content or misses it entirely, and a resume that reads beautifully to you arrives as fragments.
Use a single column, conventional section headings, a standard typeface, and consistent date formatting. Send a PDF unless a Word file is specifically requested.
This does not mean your resume has to look cheap. Generous spacing, a clear hierarchy and restrained use of bold will look more professional than any template with a skills chart.
Burying the relevant experience
Strict reverse-chronological order is right for most people, but it fails when your most relevant experience is not your most recent — career changers, returners, and anyone whose current role is a detour.
If that describes you, add a short section near the top that frames the relevant experience explicitly, then let the chronology follow. A reader who reaches your best qualification on page two has usually already decided.
The same applies within a role. Order your bullet points by relevance to the advert, not by the order in which you did things.
Typos where they cost the most
Not all errors carry equal weight. A misplaced comma is a small ding. A wrong digit in your phone number or a typo in your email address ends the process entirely, and you never find out why.
Check contact details first, every time, and test the email address if you have recently changed it. Then check the employer's name — misspelling the company you are applying to is uniquely damaging because it reads as carelessness aimed directly at them.
After that, read the whole thing aloud and have another person review it. Spellcheck will not catch "manager" written as "manger", and that one appears on resumes constantly.
Leaving gaps unexplained
An unexplained gap does not read as neutral. It invites the reader to fill the space with a guess, and the guess is usually worse than the truth.
A single factual line resolves it. "2023–2024: Career break — family caregiving." "2022: Redundancy following company restructure; contract roles during search." No apology and no elaboration required.
The same applies to a run of short roles. Three words next to the dates — fixed-term contract, company closed, project cancelled — stops a reader concluding that you are the common factor.
Padding with things nobody asked for
Several conventions persist long after they stopped being useful and now simply consume space.
Drop "references available on request", which is assumed. Drop your full home address; a city is sufficient and safer. In most English-speaking countries, drop date of birth, marital status and photograph — employers actively avoid material that could introduce bias. Drop skills so basic that claiming them raises questions, like email or internet research.
Hobbies are borderline. Include them only where they are genuinely relevant or genuinely distinctive; "socialising with friends" is neither.
Claiming things you cannot defend
Keyword matching tempts people to list every technology and skill they have heard of. It is a bad trade.
Anything on your resume is legitimate material for an interview question, and being exposed on an inflated claim damages your credibility on everything else you wrote. A candidate who lists a language at "fluent" and cannot hold a conversation has not just lost that point; they have made every other line suspect.
Be accurate about levels. "Working knowledge" and "familiar with" are honest and perfectly acceptable descriptions.