Your resume is costing you interviews
READ TIME: 4 MINUTES
You sit down to write your resume.
And you freeze.
You've dusted it off every couple of years when it was time to look. You're not a resume writer. So you do what everyone does, you Google templates, read best practices, ask AI to write it for you.
You're piecing it together and hoping it's right.
Or you give up on figuring it out yourself and spend a few hundred dollars on a professional resume writer. Seems like a reasonable move.
Except the person you hired has never been a sales manager, a VP, or a recruiter. They don't know what a hiring team actually looks for. And they don't know your stories. They'll ask questions but they're not asking the right ones, because they don't have the insider perspective to know what matters.
I've been on both sides of this. As a hiring manager, I've scanned thousands of resumes. As a coach, I've rebuilt dozens of them. The gap between what candidates submit and what hiring teams need is bigger than most people realize.
The result is the same either way.
A resume that looks fine. But it doesn't get you interviews.
In the last three months, I've reviewed and redone over 20 resumes. AI-generated. Self-written. Professionally written. The majority were missing the same things.
Here's what I found.
What's missing
Impact: ranking, promotions, % to quota, amount sold
What you sold, who you sold it to, deal size
Your story: your strengths, the problems you solved, the progression you made
And even when the right information was there, it was buried. Ten bullet points deep. Because most people don't understand how a recruiter or hiring manager actually reads a resume. They're not reading it. They're scanning it, F-pattern, top to bottom, looking for specific signals fast.
A multi-column layout with a skills section makes that harder, not easier. ATS (Applicant Tracking) systems read left to right, top to bottom. Multi-column formats scramble keywords.
As Mike Stamp, VP of Global Talent Acquisition at Riverty put it:
"Multi-column skills sections and heavy visual blocks can sometimes work against candidates. ATS systems often read left to right, top to bottom, which can scramble keywords, and recruiters tend to F-scan for outcomes first. Pulling key achievements higher, simplifying skills into a single column, and letting experience dominate visually can strengthen it further."
What happens when you fix it
When a resume is done right, my clients hear this from recruiters on the first call:
"Your resume answered a lot of my questions."
"Based on your resume, I have a really good understanding of the work you did before and it seems like it would relate well to this role."
That's what a strong resume does. It does the work before you get on the phone.
The goal of your resume is two things:
To land the recruiter screen
Provide the right context to tee up stories for your interview
3 ways to improve yours
1. Add impact — with real numbers
This is where most resumes fall flat. They have the right categories but none of the specificity.
Bad: Hit quota. Ranked #5. Increased lead conversion rate. Mentored AEs.
Good: Sold $1.1M on $1M quota. Ranked #5 out of 100. Increased lead conversion rate by 20%. Mentored 4 AEs.
The number is what makes it land. Without it, every resume says the same thing.
2. Give context — what you sold, who you sold it to, deal size
A hiring manager wants to know if your experience maps to their world. The best way to show it: include a deal example. Not just "closed enterprise deals" — show one. The company type, the problem, the size. Make it easy for them to see the fit.
As executive resume writer Jessica Hernandez puts it: "You have to connect the dots for them and make it easy for them to see how you fit the role."
3. Less is more
Scannability is the goal. One page if you have under 10 years of experience. Two pages max. No more than five bullets per role. Every bullet should be doing work — if it doesn't show impact, cut it.
Your resume isn't a complete record of everything you've done.
It's a highlight reel built for one specific audience: the person deciding whether to get you on the phone.
Think of your resume as your marketing collateral. It gets you the sales call. Once you're in the room, it becomes your pitch deck.
In sales, a great pitch deck helps but it doesn't close the deal. The salesperson does. And even a mediocre deck can win with the right pitch and the right product behind it.
Resumes work the same way. Without the process and the pitch, you can't win.
The best resume in the world still won't land the offer. That's what we build together in Clarity to Close™ — the process and the pitch to back it up.
But a bad resume will cost you. Even if you do land the interview, the hiring manager is already wondering: is this how they'd present our product on a sales call?
I know because I was that manager.
Hit reply and tell me: what part of your resume needs the most work? I read every response.
To clarity and confidence in your career path,
Amanda
See you next Sunday.
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