Eye-tracking research on recruiter behaviour shows that the average recruiter spends under 7 seconds on an initial resume scan before deciding whether to read further or move on. Seven seconds. That's roughly the time it takes to read two bullet points.

In that window, a recruiter isn't reading — they're pattern-matching. They're looking for signals of fit, credibility, and clarity. If your resume doesn't immediately surface those signals, you're out — regardless of how strong your actual experience is.

The painful truth is that most rejections aren't because of what you've done. They're because of how your resume communicates what you've done. Below are the seven most common resume mistakes that cause strong candidates to be dismissed in seconds.

These aren't minor formatting preferences. Each mistake listed here is something we see repeatedly in resumes from candidates with genuinely strong backgrounds — engineers, MBAs, analysts, product managers — who are being passed over not because of lack of experience, but because of how that experience is presented.

Mistake 1: No Clear Value in the Top Third

The top third of your resume — roughly the first third of the page — is prime real estate. It's what a recruiter sees before deciding whether to scroll. If that space is wasted on a generic objective statement, a dense paragraph about your "passion for growth," or a list of skills with no context, you've already lost them.

Recruiters are matching your profile to a role. The top of your resume needs to tell them — within a glance — who you are professionally, what level you operate at, and whether you're relevant to what they're hiring for.

The fix: Replace your objective statement with a 3–4 line professional summary that leads with your role/level, your primary domain of expertise, and one or two concrete proof points. Tailor it to the specific role you're applying for. Make it scannable — not a wall of text.

Mistake 2: Describing Responsibilities Instead of Results

This is the single most common mistake — and the one that costs the most. Most resumes read like a job description: "Managed a team," "Handled client relationships," "Responsible for product strategy." These tell the recruiter what your job was. They don't tell the recruiter what you actually achieved.

Recruiters are looking for evidence of impact. They want to know: did this person move the needle? Did things get better because of them? Generic responsibility statements give them nothing to hold onto.

Compare these two bullets for the same role:

  • Weak: Managed marketing campaigns across digital channels.
  • Strong: Led performance marketing across Google and Meta, reducing cost per acquisition by 34% and growing monthly qualified leads from 800 to 2,200 over two quarters.

The second bullet is specific, quantified, and shows business impact. It gives the recruiter something to evaluate — and something to remember.

The fix: For every bullet point, ask yourself: So what? What changed because of this? By how much? For whom? If you can't answer those questions, the bullet is a responsibility, not an achievement. Rewrite it until the impact is explicit.

Mistake 3: Sending the Same Resume to Every Job

A resume that tries to speak to everyone ends up resonating with no one. Hiring managers can immediately tell when a resume is generic — it lacks the language of their industry, doesn't mirror the priorities of their role, and feels like it could have been sent to any company in any sector.

The way recruiters evaluate candidates is role-specific. A product manager applying to a growth-stage startup is being screened on different signals than one applying to a large enterprise. The same underlying experience needs to be framed differently for each context.

The fix: Maintain a master resume with all your experience, then tailor a version for each application. At minimum, adjust the professional summary, reorder your bullets to lead with the most relevant experience, and mirror the exact language from the job description — a core principle of ATS-optimized resume writing — wherever it accurately reflects your work.

Mistake 4: Wrong Resume Length for Your Experience Level

Resume length is one of the most argued-about topics in career advice — and most of the advice is wrong. The reality is simpler: your resume should be as long as it needs to be to make a compelling case, and no longer.

Two common failure modes:

  • Too long: A 3-page resume for someone with 4 years of experience. Padding out a thin track record with irrelevant internships, every course you've ever taken, and hobby projects from university signals a lack of editorial judgement — which is itself a red flag.
  • Too short: A single-page resume for a director with 14 years across multiple companies and domains. Compressing a rich career into one page often means cutting the very details that make you stand out — the scope, the scale, the specifics.

The fix: 0–5 years of experience: 1 page. 5–15 years: 1–2 pages. Senior leadership (15+ years): up to 2 pages, occasionally 3 for very senior executives. Every line should earn its place. If a bullet doesn't add to your case, cut it.

Mistake 5: A Weak or Missing Professional Summary

Many candidates leave the summary section blank entirely — or write something so vague it might as well be blank: "Dynamic professional with a passion for excellence seeking a challenging role in a growth-oriented organization." This says nothing. It doesn't differentiate you, doesn't communicate your level, and doesn't give the recruiter any reason to keep reading.

The professional summary is your opening argument. It's the one place on the resume where you get to speak directly — to frame your narrative, signal your positioning, and tell the recruiter exactly why they should care about the next two pages.

The fix: Write a 3–4 line summary structured around: (1) who you are professionally and at what level, (2) your primary expertise and the type of problems you solve, (3) one or two standout proof points (scale, scope, outcomes), and (4) what you're targeting next. Make it specific enough that it couldn't have been written by anyone else in your field.

Mistake 6: No Numbers, Anywhere

Quantification is one of the strongest signals on a resume. Numbers make your impact concrete, give the recruiter a reference point, and immediately separate you from candidates who use only vague qualitative language. Yet a surprisingly large number of resumes — even from strong candidates — contain almost no numbers at all.

This doesn't mean you need a metric for every single bullet. Some contributions are genuinely hard to quantify, and fabricating numbers is worse than omitting them. But the majority of professional work — even in non-revenue roles — involves some quantifiable dimension: team size, budget, timeline, volume, growth rate, efficiency gain, error reduction, customer count.

The fix: Go through every bullet and ask: is there a number that belongs here? Team size, budget managed, percentage improvement, number of users, revenue influenced, time saved. Even approximate numbers ("~500 users," "reduced review cycle from 3 weeks to 4 days") are vastly more credible than pure adjectives like "significantly improved" or "dramatically reduced."

Mistake 7: Poor Visual Hierarchy and Dense Formatting

Recruiters don't read resumes linearly. They scan — jumping to headers, skimming bullet points, looking for anchors. If your resume is a wall of dense text with no clear structure, the recruiter's eye has nowhere to land, and they move on.

Beyond readability, formatting is also a proxy signal. A cluttered, inconsistent resume suggests poor attention to detail. For roles in consulting, product, finance, or any client-facing function, the quality of your resume is interpreted as a preview of the quality of your work.

Common formatting mistakes include:

  • Inconsistent font sizes, weights, or styles across sections
  • Bullets that run 4–5 lines long (they stop being bullets)
  • No clear visual separation between sections
  • Margins that are too narrow — making the page look claustrophobic
  • Mixing date formats (Jan 2023 in one place, 01/2023 in another)
  • Contact information buried at the bottom instead of the top

The fix: Use consistent typography — one font, two or three weights at most. Keep bullets to 1–2 lines. Use white space intentionally; it's not wasted space, it's what makes the page readable. Run a formatting pass after every draft where you look at the resume from a distance — if it looks dense, it is dense.

The Bigger Picture

Each of these seven resume mistakes is fixable. None of them require you to have done more, achieved more, or worked somewhere more prestigious. They require you to present what you've already done with more precision, specificity, and strategic intent.

The recruiter who rejects your resume in 7 seconds isn't making a judgement about your capability. They're making a judgement about your signal — what your resume, at a glance, communicates about you. Change the signal, and the outcome changes.

That's the work. It's harder than it sounds, and more impactful than most people expect. If you want to go deeper on the technical side of how your resume gets screened, read our guide on how to write an ATS-optimized resume.

If you're unsure which of these mistakes your resume is making, a professional audit is the fastest way to find out. At Reforge Me, we review your resume against real hiring criteria — not templates — and give you an honest assessment of what's working and what isn't.