Got told my resume was 'too fancy' by a hiring manager at a small tech startup in Austin

He said it looked like a robot wrote it with all the jargon, so I rewrote the whole thing in plain English, dropped my 3 most recent job titles into bullet points and stopped using words like 'optimized' and 'synergy', and suddenly got two interviews in the same week - has anyone else had a recruiter basically tell them to dumb it down?

2 comments

2 Comments

lisa_hill236d ago

Oh man, I had almost the exact same thing happen at a startup here in Seattle! They literally told me my resume sounded like I was trying to sell them a used car, lol.

skylerm556d ago

Honestly I think thats kind of a fair criticism from them though. Resume writing has gotten so hype-y and salesy these days trying to catch some recruiters eye for 6 seconds. Half the time people load up their resumes with buzzwords like "leveraged cross-functional synergy" and honestly that stuff sounds more like a used car pitch than just saying what you actually did. If I was hiring for a startup I'd probably roll my eyes at any resume that sounded like it was trying to hard to sell me on some perfect candidate. Better to just list your actual projects and results in plain English, let the work speak for itself. Your resume is just a door not the whole sales pitch.