One hiring manager's note about my resume format fixed everything

After 14 months of sending out applications and getting nowhere, a hiring manager in Austin finally told me my resume looked like a wall of text. She said she spends about 6 seconds on each one and couldn't find my key skills. I cut it down to one page, added clear section headers, and put numbers up top like how many accounts I managed. Within 3 weeks I got two callbacks and one interview. Has anyone else gotten a blunt critique like that that actually turned things around?

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lane.joel7d ago

That blunt feedback is the most useful thing you can get, but nobody wants to give it. Took me a year of dead ends before a recruiter told me my resume was too dense and didn't show results. Swapped the paragraph bullets for short lines that started with action words and put the numbers front and center. Also made sure the top third of the page had my best stuff, since that's all they actually scan. Once you stop treating it like a life story and treat it like a menu, it clicks.