5 Resume Mistakes You MUST Avoid (with real examples)!
About this video
Drawing on his own first job search — hundreds of cold emails, dozens of interviews and several offers after he fixed his resume — Su walks through five mistakes from his original resume and the corrections. First, he led with education; recruiters care far more about work experience, including internships, because well-written bullets let them picture you doing the job. Second, he described duties with fluffy verbs instead of showing impact, so the same experience was rewritten to state the result, such as a client successfully opening a branch. Third, he omitted metrics; he argues recruiters reward the effort to quantify, however modest the number, and teaches repeatedly asking ‘so what?’ to surface benchmarks like score improvements or acceptance rates. Fourth, he sent one generic resume everywhere; the fix is focusing on three to five target roles and tailoring each version, using a word cloud of the postings to find keywords. Fifth, he overlooked small formatting inconsistencies and typos, which he now catches with tools like Grammarly and by sending the resume to friends for review.
Key takeaways
- Put work experience above education; bullets should help recruiters picture you in the job
- Show impact and results, not duties dressed up in fluffy verbs
- Quantify even small wins; keep asking ‘so what?’ to find a metric
- Tailor the resume to a few target roles using keywords from their postings
- Sweat small formatting and spelling errors; get other eyes on the draft
Episode details: published August 23, 2022 · 6:41 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Jeff Su’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.
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