10 resume mistakes that cost you interviews

Recruiters spend well under a minute on a first pass. Most rejections at that stage aren’t about your experience; they’re about how the resume presents it. These are the ten mistakes that come up constantly, with the fix for each.

1. Listing duties instead of results

“Responsible for social media accounts” describes the job, not you. Anyone who held the role could write the same line.

Fix: state what changed because you were there: “Grew Instagram from 8k to 30k followers in a year.” Where numbers honestly exist, use them; where they don’t, name the concrete outcome.

2. One resume for every application

A generic resume matches no posting particularly well, and recruiters searching for the posting’s terms won’t find you.

Fix: tailor your resume to each job description; it takes minutes and changes which searches you appear in.

3. A vague or missing summary

Three lines of “motivated team player seeking challenging opportunities” says nothing. So does no summary at all when your path needs context.

Fix: two or three sentences of facts: role, years, domains, one strength. “Backend engineer, 6 years, marketplaces and payments. Focus on reliability and cost-aware infrastructure.”

4. Wall-of-text formatting

Ten-line paragraphs and 9-point font mean nothing gets read.

Fix: bullets of one to two lines, clear section headings, white space. If it doesn’t scan in six seconds, it doesn’t scan.

5. Unexplained gaps

A silent two-year hole invites the worst assumption.

Fix: one honest line (sabbatical, caregiving, education, freelancing). Named gaps are normal; unexplained ones are red flags.

6. Typos and inconsistent details

A single “recieved” undercuts a “detail-oriented” claim. Inconsistent date formats and title casing do the same, quieter.

Fix: read it out loud once, run a checker, and keep one format for every date and heading. A resume score catches most of this automatically.

7. Burying the relevant experience

The role that matches the posting sits at the bottom of page two, under three irrelevant ones.

Fix: order within sections is yours to choose. Lead with what the target role cares about; compress the rest.

8. Skills you can’t back up

A skills list with fifteen technologies, three of which appear nowhere in your experience, reads as padding, and interviews expose it.

Fix: list what you can discuss for five minutes. Cut the rest.

9. Decorative templates that fight the content

Skill bars, photos, two-column layouts with tiny sidebars: they cost parsing accuracy (ATS problems) and rarely add credibility.

Fix: pick a clean, recruiter-ready template and let the content carry the design.

10. Sending a stale resume

The resume says “Present” for a job you left eight months ago, and the new certification is missing.

Fix: touch the resume every time something changes, not the night before a deadline. Keeping it in one editable place, instead of six Word files named resume_final_v3, is most of the battle.

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None of these require talent to fix; they require a second pass. Rung’s analysis runs that second pass for you: it reads your resume like a recruiter, flags what’s on this list, and fixes most of it in one tap.