Be careful on what type of content you consume on social media.

So much information out there contradicts each other, and if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can end up doing yourself more hard them good.

For example, this week I saw a resume template go viral on X which obviously caught my attention.

This template received over 50 MILLION views on X.

Crazy!

You’d think if a resume template gets that much traction, surely it has to be a good idea to use, right?

Not so much.

While it’s “not bad”, here are some issues with this format.

1: This person is a career coach

Nothing wrong with career coaches, and there are certainly good ones out there.

Career coaches “coach” you on your job search to help you land your next gig. Certainly sounds helpful especially trying to navigate a job market like today’s.

But their goal is ultimately to make money off you. And one way of doing that is by selling resume templates.

Nothing wrong with that - I do the same thing as a side hustle.

Just be aware this is an actual motivation to do so.

2: Success & Experience

She says in her bio that she’s a recruiter, which is great. This shows she has experience in the hiring process.

But there’s no information as to what type of companies, skill sets, or industries she’s recruiting for.

A Software Engineer may require a different resume template than someone in Operations, Administration, Finance/Accounting, Marketing, Creative, etc.

A resume for Big Tech may look different than Finance or a smaller SMB.

3: Experience in your niche

So let’s pretend this person is extremely successful (they may be in real life, idk). Let’s also pretend they’re a high level agency recruiter like me that’s placed a ton of people.

You still have to make sure they have the specific experience of writing resumes for your niche.

For me - I clearly cater to tech pro’s at F500s. I get resume requests all the time for people in marketing, ops, admins and I turn them all down because that’s not my wheelhouse. I can turn their business down because I don’t need the money and I do this for fun. Other resume writers or career coaches may not be so kind to do so.

So before you pay someone for resume services or career coaching, make sure they have success in the specific niche you’re looking for.

…

Let’s take another look at the resume itself.

Now first and foremost - content is king.

A good resume template will very rarely be the reason you get an interview.

You need to have the skills & experience for the role. Resume format comes second.

As you may have heard me say before, your resume needs to convey on each work experience:

• What you did

• How you did it

• Why it mattered

That being said, resume format may be a reason why you’re not getting picked up for interviews using a template like this one…

1: ATS Parsing

The main issue with a resume like this is that columned/Sectioned resumes like this “may” not parse well into an ATS when you apply to jobs online.

Believe it or not - recruiters do not manually open and review every single resume that applies.

Your resume gets “parsed” into their ATS, and instead of reviewing your resume “as is” (whether you have a ms word or pdf), it gets reviewed in whatever format it got parsed in at via ATS.

Believe it or not - HR Tech is still absolutely terrible in 2024. So there are times where a resume like this does not parse well and your resume gets all jumbled up making it hard to skim.

2: 100s of candidates to stand out from

So we established that the resume can potentially get parsed incorrectly once you apply.

Now you’re asking “Well the recruiter should still do their job and read everything!”

If you’re asking this question, you definitely didn’t read last week’s post why the recruiting process is broken:

So that being said - you want to make it as easy as possible for recruiters & hiring managers to do their job for you.

The easier you make it for your resume to parse into an ATS, the easier it is for them to skim and read, and the more likely your resume get’s picked up on.

3: Mismatch between skills & work experience section

Let’s pretend in a perfect world we didn’t have to worry about ATS systems & 100s of candidates per role.

Typically resumes like get “lazy” when writing their bullet points. Since this format is really only optimized for you to keep everything on one page, specifically more technical skillsets like SWEs are forced to leave out a lot of detail that matters when writing resumes.

For example, let’s take “hard/technical” skills. And let’s say you’re a full stack javascript developer experienced with React, Node, AWS, Typescript.

Usually, candidates with this resume will put their hard skills on the left side in the skills section and leave their work experience bullet points extremely generic.

When it’s listed like this, we can’t tell what technologies you used in what experience.

So idk if you have used react at one job, or your entire career. And yes - for a lot of companies this matters.

4: Limited Resume Space

Since this resume format is designed for really 1 page, it really limits your ability go in further detail about your experience.

So let’s pretend you decide to put your hard tech stack in there in one bullet point, that’s still not enough. This example shows 3 jobs and 2 bullet points each.

Unless you’ve worked at the best companies in your industry, it’ll be hard for most people to get picked up on an interview with just 2 bullet points per job.

Remember what I said before, each work experience needs to answer:

• what you did

• how you did it

• why it mattered

Even if you say screw it and make your resume in full detail and go past 1 page with this, you run back into the first problem with it not parsing in correctly. And when you go on page two, with nothing listed on the left bar and only writing on the right 2/3 of the page, it becomes visually displeasing which is the whole main reason to use this template to being with.

5: Doesn’t “Flow”

Remember from last week’s post, recruiters have limited time to scan your resume to make sure you’re a fit, so you want to make it as easy as possible for them to skim your resume.

And also remember - with this format - you can’t beef up your bullet points with the way it’s meant to work.

Because of this, the reader has to keep reading from right to left, right to left, going back and forth from experience section to skills section. That’s not good. You risk a chance they either:

• say “screw it” not worth it

• Choose not to call you to clarify your bullet points (likely because they aren’t detailed enough)

• Choose not to call you to clarify your exp because it didn’t parse well into the ATS

What’s a better alternative?

Que in my shameless resume template here:

Is it the best template? No clue. But I’ve placed 700+ tech pro’s using this thing at various F500 companies. So it definitely works.

TL;DR

So be careful on what advice you consume on the internet. This feels weird saying this as an anonymous cartoon on X, but there’s so much contradictory info that can pull you in two different directions.

Make sure to vet the source & also that they have the specific experience in your niche.

While this post is about resume templates - that comes second to the actual content. You can use her template, my template, any template - but if you’re content sucks it doesn’t mean a thing.

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I put together a guide to help navigate your job search, check it out below:

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