The Two Things You Shouldn't Put on Your Resume: Common Resume Mistakes that Cost You Interviews
- May 20
- 2 min read
There's no shortage of resume advice on the internet. Avoid typos. Use action verbs. Keep it to two pages. Most of it is fine, and most of it is also obvious. But when we look at the resumes that are quietly costing senior professionals interviews and what the "common resume mistakes" are, the problems are almost never the obvious ones. They're two things that show up constantly and that most people don't even realize are working against them.
The first: a summary that describes you instead of positioning you.
The objective statement is officially dead and most professionals know that much. But what replaced it, the professional summary, is often just as ineffective in a different way. A summary that says "results-driven leader with 20 years of experience in operations and team management" tells a hiring manager almost nothing. It's the resume equivalent of saying "I'm a hard worker who loves a challenge." At the senior level, everyone has experience. Everyone has managed teams. The summary is your one chance to answer the question a hiring manager is already asking: why this person, for this role, right now? If your summary doesn't answer that, and instead describes who you are instead of why you're the right candidate, it's not helping you. It might actually be hurting you by burning prime real estate on language that blends you into the pile rather than pulling you out of it.
The second: job descriptions dressed up as accomplishments.
This one is so common that we see it on nearly every resume that comes through our door. Bullet points that start with "responsible for" or "managed" and then describe what the role entailed, not what the person actually did with it. "Responsible for a team of 12 and overseeing day-to-day operations" is a job description. It tells a hiring manager what your role was supposed to do. What they actually want to know is what happened under your watch. Did the team grow? Did performance improve? Did something that was broken get fixed? Hiring teams want to see how you brought value in your previous roles, not just what you were responsible for. At the executive level, the candidates who get called back are the ones whose resumes make that distinction clearly and specifically.
The common thread between these two things is the same: they describe rather than demonstrate. And a resume that describes is a resume that gets passed over because the document isn't making the case, not necessarily because they are under-qualified. The fix isn't complicated, but it does require looking at your own resume through a different lens: the one a hiring manager uses, not the one you used when you wrote it. That outside perspective is exactly what tends to change everything, and that’s where we can help at Top of the Stack. We built our Resume Revitalization service to help senior professionals translate their experience into the compelling candidate narrative that gets them hired. Get started today!
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