Bad Resume Examples and the Fix for Each

Ten failures, each shown as written and then repaired. Most resumes have three or four of them.

1. Duties instead of achievements

As written: Responsible for managing warehouse operations, supervising staff, and ensuring compliance with company procedures.

Fixed: Cut order turnaround from three days to one across four sites by resequencing the pick process.

The most common failure on any resume. The first version is true of everyone who has held the job, which means it does not differentiate. See resume achievements.

2. A summary that describes anyone

As written: Highly motivated and results-driven professional with a proven track record of success in fast-paced environments.

Fixed: Operations manager with six years in multi-site distribution, currently four sites and 180 staff, having cut order turnaround from three days to one.

Adjectives replaced by facts. See resume summary examples.

3. The invisible parsing failure

As written: a two-column layout with a coloured sidebar holding skills, and contact details in the document header.

Why it fails: the sidebar can extract out of order or not at all, and some parsers skip headers entirely, producing a record of you with no phone number.

Fixed: single column, contact details as the first lines of the document body, skills as a normal section.

Test it: export to PDF, select all the text, paste into a plain text editor. If the order is scrambled or content is missing, this is your problem. See ATS resume templates.

4. The image resume

As written: exported from a design tool as a PNG, or scanned from a printout.

Why it fails: no text layer, so a parser reads nothing and a screen reader reads nothing. That is the same failure Section508.gov addresses for accessible PDFs, and it means the document is effectively blank to a system.

Fixed: export as a text-based PDF and confirm you can select the text. See the Canva resume guide.

5. Inconsistent everything

As written: dates as “Mar 2021” in one entry and “03/2022” in the next, three bullets ending with periods and two without, two fonts because a section was pasted in, employer before title in some entries and after it in others.

Why it fails: it reads as a document nobody proofread, which in roles requiring attention to detail argues directly against you.

Fixed: one date format, one punctuation convention, one font, one field order. Ten minutes with a printed copy. See bullet point punctuation and the resume fonts guide.

6. Skill rating bars

As written: Python ●●●●○ · Excel ●●●●● · Leadership ●●●○○

Why it fails: your four out of five is not comparable to anyone else’s, there is no shared definition, and the graphic extracts as nothing. Rating your own leadership is worse than not mentioning it.

Fixed: Python (four years, built the reporting pipeline) · Excel (models with scenario switches, Power Query). See the resume skills section guide.

7. Grey text and cramped type

As written: 9 point body text in light grey, with half-inch margins reduced to a quarter inch to fit one page.

Why it fails: it is hard to read on a dim screen and worse in print, and light grey falls short of the contrast ratios in the WCAG standards.

Fixed: 10 to 12 point in near-black, half-inch margins minimum, and content cut rather than shrunk. See the one-page resume template guide.

8. Everything weighted equally

As written: five jobs across twelve years, four bullets each, including a role from 2013.

Why it fails: it runs to a page and a half, and space is being spent on work nobody will ask about.

Fixed: four or five bullets on the current role, two or three on the previous, one or none on older, and anything over fifteen years old compressed to a single earlier-career line. See the resume work experience guide.

9. The obsolete furniture

As written: an objective seeking a challenging position, a full postal address, “References available on request”, and Microsoft Office in the skills list.

Why it fails: none of it conveys anything, and together they mark the document as following a template from a much earlier era.

Fixed: all four deleted, and the reclaimed space used for achievements. See the resume sections guide and references on a resume.

10. Untailored, sent to everything

As written: one resume, unchanged, sent to forty postings across three different role types.

Why it fails: it competes against targeted documents from similar candidates, and its first bullets answer nobody’s specific requirements.

Fixed: reorder the bullets so the most relevant leads each role, rewrite the three-line summary per application, and adopt the posting’s vocabulary where honest. Ten minutes. See how to tailor a resume.

The two-minute self-diagnosis

Faster than reading your resume through, and it catches most of the above.

Test one: the paste test. Export to PDF, select all, copy, paste into a plain text editor. Read what comes out as if you were the machine. Is your name first? Are jobs in order with dates attached? Is anything missing? This finds failures 3, 4 and 6.

Test two: read only the first bullet of each role. Do they say what changed, or what you were responsible for? This finds failure 1, which is the one that matters most.

Harvard’s career service materials describe a resume as differentiating you from other candidates. Both tests are asking the same question: does this document do that, or could it belong to anyone?

Related

For the honest fixes, see resume achievements, the resume format guide and how to tailor a resume. For misstatements specifically, see lying on a resume. For current expectations, see 2025 resume trends.

Or run yours through the resume checker, free at Kazifi.