5 Common Resume Mistakes to Avoid When Landing Your Next L&D Role

When trying to land an L&D role, what holds most job seekers back is the one nonnegotiable needed to secure a job—a resume. Whether you are starting from scratch, updating your most recent experience, or pulling an old version out of the archives, creating a resume is often the most daunting (and time-consuming) task of any career transition.

What makes the resume process so daunting is determining the direction to take. With the current unprecedented and unpredictable job climate, what has worked in the past may not work anymore. Many “old-school” ways of tackling career transitions have evolved into standard one-size-fits-all approaches that don’t reflect the individuality of each job seeker.

However, it is crucial for job seekers to market their individuality and stand out from the crowd. To help you do so, let’s consider what dated advice to avoid when writing your resume.

Mistake 1—Creating a New Resume for Each Job Application

How much time do you spend updating your resume each time you apply for a role? On average, job seekers report spending upward of 45 minutes updating their resume each time they apply for a new job. With the average job seeker applying to at least 200 jobs during their search, that’s 150 hours you may find yourself spending on just updating your resume.

If you have to spend more than five minutes fine-tuning your resume before you apply for a job, that is a telltale sign that you don’t have a clear idea of your L&D niche. Your L&D niche is the intersection between your transferable skills, your career interests, and your core values. Your resume should reflect your niche, not be a carbon copy of the job description you’re about to apply to. When you develop a one-and-done resume that is tailored to you and intentionally focuses on applying to roles aligned with your skills, interests, and values, few edits should be needed each time you apply.

Mistake 2—Optimizing for the ATS

I’m sure you’ve heard the statistic that 70 percent of all companies use an applicant tracking system (ATS) as part of their hiring process. While this is true, the false narrative born from this statistic is that these companies also use the ATS to auto-reject candidates whose resumes don’t match specific keywords.

According to Hiring Thing, an applicant-tracking and employee-onboarding platform, an ATS “is not a magic tool that does the hiring themselves. There is no algorithm. There are parameters and customized hiring workflows, but those are set by people using the ATS, not the software.” What this means is that most of the time when the system is “auto-rejecting,” it is because of “knock-out” questions or parameters, such as (but not limited to) ability to relocate, willingness to travel, or years of experience.

One of the biggest mistakes job seekers make is overloading their resume with buzzwords and phrases from the job description to “beat the ATS.” Sadly, because this advice is so widespread, if you mirror your resume to match the keywords in the job description, it is likely that hundreds (if not thousands) of other candidates are doing the same. The result? Rather than standing out as a uniquely qualified candidate, you’re now lost in a sea of resumes that read the same.

So, who should you optimize for? A human. Numerous studies have shown that recruiters spend about 10 seconds reviewing a resume, so make sure it is easy to read (more on this in Mistake 5) and highlights impact, achievements, and metrics. Going back to Mistake 1, if you’ve created a niche-aligned resume, it is likely that your resume already contains similar keywords and verbiage to the job description without being an exact replica.

Mistake 3—ChatGPT-ing Your Resume

As rapidly as artificial intelligence (AI) technology is evolving, I promise you that if you throw a job description and your current resume into ChatGPT and have it spit out a shiny new resume for you, the person on the receiving end of your job application will know you did not write it.

While AI technology is certainly improving and becoming more humanistic, our human brains have also evolved alongside AI, and it is becoming easier to spot an AI-generated resume. In fact, resume.io conducted a study of over 3,000 managers across the country and found that “nationwide, a significant majority of hiring managers express a preference for receiving a poorly written but authentic resume over a perfectly polished AI-generated one.” While I don’t advocate for a poorly written resume either, you can see the level of scrutiny placed on AI-generated resumes.

This is not to say that you can’t leverage AI to speed up the resume-writing process. Some use cases for an AI platform like ChatGPT include:

• Condensing multiple bullet points into one

• Making your resume content clearer and more concise

• Drafting a profile statement aligned with your L&D niche

Mistake 4—Cramming Too Much In

Think of a great product advertisement you’ve experienced recently. Whether it’s a TikTok ad, TV or podcast commercial, or any other type of promotion, an advertisement has a limited window of time to capture—and keep—your attention. If an advertisement started going on and on about every single milestone endured to create the product, you would move past it quickly.

The same goes for your resume. You are the product, and your resume is the advertisement. Because of this, you want to be intentional about what you put in it, and even more intentional about what you leave out. To audit your resume, go line by line and ask yourself, “As I write this, do I want to do this exact same thing again in my next role?” If the answer is a hard yes, the content stays. If not, consider removing that content. Remember, your resume is a marketing document that highlights the skills you want to use in your next role through the lens of what you’ve accomplished in the past.

Mistake 5—Choosing Fashion Over Function

Earlier, I cautioned that you should never optimize your resume for an ATS. The one caveat to that is the resume format. Because the ATS is designed to parse, sort, and display resumes and candidate profiles, it must be able to read the document you submit. The quickest way to get your resume rejected is by making it artistic—by adding graphics, charts, columns, and custom fonts—and inadvertently unreadable by the software.

According to Flexjobs.com, “stick to text-based formats that the system can quickly parse. This will give you the best chance of getting your resume into the hands of a human recruiter.”

An Easier Way to Land Your Next L&D Role

Drafting an aligned resume can be time consuming at first, but the work you put in downstream will pay dividends upstream. If you are intentional about avoiding these mistakes to develop your one-and-done, niche-aligned resume, you’ll find the amount of time it takes for you to apply to jobs drastically decreases, and your application-to-interview success rate will skyrocket.

To get more tips and strategies for your career search, check out my book Land Your Next L&D Role.