Top 10 Resume Tips (Part 1): Summer’s Greatest Hits
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- 4 min read
Summer’s winding down, and hiring season is about to ramp up. September is one of the busiest times of year for recruiters, which makes right now the perfect moment to sharpen your resume and job search strategy.
Every week in the Shameless Plugs section of my newsletter, I share the strategies I use with Karpiak Consulting’s paying clients. These aren’t hypotheticals...they’re the real resume fixes and job search tactics that helped people land jobs, promotions, and salary bumps.
To wrap up summer, I’m counting down the 10 most-read Shameless Plugs of the season. We’ll do this in two parts. This post covers 10 through 6, and next week’s will feature the top 5.
10 – Focus Your Resume
One of the most common resume mistakes is trying to prove your entire career history at once. The result is what I call a “career scrapbook," with every job, every responsibility, every side project. While it may feel thorough, what it really does is bury the information a hiring manager actually cares about.
Recruiters don’t have time to connect the dots for you. If your resume makes them guess what you’re best at or why you fit a role, they’ll move on to the next candidate. The job of your resume isn’t to show everything you’ve done...it’s to prove you can do this job right now.
So, focus on the experience that matters most for your next role. Lead with the responsibilities, skills, and wins that align directly to the job you’re applying for, and trim back the filler. A Comprehensive Resume Review client who applied this principle walked away with a more senior role and a $20K raise simply because the resume finally told the right story.
9 – Lead With Relevance
The first third of your resume is prime real estate. If your summary is vague and your top bullets are generic, you’ve already lost the reader. Too many jobseekers treat the summary as a biography (a recap of everything they’ve done), instead of what it should be: a pitch for the job ahead.
Relevance should lead the way. Rewrite your summary so it speaks directly to the role you want next, not the one you’re leaving. Reorder your bullet points so the most relevant skills and achievements come first. And cut or reframe the parts of your history that distract from your story.
A Review Bundle client who embraced this approach successfully pivoted into a values-driven role. The reason? The recruiter didn’t have to dig. The resume’s most important details were front and center, and the value proposition was crystal clear.
8 – Make Pivots Feel Natural
If you’re changing industries, the worst mistake you can make is leaving it up to the reader to figure out why your past experience is relevant. Without a clear frame, recruiters default to “not a fit.”
The fix is to highlight transferable results instead of industry-specific tasks. Did you improve retention? Increase engagement? Streamline processes? Drive revenue growth? These are universal outcomes that matter in any field. By reframing your bullets around these kinds of results, you make the pivot feel intentional and logical.
One client came in for a Comprehensive Resume Review convinced their long career in one industry would block their move into another. By reframing their experience around business outcomes instead of job titles, we made the transition seamless. A few weeks later, they landed the job they “dearly wanted.”
7 – Emphasize Value, Not Tenure
Many jobseekers panic about short stints or multiple moves in a short period. They assume hiring managers will see their timeline and toss them aside. But here’s the truth: employers care less about tenure than about impact. If you made a difference, even in six months, that’s worth showcasing.
Instead of trying to hide or downplay short stints, shift the focus. Start every bullet with ownership...what you led, managed, or drove. Then spell out the impact: how you improved processes, reduced costs, grew revenue, or delivered results. Add details like budgets, project size, or team scope to give weight to your work.
That’s exactly what a Premium Edit Bundle client did. By emphasizing value instead of tenure, they landed their ideal job with a $110K salary. You can’t change your timeline, but you can change how you frame it.
6 – Realign for the Role
Not every resume needs a total overhaul. Sometimes, the foundation is solid but the story is misaligned. A resume with a broad summary, buried wins, or formatting that makes progression look like job hopping isn’t broken...it just needs realignment.
Start by tightening the summary so it mirrors the language of your target roles. Then, move your biggest and most relevant wins up top where they’ll be seen. If you’ve held multiple roles at one company, group them together to show stability and growth. And don’t forget to add context like team size, budgets, or reporting scope. These details help readers understand your impact.
One Comprehensive Resume Review client avoided “settling” for a lower-level role by realigning their resume this way. The experience was already there, but once the resume reflected the right level of clarity and context, employers saw them as a direct fit.
That’s the first half of the list! Each of these takeaways is something you can start applying to your resume right now.
Next week, I’ll share the top 5 most-read Shameless Plugs of the summer: the strategies that resonated most with readers and will give you a strong foundation heading into hiring season.