Why You’re Too Close to Your Own Resume
One of the hardest resumes to evaluate objectively is your own.
You know what every job involved. You remember the difficult clients, the projects that took months to complete, the problems you solved, and the work that was technically outside your job description. When you read a bullet on your resume, all of that context is already in your head.
The recruiter reading it doesn’t have any of that.
I recently heard from a Comprehensive Resume Review client who was a good example of this. She’s a recruiter herself and had been laid off for almost a year when we worked together. She later admitted that she had assumed working in recruiting meant she knew enough about resumes that she didn’t need help.
When I reviewed her resume, she had plenty to talk about. She had recruited across multiple industries and clients, handled high-volume hiring, coached junior recruiters, and had strong results throughout her career. But because she already knew the context behind all of it, she wasn’t always giving the reader enough of that context on the page.
She listed the clients she supported in an RPO environment, for example, but I wanted to know what she actually did for each client. There were good metrics, but some of them were buried underneath routine responsibilities. Other bullets told me that an initiative had been successful without explaining enough about her role in making it successful.
I also recommended adding a summary back to the resume. She thought summaries weren’t important anymore, but she had experience across different clients and industries that needed some framing. A focused summary could help establish what kind of role she was targeting and which parts of her background were most relevant before the recruiter started working through the chronology.
This happens all the time when people write their own resumes. Something can feel obvious because you lived it. You know that a certain client was huge. You know that a project was complicated. You know that being selected for something was a big deal. You know what an internal acronym means and why a particular metric was impressive.
None of that means the person reading your resume knows.
That’s why getting another set of eyes on a resume can be useful even if you’re a strong writer or understand recruiting. Someone who doesn’t already know your career can tell you where they’re missing context, where they have questions, and where something you think is impressive doesn’t actually look impressive because you haven’t explained why.
After the review, this client rewrote her resume using the feedback. Then last week, months after we worked together, I randomly received a LinkedIn connection request from her. She told me the resume help had “done the trick” and asked if I was going to do another pay-it-forward event because she wanted to help someone else this time.
She reads resumes for a living and still needed someone else to read hers.
If you’ve been working on the same resume for months, moving bullets around, changing words, and wondering why you’re not getting the response you expected, you may be too close to it to see what’s missing.
Karpiak Consulting’s Comprehensive Resume Review gives you recruiter-side feedback on what your resume is actually communicating, where the reader needs more context, and what you can change to make your experience easier to understand.
