How I Rewrote My Resume and Got More Callbacks

How I Rewrote My Resume and Got More Callbacks

I still remember staring at my first resume after graduating with my journalism degree. It was… fine. I mean, it had my name on it. It had my GPA. It had a little section for skills where I’d listed my freeCodeCamp courses and the CS50 course I’d grinded through late at night. At the time, I genuinely thought that was enough. Turns out, I didn’t know the first thing about what a resume was actually supposed to do.

The Document I Thought Was “Good Enough”

Here’s the thing nobody tells you when you graduate — your resume isn’t a biography. It’s not a record of how hard you worked or how many all-nighters you pulled or how much you sacrificed to get that degree. Nobody cares about that. Not yet. Not on paper.

When I first put mine together, I wrote it like a simple bio. Academic background. A few courses. Some vague descriptions of what I’d done. It looked like every other resume in the pile, which — I’d come to learn — is the worst thing it could be.

I wasn’t thinking about it as a marketing document. I was thinking about it as a formality. Something you hand over and then the interviewer just… magically sees your potential. That’s not how it works. Not even close. Harvard Business Review puts it plainly — a resume needs to be accomplishment-focused, not duty-focused. I was doing the opposite.

The Grind That Humbled Me

So I started applying. And applying. And applying some more.

I’ll be honest — the silence was brutal. You send something out and you just wait. Days go by. Nothing. You refresh your inbox. Nothing. You start wondering if the emails even went through. They did. People just weren’t responding.

What I didn’t understand at the time was that my resume was getting filtered out before a single human even laid eyes on it. A huge chunk of employers run applications through software — Applicant Tracking Systems — that scan for specific keywords and formatting before a recruiter ever opens the file. If your resume isn’t built to pass that filter, it doesn’t matter how qualified you are. You’re invisible.

And even when it did reach a real person? I later learned that the average recruiter spends about 6 to 8 seconds — seconds — scanning a resume before deciding whether to keep reading or move on. Six seconds. I was writing paragraphs. Long, careful, thoughtful paragraphs. Nobody was reading them.

The response rates I was seeing made sense once I understood all this. On platforms like LinkedIn, you’re lucky to hear back on 3% to 13% of applications. Apply directly on a company’s website? Sometimes it’s even lower — around 2% to 5%. And in a competitive market, it can take 40 or 50 applications just to land a single interview. I didn’t have 50 applications in me without changing something.

What I Actually Changed

The rewrite wasn’t one big dramatic moment. It was more like slowly realizing everything I was doing wrong and fixing it piece by piece.

The first thing I killed was the duty-list format. My original resume was full of phrases like “Responsible for…” and “Managed…” — passive, vague, forgettable. I learned to swap those for action verbs and, more importantly, results. Not “wrote articles” but “published 12 feature stories that grew site traffic by X.” Not “handled social media” but “grew an audience.” Numbers. Actual numbers. That shift alone changed how the whole thing read. Peer-reviewed research backs this up — quantified accomplishments significantly increase perceived hireability compared to duties-only descriptions.

The second thing I did was stop treating the top of my resume like a header and start treating it like a hook. Two or three sentences at the very top — a professional summary — that immediately answered the question: Who is this person and what can they do for me? Recruiters scan top to bottom. If you haven’t grabbed them in the first few lines, you’ve already lost.

Third — and this one hurt a little — I cut it down. Ruthlessly. One page. I’d been trying to include everything to show I was well-rounded. But “well-rounded” on a resume just reads as unfocused. Relevant experience first. Everything else gone. Forbes confirms brevity and design minimalism are two of the biggest resume trends right now — for good reason.

And then the keywords. Every job posting tells you exactly what they want. It’s right there in the description. I started pulling specific phrases and skills directly from job postings and weaving them into my resume so the ATS software would actually recognize me as a match. It sounds almost too simple. But it works. LinkedIn’s own data on high-growth roles shows exactly which skills employers are searching for — and those are the words you want on the page.

What Surprised Me Most

The shift in response rate was real. Going from almost nothing to actually hearing back — that feeling is hard to describe. It wasn’t luck that changed. The market didn’t change. The jobs didn’t change. The only thing that changed was the document.

What hit me hardest was this: a resume isn’t about your struggles. Nobody reading it cares how hard the journey was. They care about results. That’s it. Your 20 years of ups and downs, your late nights, your setbacks, your detours — none of that shows up on a resume. What shows up is what you did. What you produced. What you can prove.

There’s something almost cold about that. But once you accept it, it’s actually freeing. You stop trying to explain yourself and start showing your value. That’s a different document entirely. It also reminded me of something I wrote about over at the habits of unflashy wealth builders — the people who win quietly aren’t the loudest in the room. They’re the ones who let results do the talking.

What This Means If You’re Job Searching Right Now

The market in 2025 and 2026 is not forgiving. There are a lot of people applying for the same roles. A lot of qualified people. The difference between getting a callback and getting silence is often not talent — it’s presentation.

If you’re a journalism grad, a liberal arts grad, someone coming back after a gap, someone switching careers — none of that disqualifies you. The BLS data on unemployed persons by reason shows that career reentrants and switchers make up a significant chunk of the job market. You’re not alone in rebuilding. But a generic, duty-list resume probably will hold you back. The competition is too dense for a “good enough” document.

And if you’re moving jobs because you want better pay — which, according to Pew Research, about 61% of job switchers in 2024 cited as their main reason — then your resume needs to clearly communicate your value, not just your history. Those are two very different documents.

The good news is that the fix isn’t complicated. It just requires being honest with yourself about what your resume is actually communicating right now. If you’ve been thinking about the bigger picture of career and financial momentum, my piece on the quiet alchemy of compound interest connects nicely to this — because career growth and financial growth work on the same principle. Small, consistent improvements compound into something serious.

5 Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me Earlier

1. Treat every resume like a custom document, not a template.
Copy-pasting the same resume to 50 jobs is a trap. Spend 10 minutes per application pulling keywords from that specific job description and adjusting your summary to match. It makes a real difference.

2. Replace every “responsible for” with an action and a result.
“Responsible for managing content” becomes “Developed and published weekly content series, increasing average readership by 30%.” If you don’t have numbers, estimate honestly. Something is always better than nothing.

3. The top third of your resume is everything.
Put your strongest, most relevant material at the very top. Professional summary, key skills, most recent and relevant experience. Recruiters are scanning, not reading. Make those first few inches count.

4. One page is a discipline, not a limitation.
Cutting your resume down forces you to figure out what actually matters. That process alone will change how you talk about yourself in interviews too.

5. Don’t skip the ATS test.
Before you submit, paste your resume into a plain text document and see how it reads. If it looks like scrambled code, so does your application on the other end. Simple, clean formatting — no text boxes, no heavy graphics — passes through cleanly every time.

6. Add real skills, even if they feel small.
My freeCodeCamp and CS50 courses felt minor when I listed them. They weren’t. They signaled curiosity, self-direction, and actual technical ability. Certifications, online courses, tools you’ve genuinely used — put them in. They matter more than you think.

The Honest Closing Thought

A resume is a strange thing. It’s supposed to represent you — your whole journey, everything you’ve built, all the years you put in — compressed into a single page. And it can feel reductive. Almost insulting, even.

But here’s what I’ve come to believe: the discipline of writing a great resume teaches you something important about yourself. It forces you to look at your own story and ask, what actually mattered here? What did I actually produce? That question is worth sitting with, regardless of whether you’re job searching or not.

The paper doesn’t define you. But learning to tell your story clearly and confidently? That’s a skill that’ll follow you everywhere. And if you’re thinking about the long game — not just landing the next job but building something lasting — the unflashy wealth builders I’ve written about have a lot in common with the best resume writers: they’re precise, they’re patient, and they let the results speak.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve learned so far. Would love to hear what’s worked for you.

— Bred

Sources referenced: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics · SHRM · Glassdoor · NACE · Journal of Organizational Behavior · Harvard Business Review · Forbes · Pew Research