Resume Fights

Scary statistics: US firms have announced 50% more job cuts than at this point last year; the hiring rate has fallen to its lowest non-pandemic level in a decade; more than a quarter of the unemployed have been without a job for at least six months (The Economist 11/6/2025). In that environment, I've gotten a lot of "help" on my resume, and I'm not sure how helpful it was.

When I was laid off, an outplacement firm (hired by my former company) recommended many changes to my resume. Some of them made it better, but I've reverted many of them over time as I decided that the changes were hurting it instead. A former colleague DG reached out and (unprompted) said that she had the same experience. Let's talk about my resume journey, and lament the lack of a feedback loop.

Overall Comparison

The big changes were how much summary text to put at the top of the resume. A few years ago I consolidated my previously two-page resume to one page in the thought that it was more professional. This included trimming some bullets and tweaking formatting, and I dropped the keywords section from the top. The advice from the outplacement agency was to embrace two-page resumes and add back keywords and other narrative at the top.

I'll go into further detail on each later on, but here's a summary: of the three documents sorted oldest-to-newest left-to-right. (All resumes on this page have my phone number and email obscured)

The post-layoff resume - the one I updated same-day as I got my notice - has my most-recent title 2 inches from the top of the page (red bar). After a few header items regarding my location and contact information, it jumps right into experience with three bullets for the most-recent job. The "agreed-on" resume that I negotiated with the agency has my most-recent title 4.25 inches from the top (green bar) - nearly 40% down the first page! My current version pulls that back a bit, 3.875 inches from the top (blue bar).

Version	Most-Recent Title Position	% Down the Page
Post-layoff (red)	2"	18%
Outplacement (green)	4.25"	39%
Current (blue)	3.875"	35%

If a hiring manager is looking at my resume, they still need to look more than twice as far down the page to find my most-recent title compared to my post-layoff version. Given that people look at resumes for 15-30 seconds (per the agency), those 3-4 inches at the top had better be doing some important things. When I was a hiring manager, I routinely skipped past everything until I could find the "Experience" section; I don't know if I'm typical that way, but I worry that I'm wasting the most important real estate in the document.

Post-Layoff Resume

I updated this resume immediately upon getting my notice. It used my previous efforts on getting the resume down to one page, which meant that it consolidated some job titles (e.g. one section for Value Stream Leader and Senior Value Stream leader because I was promoted without a change in responsibilities) and included no keywords outside those in my accomplishment bullets. In addition, following some (probably incorrect) advice, my bullets implied my responsibilities as well as highlighted my accomplishments: I didn't have a separate line describing the role itself.

Outplacement Resume

The agency made major changes in formatting and content. Formatting-wise, they removed a lot of the differing indentations I used to separate sections of the resume (fair) and added some extra whitespace in other areas to make section breaks stand out (also fair). Content-wise, some headlines moved to the very top, like adding the PMP and MBA right after my name LinkedIn-style. But the biggest change was the addition of a headline, a narrative section, and a keywords section all before rolling into experience.

The purpose of these additional sections is to give a human reviewer a small summary of the rest of the document so that they're interested enough to read more. They are also to give automated review systems enough keywords that they highlight my resume and present it as a potential match to that human reviewer. Because the top of the first page is so valuable, balancing "enough to meet those objectives" with "don't waste the reviewer's time" is difficult. We ended up with a two-line headline (title and subtitle), four lines of narrative, and two lines of keywords.

Outplacement Resume: Trite Writing

I had the most conflicts with the agency over narrative. They wanted to add some terms that turned me off. Frankly, I thought they sounded like "happy horseshit". This included opening my narrative with "Dynamic leader passionate about streamlining processes through automation, providing maximum responsiveness with minimum effort". I liked the second half of the sentence, but "Dynamic leader passionate about..."? Every one of those words is trite self-promotion business-speak and I have less respect for a candidate branding themselves using them.

Similarly, although I liked the phrasing they developed "delivering results in diverse and challenging roles" (because I have worked in a wide variety of functions), opening it with "Renowned for" cheapened the statement. The "Dynamic leader" didn't survive my first cut, but "Renowned" survived until my father (rightly) made fun of me for it.

Outplacement Resume: "Timelessness"

The agency recommended a "timeless" resume: one that covered only the past 10-15 years and avoided dates otherwise. The intent is to avoid age discrimination and enable focus on the most-recent accomplishments. This made sense to me initially, but I've gotten different people advising me to reverse it and I mostly have. I'm not yet of an age where discrimination is a huge worry, and often I highlight my "nearly two decades' experience in aerospace manufacturing," so hiding it on my resume is...odd. In addition, timelessness meant taking my total years with the company off my resume, leaving only the durations of time in each title. But I got pulled into special projects with new titles over the past few years, which can make me look like a job-hopper. In addition, my company name changed several times while I stayed, which bolsters the impression. In my most-recent resume, I've added back "2007-2025" at the same company to tell a completely different story.

I did decide to leave out the graduation years for my Bachelor's and Master's degrees. My first Project Management Professional (PMP) certification was in 2019, so I left it in following the "less than 10 years" rule. In my most-recent resume, I pulled the PMP date off for consistency and added back the grade-point average for my MBA (because it's 3.94 / 4.00) and my graduation honors for my Bachelor's (magna cum laude) because why not?

Current Resume

I've reclaimed some of the top of the page for experience. In addition to moving the "main content" further to the top, it let me get my Value Stream Leader experience onto the first page as well. I've spent the most time in Value Stream Leadership / Program Management in my career and have been looking at those sorts of roles, so having it slip to the second page every time seems counter-productive. I sacrificed the keywords second as those keywords often appear in the accomplishment bullets anyway, and the subtitle and narrative often get completely rewritten for each job posting to align with the language in the job description.

I also captured my part-time Chief Financial Officer (CFO) role for a small local business, but in the past few weeks pushed it to the second page to focus on the big-company roles instead. I also had someone point out that since I'm already using the second page, I might as well use more than a quarter of it so I've expanded those sections. Instead of "job title only" for my "prior to 2013" titles, they've gotten 1-2 lines each to describe responsibilities and accomplishments.

Something I'm proud of but don't know if it actually helps is the presence of links in my resume. I started this website to raise my profile online, and so I wrote about many of my accomplishments at work. I pushed myself to have an article I could like to for every bullet on my first page so that an interested hiring manager could look further. Does anyone? No idea. If nothing else, it helped me come up with topics and document my accomplishments while they were freshest in my mind.

Conclusions and Moving Forward

As a member of that 25% of the unemployed who have been out-of-work for more than six months, I've found my greatest frustration is the lack of feedback. I describe submitting resumes as "shouting into the void" or "dropping them into the abyss" because it's extremely rare to hear back, and I never know why the resume didn't trigger interest. Is there a simple fix that would magically get hiring managers to call me? Probably not. But of the three times that I've gotten a hiring manager to talk to me about a currently-open role (excluding future peers, Human Resources, etc.), I've networked my way to the hiring manager all three times. In this job-search cycle, I've never had a resume dropped in an application portal yield a conversation with a human unless I've also networked my way to a human outside the application-portal system.

From what I've seen online and talking to people, that's the hardest part about job-searching while unemployed: without feedback ("you need more years in X" or even better "when I see Y on your resume it instantly turns me on/off") it's really hard to know if we're doing everything we can. I might have already done the magical thing and tomorrow a hiring manager will call me and say "your resume surfaced from the thousands of AI-slop applications we got and I'd love to talk to you" and it turns into a job...but I can't expect that. I just need to keep tweaking my resume to what suits me - not the agency - and network and apply until the right match turns up.

Best of luck to everyone who is hunting for a job and to everyone who is hunting for a candidate. May you all find each other!