Business & Finance
Ex-Google recruiter: The No. 1 resume 'red flag' that makes hiring managers stop reading—and how to fix it
Key Points
When you talk about your work in a resume, you know exactly what your team accomplished, why the project mattered and what the results meant. But the recruiter looking at your resume has none of that context. They have about six seconds to scan your application — and hundreds of others waiting.
When you talk about your work in a resume, you know exactly what your team accomplished, why the project mattered and what the results meant. But the recruiter looking at your resume has none of that context. They have about six seconds to scan your application — and hundreds of others waiting.
For over a decade, I've worked as a recruiter at major companies like Google, TikTok, Uber and The New York Times. The biggest resume mistake I see is writing for the one person who already knows your story: you.
This mistake is often completely invisible to job seekers, even the hardest-working ones. And it's a red flag because it makes your accomplishments harder to understand and your impact easier to overlook.
I tell all my clients, whether they are new graduates or CEOs, to try this exercise: Cover your name at the top of the page. If your read your resume and it seems like it could be any other candidate's, you're in trouble. It means the value of your work will not translate to the person who is deciding your future.
This red flag shows up in four ways. Here's how to spot each one and how to fix them.
1. The 'you had to be there' language
Here's a line I've seen hundreds of versions of: "Conducted financial analysis on operating spending and budget trends to support strategic planning and decision-making."
The person who wrote it knows exactly what it means. They know the department, the budget and who the work supported. To an outsider, it's so generic that it tells me almost nothing, and I'm not going to spend my six seconds trying to decode it.
The fix: Add a line of context before your bullets. Briefly explain what the organization does and what your role was within it. How would you describe it to a friend or to your grandma? Provide some key context to give a stranger a way in.
2. The number that never explains itself
"Add metrics" is some of the most repeated resume advice there is. It is good advice. But a number with no context is just as unhelpful as no number at all.
Take "$630,000 in Q2," for example. Is that $630,000 in sales? Cost savings? Donations raised? Revenue generated? A statistic is meaningless without a reference. Remember that your accomplishment is the figure plus what it represents.
The fix: A number is only meaningful when the reader knows what it measures and why it matters.
3. The insider shorthand
A bullet like "Owned the Atlas migration via the FRED pipeline" is a foreign language to anyone who wasn't on your team.
Make a jargon checklist: internal tool names, project codenames, company-specific acronyms, and other shorthand that only your colleagues would recognize.
The fix: Go through your resume carefully and take out anything that requires insider knowledge to understand. Efficiently describe what the tool or project actually was, in plain terms, so that someone at a different company, or even better, in a different industry can understand it.
4. The 'skill' that's really an adjective
"Excellent communication. Team player. Hard-working. Detail-oriented." Nearly every resume claims these, which is exactly why they carry no weight. They're impossible to verify and don't say anything specific about you.
Skills are things you've actually done and can demonstrate. Attributes are personality traits, and they belong in an interview, not as unsupported claims on a resume.
For example, "Excellent communication" proves nothing. "Supported English- and Spanish-speaking customers for four years" shows communication skills in action
The fix: For every skill listed, ask if you can prove it with a specific example. If you can't, it's an adjective. Cut it.
Farah Sharghi is an HR and technical recruiter, career coach, public speaker and content creator. She posts about job hunting, interview prep, and salary negotiations on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok.
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