Took me 3 full days to figure out why my resume kept getting rejected until I changed one stupid word

I swapped 'managed' to 'led' in my bullet points and got 4 callbacks in the same week after 8 months of nothing so has anyone else had a tiny word change make that big of a difference?

2 comments

2 Comments

zarap1417d agoMost Upvoted

oh man that's brutal but honestly not surprising at all. i had something similar happen with my resume - i changed "responsible for" to "drove" and suddenly started getting interviews. it's wild how those little action verbs trigger something in the hiring software or recruiter's brain. i mean who knew a single word could make or break months of job hunting. happy it worked out for you though, that must feel amazing.

kelly.emma17d ago

So did you just swap the word without changing anything else around it? Like did you keep the same sentence structure and just replace that one word, or did you rewrite the whole thing while you were at it? I'm wondering if it's the verb itself or if maybe the act of rethinking how you described your work made you more intentional with the whole resume. Been thinking about tweaking mine but not sure if just a quick swap is worth the trouble or if I need to start over.