Read your résumé out loud and mark the vague lines
Okay you guys, this is the part where I make you talk to yourselves at the kitchen table. Stick with me.
Get your résumé in front of you, printed if you can. Not on the laptop screen. There's something about paper that makes your eyes stop skimming and actually see the words. Reading a screen, your brain fills in gaps because it's used to scrolling past stuff. Paper slows you down.
Now read it out loud. Actual sound coming out of your mouth. I know it feels ridiculous. Do it anyway, maybe when nobody else is home.
Here's what you're listening for: any line where you'd feel a little embarrassed if a stranger asked "okay, prove it." That's your vague line. Mark it. I don't care if it's a highlighter, a pen circle, whatever's in the drawer.
What vague sounds like
"Hard worker." "Team player." "Excellent communication skills." "Detail-oriented." These show up on almost every résumé I've ever helped fix, and they mean nothing. Anyone can type them. Nobody can verify them. If a hiring manager has read four hundred résumés this month, and I promise some of them have, these words are wallpaper. Their eyes slide right past.
Same goes for "responsible for" as an opener. Responsible for what, and what happened because of it? That's the real sentence. "Responsible for" is the sentence's shadow.
Read each bullet and ask yourself: could a stranger check this? Could they call your old boss and confirm it, or see the result with their own eyes? If yes, keep it. If it's just a nice-sounding claim about your personality, mark it.
My honest opinion here
Every line on your résumé should be something a stranger could verify. That's the whole standard. Not "sounds impressive." Verifiable. "Managed a team" is weak. "Managed a crew of six on weekend shifts" is better. "Cut scheduling conflicts by handling it myself instead of emailing the manager every time" — now we're getting somewhere, even without a fancy number.
You don't need a statistic for everything. I know some résumé advice makes it sound like you're not allowed to write a sentence without a percentage sign in it. Sometimes you don't have the number and that's fine. What you need is a specific. A number is one kind of specific. A concrete detail is another.
How I do this at home
I mark mine in three passes, because I catch different things each time.
First pass, I'm just circling anything vague — the "hard worker" type lines, the empty adjectives.
Second pass, I read only the circled lines and ask "what did I actually do, in plain words, like I'm telling my neighbor." Not résumé words. Kitchen table words. Write that down next to it, even messy.
Third pass, I turn the kitchen table words into the specific version. That's the translating part — taking what's true and putting it in language a hiring person recognizes. We'll dig into that translating piece more in a later lesson, so if this feels rough right now, don't panic. Today is just about finding the weak spots.
The three-sitting thing
When I rebuilt my own résumé years ago — this was during the stretch when Ethan's work was shaky and I needed to bring in money fast — it took me three separate sittings to get through it. Not because I'm slow, but because I kept getting to a line, staring at it, and realizing I had no idea why I'd written it that way except that it sounded professional. I'd walk away, come back the next day with fresher eyes, and cut more.
By the time I was done I'd thrown out two-thirds of the thing. Two-thirds. It went from four pages down to under one. I still have a photo of the old four-page version on my phone. I show people sometimes just so they know what the "before" actually looks like — it's not pretty, and neither was mine.
That's normal. If you're marking half your résumé right now, good. That means the exercise is working, not that you're bad at this.
One caution: don't try to fix everything in the same sitting you're marking it in. Your brain wants to jump straight to rewriting once it spots a problem, and you end up rushing the fix. Mark today. Rewrite next time, with a clear head.
Before next time
Go through your whole résumé out loud at least once before we meet again, and bring it back marked up — I want to see actual highlighter, actual circles. If you don't mark anything, either your résumé's already tight or you weren't listening to yourself closely enough.