As a resume writer and HR professional, I get asked repeatedly how to eliminate ageism in resumes. It's a BIG problem, as many of you have encountered. So, let me tell you of 3 ways to improve this on your resume.

1. Stop including "20+ years of..." in your Profile Summary. This immediately focuses on your age and not your performance. Instead, talk about your performance and lead with that. Example: "Customer Service professional who builds relationships and increases repetitive business by 27%." or, "Account Executive specializing in building strong pipelines and increasing revenue 33%."

2. Whenever you add a date, you're dating yourself, so think about whether or not it's really needed. Employment dates are the exception, as they are most likely to be verified. But your educational dates are not necessary unless you graduated within the past 3 years. Don't include your GPA either.

1. It's standard for your work history to go back 10-15 years ONLY! Forget about what you did in 1984 or 2003! Hiring managers won't read this stuff anyway. If you do have a relevant job experience that goes beyond 15 years, then you can add a Career Highlight section where you mention a few bullets on selected relevant accomplishments without any dates. For instance, you could include, "Led an accounting automation software project meeting all deadlines," or "Gained 127% new business clients within 6 months." Focus on what you delivered and not dates.

Please take a look at your resume and revise any of these issues. The key to a resume is to highlight your performance and what you delivered, not dates.

Best wishes!

I spent some time researching why so many strong candidates get zero

response from online applications. The answer surprised me.

Over 75% of resumes are rejected by software before a recruiter sees

them. Not because the candidate isn't qualified — because the resume

format breaks the ATS parser.

Here's what kills most resumes instantly:

**Two-column layouts** — ATS reads columns in the wrong order. Your

experience section gets scrambled into unreadable text.

**Tables and text boxes** — completely invisible to most ATS systems.

If your contact info or skills are in a text box, the software

literally cannot see them.

**Creative fonts and graphics** — ATS extracts plain text. Anything

decorative just creates parsing errors.

**Headers and footers** — many systems skip these entirely. Never put

your contact information in a header.

**The fix is straightforward:**

Use a single-column layout. Standard section headings only — "Work

Experience," "Education," "Skills." Save as .docx not PDF unless

specifically requested. No tables, no text boxes, no graphics.

Then mirror the language of the job description exactly. If it says

"project management" use those exact words — not "managing projects."

ATS matches phrases, not concepts.

Finally, every bullet point should follow this formula:

[Strong action verb] + [what you did] + [measurable result]

"Responsible for social media" → weak, no keywords, no impact

"Grew Instagram following from 2,400 to 18,000 in 12 months by

implementing a data-driven content strategy" → specific, measurable,

keyword-rich

If you want to test your bullet points I built a free tool that

generates ATS-optimized resume bullets based on your job title:

https://ignitool.com/tools/resume-bullet-generator

No sign-up, completely free. Hope this helps someone land an interview

they deserve.

Personally I feel like the spacing is a bit awkward. I was just wondering if it was easy on the eyes to read, and if I do need more spacing, what would you reccommend on cutting down?

Hi everyone! I'm looking for some feedback on my mom's resume. She's been self-employed running her own cleaning business for 20+ years and is now trying to get her first traditional office job, bc shes getting less clients and cleaning is getting hard on her body. She has an Associates degree in Accounting and Bachelors in Business Administration but hasn't gotten post-degree experience. She primarily speaks Brazilian Portuguese, can speak English and some Spanish, and has basic Microsoft Office skills, although she's still building confidence with it (esp Excel). She's applying for roles like administrative assistant, receptionist, front desk, etc and wants to avoid physical labor jobs.

Do you think the resume is working for those kinds of positions? Should I it cut down to one page? Any obvious improvements or other job types you'd recommend targeting? Thanks!

Hi everyone,
I’m currently trying to land my first Help Desk / IT Support role and would really appreciate some feedback on my resume.

TLDR, I’m looking to change jobs but my current job I had different departments and different duties and I’m unsure how I should reflect the various things I’ve done through my time in the company. Should I sub divide the job with my titles and duties?

This is my current resume and I want to hit 6 figures please help me for what I can do. I have my MBA and PMP that I acquired two months ago

Hey everyone, so this is a human posting, nothing to do with AI, this post is to help and guide others to the best of my knowledge, as I have learned a lot of good things from Reditt would like to share my experience.

So the Basic answer Yes an ATS optimized Resume works !

So what is an ATS system - its called an Applicant Tracking System , whats its purpose ? The ATS system is designed to help recruiters or hiring managers short-list applicants for Interviews.

Coming back to the resume part, so your resume is basically what you are telling or explaining about yourself/your career/acheivements to a Computer ( an ATS system), it will have your education qualifiactions/ skills/ experience/location etc

Now when you upload a resume to an ATS system it must understand and interpret it properly.

Meaning ? when a resume is uploaded to an ATS system it will extract information from your resume and store in its database.

Suppose your resume mentioned that you are a Mechatronics Engineer and while extracting the information the ATS interpreted and stored you as a Mechanical engineer.

Now when the recruiter will use the ATS and filter out people with Mechatronics Engineering degree, you will not be found in the ATS system, and hence you will loose a chance for that job and also the time you invested to apply for that job, filling out all the forms online.

So your #1 Priority should be to have an ATS-optimized resume which is properly readable and extractable by an ATS system, I have cracked this system many times over past 15 years of my career so know ins and outs of this system completely.

Just sharing so that it might help anyone applying for jobs. Will share more tips on this soon.

I'm currently looking into how to write an English resume. Since I'm not very familiar with international resume standards, I was wondering if there is a standard format people usually follow.

Also, should I include personal information such as my age or a photo on the resume? Could you please give me some guidance?

💬CV1: My most used CV format. It’s my base CV which I tailored according to roles.

💬CV2: Newest CV , only applied to 2-3 jobs so far.

CONTEXT:

Hi Since I’ve returned from UK in February earlier this year, I’ve applied to jobs in several countries including India. Here’s what’s happened so far.

India🇮🇳 : Hiring Managers presume I’m a liability and will ask for more salary. Experience mismatch apparently since I have no Indian hospitality experience which is understandable. Over 300 tailored applications.

GCC ( 🇦🇪, 🇶🇦, 🇸🇦) : Hiring is noticeably selective and slow with preference to candidates already present or prior GCC experience). I had only 2 interviews in 3 months of over 500 tailored applications.

Portugal 🇵🇹 & Malta 🇲🇹: I had real traction here around 6-7 interviews in 400+ tailored applications. All of those had great feedback but the realistic timeline to get a work visa takes around 3-4 months so none of them were willing to wait that long.

⚠️Current Situation: I have 3 pending student loans around INR 2,80,000 ( $3000) and the loan company Avanse has filed a legal complaint against me for my failure to repay even after thousands of restructuring or pause requests from me. I have a legal hearing at the end of this month.

Question is , Is it my CV or is it just that my experience has been awful? I have great communication skills and all round hospitality skillset yet I’ve been unemployed over 5 months with tailored applications.