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Interview with a recruiter: Everything you've wanted to ask about resumes

Common mistakes, formatting tips, and tactical advice

Author

Severin Wiggenhorn
May 12, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes

Hello!

A newsletter is a great excuse to ask smart, interesting people questions. In addition to sharing job search and career advice from my own experience, I’m going to be talking to other people about their challenging job searches, interesting career paths, or in this case: what we can learn from someone whose job is to help people get jobs.

Dan had so many great insights on resumes, things I’d always wanted to know, things I never thought to ask, and things I’ve read on the internet but was skeptical of, that this needed to be a whole post. Recruiters read hundreds of resumes every day so I wanted insights from a professional. 

Also, check out Part I on everything you’ve wanted to know about working with a recruiter but were too scared or didn’t have anyone to ask.

This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.

— Severin
MEET TODAY’S GUEST

Dan Thompson, Recruiter Extraordinaire

Dan is the Managing Director at Vaco Tampa, overseeing a multi-million dollar technology consulting and recruiting practice in the Greater Tampa Bay Area. Since joining the team, he’s helped grow the technology practice into one of the largest divisions at Vaco. He’s passionate about giving back and serves as Chairman of the Hillsborough County Academy of IT and sits on the Advisory Board for Cyber Security Education at the Muma College of Business at the University of South Florida. Dan graduated from the University of Florida (Go Gators!) and co-hosts and co-founded Stadium and Gale, the number one-ranked Florida Gators podcast.

Part II – Everything you wanted to ask a recruiter about resumes

What are the most common resume mistakes? What advice do you give over and over?

The biggest thing is showing the results of your work, not just copy and pasting the job description. I know what the job description says, but what were your responsibilities specifically? What value did you bring to the organization? That’s what recruiters and hiring managers are looking for.

I don’t want a bullet that says C# and Angular. I want to know what were you building? What did that project accomplish within the organization? How big was your team? How big was the budget? What were your responsibilities: were you managing or leading teams? Did you have an intern you were directing maybe?

Quantify your work with numbers and facts. But also be clear about the story you’re telling.

What’s most important is that somebody can read your resume and understand what you did.

I love that. One of the ways I try to frame this for people is that everything on your resume should be specific to your experience, like the bullets should be so specific to your projects and impact that no one else could put them on their resume. The bullets are setting up the stories that the recruiters and hiring managers are going to ask about. Because ideally your resume is a story of, I built this thing or had this impact, and that should be what gets the recruiter or HM excited to ask you questions. Does that resonate with you?

Yes, that’s a great way to think about it.  

Any very tactical advice on resumes?

Name, city and state where you live, no need for a full address. Have a professional email address and have a working phone number. I’ve encouraged people to get a Google number that they can control a little more, that’s not their personal number. You can control when you take calls and you know every call to that number is related to your job search, which is especially important given the prevalence of spam calls. You don’t want to not answer a job search related call!

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Also, and I suspect people aren’t as aware of this, these resumes usually get pushed into a database or application tracking system (ATS). Usually all the formatting gets stripped out and so the content can get a little jumbled, so keep your resume formatting as simple as possible.

Yes, I’ve seen that on the inside, from the hiring side, where the formatting gets messed up. That’s a great call out!

Ok, Dan, I have to ask you this because I see so many LinkedIn posts and hear people talking about this. Are robots auto-rejecting people? That’s not been my experience at any of the 4 companies I’ve worked at where I had a role in hiring, but I want to hear it from an expert.

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No! There’s no robot that’s auto-rejecting resumes.

There may be knockout questions, where companies are looking for certain skills, or you need to live in a certain place, certain salary expectations, but every ATS is being controlled by human beings.

What other common mistakes do you see?

Be able to talk about everything that’s on your resume. It happens a lot that people are like I took a course on this or I’ve seen a demo of this or it was a long time ago. I know candidates are just trying to show the breadth of their experience, but if it’s on your resume you need to have professional-level experience with it and be able to speak comfortably about it in an interview.

One of the first things I do when talking to candidates is pick something obscure on their resume and say, tell me about your experience here.

RESOURCES

Dan’s Recommendations

Subscribe so you don’t miss part III on how Dan became a recruiter including great insight on the opportunity cost of law school and why he turned it down after getting admitted, how relationship building opens unexpected doors, and how to pivot from a niche job (advising fraternities).