The lying resumes had to stop. After enough customizations for enough job descriptions, my resume had started to look like a copy of a copy of a copy: roughly the right overall shape, but not quite recognizable as the same document.
As I’ve been seeking a new job opportunity this time around, I’ve been trying to be selective about where I apply, but also to tailor the resume I submit to highlight how I fit the specifics of each job description. To avoid pulling my hair out, I have also started to rely on an LLM to help. The output typically meets my standards, but one major issue that I’ve started to notice is that my repeated modifications had started to introduce a lot of drift from ground truth and had lost the plot. For example, one position working with a large international bank customer had somewhere picked up the location of Toronto, Ontario. I’ve been to Toronto exactly once, and I never left the airport.
The typical sequence of Read JD -> Edit Resume -> Apply to Job -> Save New Canonical Resume was the problem. Every time I modified one of those resumes, even if I went back a version or two and pulled from one that was a little more solid, I was still introducing more differences from reality. I needed a way to reach back to my real work history and build a resume from that information, rather than further modify the original modifications. This seemed obvious once I saw it, but somehow absent from everything I had tried.
So I applied the Great Truth of Software: nobody can do it better than I can. I spent a few days turning my real career story into a repeatable process that pulled straight from the source. The process is smoother and faster than before, and I stopped worrying about what I might have accidentally claimed. And I’ve started to see actual results. Prior to this, I was getting a screening call once every few weeks, but my current post-epiphany record is a recruiter contact the day after applying.
I can’t in good conscience recommend rebuilding an entire system every time you notice an inefficiency. But I can recommend knowing exactly what is on your resume.