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I’ve been applying for jobs but can’t get a look in. I rarely hear back from the organisations I apply to. On the rare occasion I do, I immediately follow up and ask for their thoughts on why I wasn’t suitable. I have never received a reply.
A friend suggested I try a resume improvement service. I am keen to improve my applications in any way I can, so I took their advice. But the response from the service was underwhelming. It mentioned a few broad, common-sense ideas, but I was already employing all of them. It mentioned some more specific ones, but I’m not convinced they improved my resume at all – one in particular seemed like a terrible suggestion. Am I just being precious or have I been sold a lemon?
The experience you outlined at the top of your question is representative of a major, long-term shift in the way job applications are generally processed. One of the main byproducts of this shift is capable, well-qualified people earnestly and conscientiously applying for jobs and hearing absolutely nothing in response.
Going by the emails I receive, the conversations I have, the articles I read (from around the world) and the experts I speak with, this problem is now so prevalent and has been happening for so long, it feels almost like an illness now in a steady state. It’s still unpleasant – you don’t want it to happen to you – but it’s no longer out of the ordinary.
I have no doubt there are good resume improvement services out there that genuinely help jobseekers, so I think your friend’s advice was reasonable. But I hope you didn’t take that advice thinking “my applications must be hopeless, and I desperately need to improve them”.
The fact is that various factors, advancements in AI being just one of them, mean that job hunts today are radically different to – and arguably far more deflating than – job hunts of not very long ago.
Whatever your reason for using this service, I think your reservations about its quality are probably well-founded.
It’s true that what you’re experiencing may be caused by an imperfect resume or a not-quite-right cover letter or a misapprehension about where your own strengths lie. But I think it’s much more likely to be the product of a pitiless and cold job application system in 2026.
Not always, but far too often, this system completely undervalues the time and effort taken by applicants, and blithely disregards the pernicious consequences of leaving a person hanging indefinitely.
Whatever your reason for using this service, I think your reservations about its quality are probably well-founded.
I agree with you that one suggestion offered by the purported author of your ‘audit’ was a shocker. We won’t publish precisely what you were told, but in general terms it suggested replacing your plain language with buzzwords.
It then seemed to imply that you should make up stats to quantify your success. If I were to be as generous as possible, what they might have been attempting to say is that if you can use numbers to prove a point, you should. But this was nowhere near clear enough.
The other major problem with what you were given is that many recommendations related to things your resume clearly already does. In some cases, the report conceded this, but in others it seemed to suggest these were areas of improvement or elements that you’d neglected.
This is one of many examples of the report’s wording being amiss. Much of it reads just a bit off. It points to something I don’t think will surprise you in the slightest: I don’t think it was written by a human.
At best, it might have been perfunctorily edited by one. It reads to me like a collection of generic “improvements” selected from a presumably long, pre-written list, roughly collated and then given one or two token tweaks – a name here, a reference to a job there – in a tepid attempt to personalise it.
But the major worry I have is that my first-glance take – that so many of these touted improvements are just half-arsed adaptations of dusty self-help waffle – is wrong. That when the report essentially tells you to load your resume with impenetrable jargon it is, in fact, offering you practical, useful advice.
That to have your resume get through the applicant tracking system that gate keeps for so many hiring managers today, you do indeed need to turn your resume into a catalogue of highly specific, fatuous and facile “keywords”.
To answer your ultimate question, in some ways I hope you were sold a lemon. If the advice you received was the resume writing equivalent of a peach, goodness help us all.
Jonathan Rivett is a writer based in Melbourne. He’s written about workplace culture and careers for more than a decade.From our partners
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