What not to put on your résumé

Most résumé advice is about what to add. This one is about what to cut.

Here's the reason it matters. A recruiter spends somewhere around 6 to 8 seconds on the first pass of a résumé. That's not a lot of room. Every line that isn't helping your case is taking space and attention from a line that could. So the question for each thing on the page is simple: is this earning its spot, or is it just there because résumés usually have it?

I've rewritten my own résumé to change industries three times — heavy-civil construction, then telecom and contracting, then facilities and robotics. Every time, the biggest improvement came from deleting, not adding. Here's what I cut, and what I'd tell you to cut too.

Private information that only adds risk

Start here, because this is the category people get wrong in a way that can actually hurt them.

Your résumé gets emailed around, uploaded to job boards, and forwarded to people you'll never meet. Treat everything on it as public. That means a few things don't belong on it:

• Your full street address. City and state is plenty. A recruiter doesn't need your door number to call you, and you don't need your home address sitting in a hundred inboxes and job-board databases.
• Your date of birth, age, or graduation years that give it away. In the US these invite age bias and you're not required to share them.
• Your Social Security number, driver's license, or passport number. These never go on a résumé. If a "job application" asks for them up front, that's a red flag, not a step.
• A photo, in the US. Some countries expect one. American hiring mostly doesn't, and a photo opens the door to bias before anyone reads a word you wrote. It also tends to break résumé parsers, which I'll get to.
• Marital status, religion, health, or anything about your family. None of it predicts whether you can do the job, and all of it can be used against you, legally or not.

This is the part of the topic I care about most, because it's the whole reason ResumAI is built the way it is. When you use the AI tailoring, your PII is scrubbed before your résumé is ever sent to a writing model — the model works on a masked version, not your name and contact block. But the document you hand to an employer is still your call. So the rule holds on both sides: the less private data you put on the page, the less there is to leak.

What you actually need up top is small: your name, a professional email, a phone number, your city and state, and a link to a LinkedIn profile or portfolio if it's real and current. That's the whole contact block.

Dead weight that wastes the reader's time

The next category isn't dangerous. It's just filler that's quietly costing you space.

The objective statement. "Seeking a challenging role where I can leverage my skills" tells the reader nothing they didn't already know — you want the job, that's why you applied. If you want a line at the top, make it a summary that says what you are and what you've done, with a number in it. Not what you're hoping to get.

"References available on request." Everyone knows you'll provide references if asked. The line is a holdover. Delete it and give that space back to your work.

Every job you've ever had. A résumé isn't a legal record of your whole career. Roughly the last 10 to 15 years, or your last few relevant roles, is enough for most people. When I moved out of construction, the summer job from fifteen years earlier wasn't making the case for the job I wanted — it was diluting it. If a role doesn't support the story you're telling for this application, it can come off.

Hobbies and interests that don't connect to anything. "I enjoy hiking and photography" is fine small talk and dead space on a résumé. Keep an interest only if it's genuinely relevant or a real credential — an active certification, a volunteer role you led, a side project you shipped.

Anything a résumé parser can't read

Most applications go through software before a person sees them. That software reads plain text and structure, and it chokes on decoration. So a few popular design choices actively work against you:

• Text boxes, tables, and multi-column layouts, which parsers often read in the wrong order or not at all.
• Putting your name and contact info in the header or footer, where a lot of parsers never look.
• Logos, icons, charts, and photos, which are invisible to the software and add nothing for the human either.

A clean, single-column, top-to-bottom layout isn't a boring choice. It's the one that survives the trip to a human. (I go deeper on this in the post on how an ATS actually works.)

Filler adjectives with nothing behind them

"Hard-working." "Detail-oriented." "Team player." "Results-driven." Everyone writes these, which is exactly why they've stopped meaning anything. The reader skims right past them because they can't be checked.

The fix is the same one that makes any résumé stronger: replace the adjective with the evidence. Don't say you're results-driven — show the result. When I negotiated a drone-system contract from $160K down to $86.1K, or stood up the same program across a 21-site network, those are numbers a reader can check. A number is a claim they can believe. An adjective is a claim they have to take on faith, and they won't.

If you cut a filler word and can't replace it with a fact, that's useful information too. It usually means the accomplishment underneath needs more thought before it's ready for the page.

Anything that isn't true

This one is short because it's not complicated. Don't inflate a title you didn't hold, a degree you didn't finish, or a number you can't back up. Dates get verified, references get called, and the first interview question about a padded line is where it falls apart.

I build products around the idea that honesty is the strongest position you can take, and a résumé is no exception. A true résumé that's sharply edited beats an impressive one you have to defend. You want to walk into the interview standing on every word.

The one question to run down the page

You don't need to memorize five categories. You need one filter. Go line by line and ask: is this earning its place, or is it just here out of habit?

Private data that only adds risk — cut it. Dead weight the reader already assumes — cut it. Decoration a parser can't read — cut it. Adjectives with no proof — replace them or cut them. Anything untrue — never on there in the first place.

What's left is a tighter, faster, safer document. That's the whole goal: not a longer résumé, a better-defended one. When you're ready to tailor what remains to a specific job, ResumAI does it without your job search leaking — which, after a post about what not to overshare, felt worth saying plainly.