Recruiters won't tell you why they passed. They just don't reply. Here are the ten mistakes that quietly cost the most interviews, in the order I see them most often.
1. A generic summary. 'Motivated professional with a passion for excellence' says nothing. Replace it with one sentence about your role, one about your top achievement.
2. Responsibilities instead of outcomes. 'Managed the customer support team' is a job description. 'Cut ticket backlog from 2,000 to 200 in one quarter' is a hire signal.
3. Buried dates or missing dates. ATS parsers need month + year for every role. 'Present' is fine; missing is not.
4. Tables and columns. They look nice, they break parsers, and they cost interviews. Single column, always.
5. A skills wall. 40 skills means you have zero specialties. Pick the 8–12 that match the role you're applying to.
6. Custom fonts that don't embed. If your PDF renders in Times New Roman on the recruiter's machine, you didn't submit the resume you thought you did. DraftlyCV embeds fonts in every export.
7. No link to work. GitHub, portfolio, LinkedIn, published writing — one link is enough, but zero is a red flag.
8. Typos in the first 100 words. The header, summary, and current role are where recruiters focus. Proofread those three times.
9. The same resume for every job. Tailor at least the summary and top three bullets to each posting. Use DraftlyCV's ATS check to catch missing keywords in 30 seconds.
10. A .docx file when they asked for PDF. Read the instructions. Some ATS systems reject the wrong format on ingest.