Resume writing · Opinion
Why Resumes Are So Hard To Write
And why they've gotten harder, not easier. The expectations on written content have risen because of how we consume content elsewhere — and AI on both sides of the application has accelerated the gap, not closed it.
In thirty seconds
- Resumes are hard to write because the bar for written content has been rising for fifteen years — set by Apple, Netflix, Instagram, every well-designed app you use — while resume writing conventions have barely moved.
- Recruiters now read resumes with the same fickle, scroll-trained palette they use for everything else they consume. If your resume doesn't deliver value in the first ten seconds, it loses to the resume that does.
- The 2026 addition: AI is now on both sides of the application. Candidates use it to draft. Recruiters use it to screen. The result is a closed loop that produces polished but indistinguishable applications — exactly the opposite of what works.
- What works is what has always worked, just done harder: specific value, controlled narrative, empathy with the reader, distinctive human voice. The candidates who land roles are the ones whose resumes survive AI screening and read as written by a real person.
- It is not your fault that your resume is hard to write. The expectations on written content rose because of how the world changed around you, not because of anything you did wrong.
In this article
A note on this rewrite
I wrote the original version of this article in September 2021. I argued then that resumes were getting harder to write because the world's expectations on written content had risen — driven by social media, news consumption, advertising, and the deliberate user-interface design behind every platform we use. Resumes hadn't kept up. Recruiters were reading them with the same fickle, scroll-trained palette they used for everything else, and the gap between expectation and reality was widening.
I closed that piece with: "It will only get worse before it gets better."
It got worse. AI happened. Application volumes per role multiplied. The dwell time recruiters give an individual resume has fallen further. The gap between the content design we consume daily and the content design of an average resume has not closed — it has accelerated. So I've kept the original argument, kept the bones, and added what's changed in 2026.
If you're reading this because you've been writing and rewriting your resume for three weeks and it still doesn't feel right: the first thing to know is that the difficulty isn't a reflection of your competence. It's a reflection of where the bar has moved.
The shared problem
The job market in 2026 isn't really suffering from a job shortage. It isn't really suffering from a candidate shortage either. What it's actually suffering from is a clarity gap — a structural mismatch between what employers can articulate and what candidates can produce.
Both sides have, at root, the same problem.
- Dissecting over-worded, lengthy position descriptions to figure out what's actually being asked
- Supplying the right information to be selected over hundreds of other applicants
- Exhaustion from different application requirements at every employer
- Lack of objectivity in self-assessment of skills and value
- Not getting the message across quickly enough to be remembered
- Getting roles to surface for the right job-search terms on SEEK, LinkedIn, Indeed
- Outlining the expectations of the role to ensure a good fit
- Attracting candidates with the right values fit, not just the right skills
- Distinguishing one good candidate from another in a stack of 400 applications
- Avoiding wasting time interviewing applicants whose written application made them look stronger than they are
If you read those two columns carefully, the same things appear on both sides:
What both sides actually want
- Time saved
- Clarity
- Value demonstrated quickly
And yet, somehow, neither side is set up to give the other what they want. The candidate is asked for content that takes ten hours to produce, when the recruiter has ten seconds to read it. The recruiter publishes a position description full of overlapping selection criteria, when the candidate just wants to know what the job actually involves and what evidence will get them shortlisted. Both sides know the system is broken. Neither side, individually, can fix it.
The content-design era
The expectations on written content have risen astronomically — and not because resume writing got harder. They rose because everything else got better.
Behind every platform you use is a user-interface strategy and a team of experts whose job is to get you to keep scrolling. Significant effort goes into making the experience fluid, goal-oriented, and strategically funnelled toward an outcome. Dwell time — how long you spend on a screen — and bounce rate — how quickly you click away — are the metrics every consumer-facing company optimises for. They've trained us, slowly and deliberately, to consume content with a fickle palette. We discard what doesn't seem relevant within seconds. We are utterly overwhelmed by content, so we've adapted by being highly selective about what we give attention to.
And then there's the resume. Mostly written by people without UI-design training, often based on templates from a decade ago, sometimes still presented chronologically because that's how it's always been done. Read on the same phone screen, by the same eyes, with the same fickle palette as everything else.
Pre-2010 era
Resumes were read by hiring managers in offices, often printed on paper. Recruiters had time. The bar for content design was set by newspapers, magazines, and brochures — visual but linear. A two-page chronological CV with a list of duties was the norm and a perfectly reasonable response to the medium.
2026 era
Resumes are scanned on phones, by recruiters with several hundred applications to triage and ten seconds per resume. The bar for content design is set by Apple's product pages and Instagram's first frame. Content has to deliver specific value before the eye moves. A list of duties from 2014 onward isn't a resume — it's wallpaper.
The Apple comparison
If you flick from your resume to Apple's website, you only need to compare the content side-by-side to see what's effectively selling something and what isn't. Apple's product pages do not list features. They lead with a single specific claim — the thing they want you to remember — followed by progressively more detail for the reader who wants more. Every word is doing work. Every word has been tested against an audience.
Most resumes do the opposite. They list everything the candidate has done, in chronological order, weighted equally, in the hope that the recruiter will find the relevant bit themselves. They are the equivalent of an Apple product page that opens with a nine-page specification sheet.
The recruiter reading your resume is a person who, ten minutes earlier, was scrolling Instagram. Their tolerance for resume conventions designed in 1995 has been ground out of them, by accident, over fifteen years of consuming better content elsewhere.
AI on both sides
This is the part the original 2021 article didn't see coming. AI has now arrived on both sides of the application — and instead of solving the clarity gap, it has accelerated it.
On the candidate side, AI has made it easier than ever to produce polished applications. ChatGPT will draft a resume in two minutes. The grammar will be flawless. The tone will be professional. The margins will be reasonable. None of which solves the actual problem, because polish was never what was missing. The problem was always specificity — saying something distinctive about a specific person. AI is structurally bad at that, because it averages across everything it has seen. The patterns AI generates — stock language, hedged claims, grammatically perfect but emotionally flat narrative — are exactly what a recruiter dismisses fastest.
On the employer side, AI has made it easier than ever to screen applications. Automated keyword-matching, ATS-aware filtering, and AI-driven shortlisting are now common. Around 49% of AI-drafted resumes are dismissed in the first round of screening, according to a 2025 study of 3,000 hiring managers. The systems are better than they were — but they reward the wrong thing. They reward exact-keyword matches. They penalise candidates who reframed selection criteria into more direct language, which is exactly what a senior writer would have done.
The result is a closed loop in which two AIs negotiate the shortlist while the human candidates and human hiring manager are largely cut out of the process. AI-drafted application gets through AI screening. AI-drafted application reads as generic to the panel. Panel rejects it. Strong human-written application gets blocked by AI screening because it didn't repeat the right keywords. Panel never sees it. Both candidates lose. We've written more about how recruiters spot AI-drafted resumes, and how to edit AI output so it survives both filters.
The other side of the same problem
This article focuses on why candidates find resume writing hard. The employer side of the same content-clarity problem — bloated job ads, repetitive selection criteria, AI-screened application piles — is covered in our companion piece, why your job ads aren't attracting candidates. Both pieces argue the same thing from opposite sides of the application.
What still works
The good news — and it is good news — is that the things that work in 2026 are the same things that worked in 2021. Just done harder, with more attention, and with a clearer awareness of what the reader on the other side is actually doing when they pick up your resume.
Pitch unique value
Identify the two or three things your career actually demonstrates that this role cares about — and lead with them. Not a list of duties. Not a chronological tour. The specific value you bring, said specifically, in the first ten lines.
Understand the fickle reader
The recruiter reading your resume has read four hundred others this week. They will give you ten seconds. Write for the ten seconds. Build the rest of the document for the reader who, having decided in those ten seconds that you might be interesting, then wants to read more.
Control the narrative
Decide what story your resume tells before you write it. A career change tells one story. A senior promotion tells another. A return after a gap tells a third. The resume that lands is the one where every section reinforces the same single thread.
Empathise with the employer
Your success in any role hinges on your ability to solve a problem for the employer. Your resume's success hinges on demonstrating that capability before they have to look for it. Read the role description. Identify the actual problem they're hiring to solve. Build the resume around solving it.
Use AI as a tool, not a writer
AI is excellent at drafting, summarising, and tightening. It is structurally bad at saying something specific and distinctive about you. Use it for the first half of the work — getting words on a page — and then edit aggressively. Add the texture, the specifics, the actual outcomes that AI couldn't have known about.
Sound like a person
In a stack of 400 polished AI-drafted resumes, the one that reads as written by a thinking human stands out. Not unprofessional — distinctive. A specific phrase, a real number, a sentence that could only have been written by you. That's the resume that gets remembered.
Why it isn't your fault
If you've been struggling to write your resume, I want to say something that I think is genuinely true and also frequently underappreciated: it is not your fault that your resume is hard to write.
The expectations on written content rose because of how the world changed around you, not because of anything you did wrong. The bar set by Apple's product pages, Netflix's first frame, Instagram's three-second test, and every well-designed app you've used in the last fifteen years has slowly trained the reader on the other end of your resume to expect a level of compression and specificity that was never expected of resumes when the format was invented. The bar moved underneath you while you weren't looking.
And then AI arrived and changed the rules again. The resumes that worked in 2021 still work — they just have to do more, faster, with more clarity, against more competition, while still surviving an automated screening layer that didn't exist when the format was designed.
None of that means you can't write a good resume. People write good resumes every day, including people we work with who do it themselves once they understand what the format is now actually being asked to do. But it does mean that if it's hard, you are not failing at something easy. You are doing something genuinely difficult — at the specific moment in history when it has become the most difficult it has ever been.
It is the way it is. We don't think it's fair, but it is the medium we are paired with for the hunt for jobs in 2026. The work, then, is to get good at the medium — or to find someone who already is.
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