Yesterday I talked to Jacob, a new college graduate who was frustrated and scared.
“I must be doing something wrong. I just don’t know what it is,” he told me. “I’ve applied for over 100 jobs, and I haven’t gotten one interview. I never thought it would be this hard to get a job once I graduated. Can you help me? How can I improve my resume, so I get called for an interview?”
I hear this exact conversation constantly. What I heard in Jacob’s voice wasn’t laziness or lack of effort. It was someone who didn’t know how to get found in an employer’s Applicant Tracking System (ATS), noticed by a recruiter, called in for an interview, and ultimately landed a job.
When I looked at his resume, I saw the same mistakes I see over and over again among new grads and college students. Here they are, and what to do to fix them.
1. Letting ChatGPT Write Your Whole Resume
This is the biggest mistake I’m seeing with the emergence of AI chatbots, like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, or Claude. Students take an old resume, or just tell the chatbot what they’ve done, and let it generate the resume for them. Worse, some take a job description and their existing resume, ask AI to “make it sound good,” and submit whatever comes out.
Here’s what actually happens when you do that.
First, AI tends to produce generic language that won’t get you past a company’s ATS, which is the very thing you were hoping it would help with.
Second, AI hallucinates. It invents accomplishments, skills, and details that aren’t true. You submit it, a recruiter calls, and you can’t defend what’s on the page because you didn’t actually do it. That gets you blocked, not hired.
Use AI as a starting point if you want to organize your thoughts or clean up formatting. But every word on that resume needs to be something you did and can explain in detail in an interview.
2. Listing Job Duties Instead of Value
A lot of new grads list their job duties and stop there. For example, they might say, “worked at the front desk,” “assisted customers,” “helped with events.”
That’s a job description, not a resume bullet. Employers want to see how you put your skills into action. They care about what you accomplished and what value you’d bring to them if they hire you.
Take whatever “ordinary” job or task you had and explain it fully. Have you outlined everything you did there? What changed because you were doing that job? What did you improve, fix, organize, or grow? Outcomes and results are the piece most students skip, and it’s the part that actually gets you noticed.
3. Underselling Your Internship
Internships are critical, but most students don’t describe them well. They list a title and a couple of vague duties instead of walking through what they actually did, what they contributed, and what they accomplished while they were there.
Go back through your internship in detail. What projects did you touch? What did you deliver? What did you learn that’s directly relevant to the job you want now? Connect those specifics to the role you’re applying for; don’t leave the reader to guess how your internship applies.
Get your career off to the right start.
4. Having No Experience or Internships
This is a tough spot, but it’s fixable. If you don’t have work experience or an internship to point to, you need to rely on projects to demonstrate your skills. Most students fail to do this, yet it is where you have the best chance to show an employer what you’re capable of.
Go through your coursework and pull out relevant class projects, research, or assignments that demonstrate real skills. Then review your transcript and list related coursework that aligns with the job you want. If you’re going for a data analyst role, pull out every technical and analytical class.
One way to help create the course list is to use this prompt for ChatGPT along with adding your transcript into the request.
I am a NAME your major, seeking a NAME the type of job. Review the transcript and create a list of relevant coursework, listing the more important classes first. List in a paragraph form class, class, class.
5. Adhering to the “One Page” Rule
Many colleges still tell students to keep their resume to one page. That’s outdated advice. Employers today want more detail on what you’ve done, what skills you’ve acquired, and how you applied them.
It’s advantageous for a new grad to clearly outline internships, projects, and relevant coursework using a more in-depth, two-page resume. Don’t force everything onto one page. Instead, expand on the experience, skills, and academic background that will resonate with an employer.
6. Formatting Errors That Get You Rejected by the ATS
This is a big mistake, and a costly one. New grads don’t understand how their formatting choices trip up an employer’s Applicant Tracking System before a human ever sees the resume. A resume that looks polished and creative on your screen can be unreadable to the software that scans it first.
Skip the PDF. Many ATS platforms distort or misread PDF formatting, so submit a Word document unless the employer specifically asks for a PDF.
Avoid creative styling altogether. That means no color, no designs, no tables, no columns, no headers or footers. Stick to a clean, simple font at size 12 or higher, and spell out school names, city names, and terms in full rather than abbreviations the system might not recognize.
The resume that gets you the interview is the one the computer can actually read, not the one that looks the most creative on a screen.
Bottom Line
Once Jacob fixed these mistakes on his resume and cleaned up his LinkedIn profile to match, the calls started coming. He landed interviews and, eventually, a job offer.
That turnaround happens all the time, because it’s rarely about the degree or the GPA. It’s about whether the resume actually shows an employer what you’re capable of, in language that both a person and a computer can understand.
If you’ve sent a lot of applications and heard nothing back, don’t assume you’re not good enough. Recognize that your resume isn’t doing its job and know that it’s fixable.
Correct these six mistakes, make sure every line reflects the real value you bring, and be ready to defend every word of it in an interview. That’s what turns silence into a recruiter calling. Jacob did it. You can too.
