Prompts to Critique and Review Your Resume

Hiring Manager Critique With a Ranked Issue List

You have a finished draft and want to know what a hiring manager would object to before you send it

Act as the hiring manager filling this role. You screen resumes for [SENIORITY LEVEL] [ROLE] positions at [COMPANY TYPE]. My resume is below, followed by the posting.

[PASTE RESUME]

[PASTE JOB POSTING]

Do not rewrite anything. Give me three things:
1. A ranked list of the 7 biggest problems, most damaging first. For each one, quote the exact line, say what you conclude when you hit it, and name the fix in one sentence.
2. The 3 strongest lines on the page, and why they land.
3. The single thing most likely to move this to the reject pile, stated plainly.

Rank by effect on your decision, not by how easy the fix is. Be specific — 'weak bullet' tells me nothing; name the bullet and say what is missing from it.

Rules — these override everything above:
- Use only the experience I give you. Do not invent employers, job titles, dates, degrees, certifications, skills, or metrics.
- If a number would strengthen a line and I have not given you one, write a placeholder like [X%] or [$X] for me to fill in. Do not estimate it.
- Do not add a tool, skill, or credential I did not list, however standard it is in my field.
- Rewrite, reorder, tighten and re-emphasize what is already there. Where I have given you too little to work with, ask me for it or leave [add detail].

The 10-Second Scan Test

Before you submit, to check what a recruiter retains from one fast pass

I want to know what my resume communicates on a fast first pass, not on a careful read.

[PASTE RESUME]

Answer these using only the top third of the first page, which is about as far as a 10-second scan gets:
1. What is this person, in 6 words or fewer?
2. What level are they, and which words made you say that?
3. Name the 3 things that stick, in the order you notice them.

Now read the whole thing and answer:
4. What did you have to hunt for that should have been in that top third?
5. Which line does the eye land on first, and is that the right line for a [TARGET ROLE] opening?

I want a reader to come away thinking [YOUR INTENDED IMPRESSION]. Say where your answers differ from that, and name the line most responsible for the gap. Diagnosis only — no rewrites yet.

Rules — these override everything above:
- Use only the experience I give you. Do not invent employers, job titles, dates, degrees, certifications, skills, or metrics.
- If a number would strengthen a line and I have not given you one, write a placeholder like [X%] or [$X] for me to fill in. Do not estimate it.
- Do not add a tool, skill, or credential I did not list, however standard it is in my field.
- Rewrite, reorder, tighten and re-emphasize what is already there. Where I have given you too little to work with, ask me for it or leave [add detail].

Consistency and Formatting Audit

After several rounds of editing, when small inconsistencies have crept in across sections

Audit my resume for internal inconsistency only — content quality is out of scope for this pass.

[PASTE RESUME]

Standardize on [YOUR DATE FORMAT] for dates and [YOUR SPELLING CONVENTION] for spelling. Report every item below as a table row: the item, what you found, the lines affected, and the single form I should settle on.
- Verb tense: past for finished roles, present for the current one
- Date format, including how the current role is written
- Whether bullets end in a period, all or none
- Capitalization of job titles, section headings, and tool names
- Employer names written identically every time
- Spelling that switches between conventions
- Dashes and spacing inside date ranges
- Abbreviations defined once, then used consistently
- Bullet length range, plus any bullet far outside it
- Section order and heading wording

Then give me a corrected version in Markdown that changes formatting only and keeps every word as I wrote it.

Rules — these override everything above:
- Use only the experience I give you. Do not invent employers, job titles, dates, degrees, certifications, skills, or metrics.
- If a number would strengthen a line and I have not given you one, write a placeholder like [X%] or [$X] for me to fill in. Do not estimate it.
- Do not add a tool, skill, or credential I did not list, however standard it is in my field.
- Rewrite, reorder, tighten and re-emphasize what is already there. Where I have given you too little to work with, ask me for it or leave [add detail].

Flag Every Claim You Would Struggle to Defend

Before you submit or interview, when you want to know which lines you could not back up if someone pushed

Grade how defensible each line of my resume is if someone pushes on it. Here is the resume, then my rough notes on what I actually did.

[PASTE RESUME]

[PASTE YOUR NOTES, PLUS ANY NUMBERS YOU CAN SOURCE FROM REAL RECORDS]

For every bullet, give me one table row: the bullet, a rating, and the reason.
- Solid — my notes back it and I could explain how
- Thin — probably true, but I have no detail behind it and would stall if pushed
- Unsupported — nothing in my notes supports it as written

For each Thin or Unsupported line, write the one question someone would ask that I could not currently answer, and say what I would need to check or recall to make the line stand. List the Unsupported ones first. Do not repair any line yourself — I want to know what to go and verify.

Rules — these override everything above:
- Use only the experience I give you. Do not invent employers, job titles, dates, degrees, certifications, skills, or metrics.
- If a number would strengthen a line and I have not given you one, write a placeholder like [X%] or [$X] for me to fill in. Do not estimate it.
- Do not add a tool, skill, or credential I did not list, however standard it is in my field.
- Rewrite, reorder, tighten and re-emphasize what is already there. Where I have given you too little to work with, ask me for it or leave [add detail].

Claude: Claude's context window comfortably holds a full resume plus several pages of rough notes in one message, so you do not have to split the paste across turns.

The Questions Your Resume Invites

Once the application is in and you are preparing for the first screen

You are the hiring manager for the role below. You have 30 minutes with this candidate, and the only thing you know about them is this resume.

[PASTE THE RESUME YOU SUBMITTED]

[PASTE THE JOB POSTING]

What I already know about the interview: [WHO I WILL MEET AND WHAT FORMAT, IF I KNOW].

Give me:
1. The 10 questions you would ask, in the order you would ask them, each tagged with the exact resume line that prompted it.
2. The 3 you would expect this candidate to handle badly, and what about the resume makes them hard.
3. 2 questions about what is absent — a gap, an unexplained move, a requirement in the posting the resume never addresses.
4. The follow-up you would ask after each of the 3 hardest, so I can prepare a second layer rather than an opening answer.

Write them the way you would say them out loud.

Rules — these override everything above:
- Use only the experience I give you. Do not invent employers, job titles, dates, degrees, certifications, skills, or metrics.
- If a number would strengthen a line and I have not given you one, write a placeholder like [X%] or [$X] for me to fill in. Do not estimate it.
- Do not add a tool, skill, or credential I did not list, however standard it is in my field.
- Rewrite, reorder, tighten and re-emphasize what is already there. Where I have given you too little to work with, ask me for it or leave [add detail].

Length Check and Cut List

When the resume runs long and you need to decide what goes rather than shrink the font

My resume runs [CURRENT LENGTH] and I need it at [TARGET LENGTH] for a [TARGET ROLE] application. The posting follows the resume.

[PASTE RESUME]

[PASTE JOB POSTING]

Do not rewrite. Build me a cut list:
1. Every line ranked from least to most useful for this specific application, with a one-line reason for each ranking.
2. A cut line — the point in that ranking where deleting everything above it reaches [TARGET LENGTH], plus a rough estimate of the space each cut buys.
3. What to compress instead of delete: an old role that becomes one line, 3 bullets making the same point, a skills list with repeats.
4. What I should keep even though it is dated or off-topic, and why it earns the space.

Return it in Markdown so I can work down the list and check items off.

Rules — these override everything above:
- Use only the experience I give you. Do not invent employers, job titles, dates, degrees, certifications, skills, or metrics.
- If a number would strengthen a line and I have not given you one, write a placeholder like [X%] or [$X] for me to fill in. Do not estimate it.
- Do not add a tool, skill, or credential I did not list, however standard it is in my field.
- Rewrite, reorder, tighten and re-emphasize what is already there. Where I have given you too little to work with, ask me for it or leave [add detail].

Plain Formatting Check Before You Submit

Before you upload to an application portal that reads your file as text rather than as a page

I am checking whether my resume still reads correctly as plain text, because the portal I upload to reads my file as text rather than as a page. Below is my resume copied straight out of the file, exactly as it pasted.

[PASTE THE PLAIN TEXT]

My layout also uses: [LIST ANY COLUMNS, TABLES, TEXT BOXES, HEADERS, OR GRAPHICS].

Tell me:
1. Where the reading order breaks — anything arriving out of sequence, or two columns merging into one run-on line.
2. What is missing. Content inside headers, footers, text boxes, and graphics often does not survive the paste, so list what you cannot see that a resume normally has.
3. Section headings you cannot confidently identify, with the plainer wording you would use.
4. Any employer, title, or date you cannot reliably pair with the others.
5. Characters that arrived as stray symbols, and spacing that collapsed.

Report findings as a list. Do not reformat the document.

Rules — these override everything above:
- Use only the experience I give you. Do not invent employers, job titles, dates, degrees, certifications, skills, or metrics.
- If a number would strengthen a line and I have not given you one, write a placeholder like [X%] or [$X] for me to fill in. Do not estimate it.
- Do not add a tool, skill, or credential I did not list, however standard it is in my field.
- Rewrite, reorder, tighten and re-emphasize what is already there. Where I have given you too little to work with, ask me for it or leave [add detail].