Teardowns
Three resumes, taken apart line by line
Each teardown below starts from a resume that isn’t bad, exactly — it’s the kind of resume most people actually send. We mark what a fast structural pass lands on, explain why each line loses, and rebuild it without inventing a single fact that wasn’t already there.
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The series
One pattern per teardown. Find the one that describes yours and start there.
Project coordinator
The duty list
Every bullet describes what the job involved. None of them says how any of it turned out.
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Marketing generalist
The wall of text
Real accomplishments, genuinely impressive ones, buried inside paragraphs nobody reads at triage speed.
Read the teardown →
Data analyst (from classroom teaching)
The career changer
Switching fields, and the resume is still written in the vocabulary of the field being left.
Read the teardown →
The rules we tear down by
A teardown series is easy to make dishonest — stage a hopeless original, claim knowledge of a reader’s eye, invent an achievement in the rewrite. Here’s what we hold ourselves to instead.
No invented facts
Every number in a rewrite traces to something the original already said. Where the original had no figure, the rewrite says so rather than supplying one — the same rule our paid rewrites are held to in code.
Structure, not mind-reading
Annotations describe what the layout does to a fast pass — where the eye has to travel, what compresses away. We never claim to know where an individual reader looked, because we never measured that.
Rewrites face our own checks
Each finished version runs through the parser and the automated checks on every build. One warning and the page doesn’t ship. It would be an odd series that published work its own tool marked down.
Get the same treatment for yours
The annotations above are the automated checks, applied by hand. Upload or paste your resume and they run on yours in about twenty seconds, each finding quoting the exact line it came from.
Resume roasts — common questions
Whose resumes are these?
Nobody's. Every resume in this series is written by us to demonstrate one specific failure pattern. We parse uploaded files for their text and discard them, so we don't hold real resumes to publish — and we wouldn't publish one without explicit permission if we did.
Can you roast mine?
Not publicly, and not yet — there's no consented submission path, which is a deliberate consequence of not keeping anyone's file. What you can do right now is run the same automated checks these rewrites had to pass, on your own resume, and get the same kind of line-level findings back.
Do the rewritten versions actually score well?
They have to. Every rewritten resume here is pushed through our own parser and every automated check on each build, and a single warning fails the build before the page can ship. Publishing an example our own tool would mark down is the one thing this series can't do.
Are you claiming to know where a recruiter looks?
No. We annotate structure — the top third, the headings, the opening words of each bullet, where numerals appear — because that's what determines what survives a fast pass. We didn't run eye-tracking and we won't dress up a guess as one.
What does it cost to check my own?
The check is free: score, category breakdown, and the full list of what was found, with no sign-up and no credit card. Paid work only starts if you want the rewritten document itself.