Former Google recruiter’s No. 1 resume red flag: ‘There’s zero chance you’re going to move forward’

Writing a powerful resume can seem like an art form in and of itself. And when doing so, there are various don’ts to keep in mind: Don’t misspell words. Don’t go over two pages. Don’t write a list of vague skills without providing proof you’ve actually accrued them.

For Nolan Church, who’s worked in talent acquisition at companies like Google and who’s currently the CEO of talent marketplace Continuum, there’s one major red flag. “The No. 1 thing I don’t want to see on a resume is probably text bricks,” he says, which is to say “endless streams of text that have a lot of words but not a lot of content.”

When he sees one of those, “there’s zero chance you’re going to move forward,” he says. Here’s his advice on making sure your resume is clean of endless text.

Church often sees text blocks under the specific descriptions of each role.

“When people describe what they’ve been doing, they often have a hard time being concise,” he says. Below each job title should be a series of one-line bullets. Instead, people will write “three to four sentences per bullet.”

In today’s world of constant text communication, short, to-the-point communication is crucial. At the office, for example, so much communication happens over email and Slack. “If you can’t succinctly describe what you’ve been doing in your career,” he says, “there’s just no way you’re going to be able to succinctly write in the workplace.”