Crafting a Resume That Opens Doors (and How AI Can Help)

On July 15, 2025, Marcelle Yeager offered her views on the ideal resume, how a good one can open new doors for us, and how AI can help us draft a resume that puts our best foot forward. This event was the second in our third seminar series theme, Skilled and Ready to Serve: Marketing Your Development Experience Effectively, and it was moderated by Laura Sheehan, Georgetown SFS.

Yeager began her presentation by dispelling a common misconception that resumes do not matter as much as they did in years past. Resumes are incredibly important. They serve as a tool for employers to differentiate potential candidates and hire the potential best fit. As Yeager stressed, resumes are your first impression and, often, the only chance you have to showcase your skills and potential fit with an organization.

How can you ensure that your resume is not only reviewed, but also demonstrates your capabilities and, ultimately, why you are the ideal person to take on that role?

When considering this question, we must think about the tools hiring teams use to evaluate job applicants. Employers across the board utilize Application Tracking System software (ATS) and (increasingly) AI-assisted technologies to scrutinize key words, qualifications, and other data points to identify preferred candidates. As such, it is critical to submit a resume that not only describes your background and experiences faithfully, but also presents that information in a manner that is legible and easily understandable by AI tools.

For Yeager, a strong resume possesses the following characteristics:

• Simple, easy-to-read structure;
• Clear presentation of strengths;
• Emphasis on fit, skills, and relevant experience;
• Sector-specific tailored language and elements;

Given the prevalence of ATS software and AI-assisted tools in hiring processes, it is critical to remember that these programs will conduct the initial screening. While making hiring processes quicker and more efficient, AI-assisted technologies do not contextualize your past experiences, nor do they evaluate your strengths relative to other applicants. These tools will look for keywords and make binary decisions (to accept or reject your application) based on the presence or absence of key terms.

Thus, Yeager emphasized the importance of crafting a simple and easy-to-read resume. Different fonts or formatting, colors, images, graphs, and other alternative ways to present your information and showcase your experience will likely backfire. Stating your background and qualifications in straight-forward prose in a logical format (e.g., bullets) is best.

During this session, Yeager also advised attendees to present their skills and strengths clearly. She argued maximizing the top portions our their resumes, offering employers a concise review of our professional career and abilities was the most effective way express our strengths and qualifications. This text does not need to be long or all-encompassing, but it should introduce your character, passion, and work adequately. Employers need to know “who you are” and how you “fit” in their organizations.

Of course, as part of our efforts to present our skills and experience at the top of our resumes, we must also highlight our potential fit within an organization. Employers and hiring managers are eager to understand where and how your skillset would work within the organization’s existing work and structure. Doing so effectively will give us a leg-up on other applicants.

Finally, making sure that the formatting and language you use in your resume is tailored specifically to the job, organization, or sector of interest is paramount. Whether you are applying for a job in the federal government, pursuing a volunteer opportunity with a local nongovernmental organization, or keen to ply your skills in the private sector, every sector has elements they look for in resumes – and many organizations may have specific elements they prefer to see in these materials.

Yeager relented that some of the people with whom she works fell victim to not providing the specific or necessary information in the correct manner. Failure to do so gives employers a reason to not move forward with your candidacy. As a result, she implored us to read the application directions carefully and to understand what information potential employers need from us as well as how to best present it.

In this session, Yeager also addressed some misconceptions many people have about the ideal length (for over five years of experience, two pages is fine) and format (depends on the job, but lengthy or exhaustive bullet points are not necessary) that resumes should possess.

Furthermore, Yeager commented on the relative lack of importance employers place on resume gaps (especially in the post-pandemic world), the high relevance of volunteer work for many positions, and how fears of being overqualified for a role should not tempt us to downplay our experience.

Truthful and genuine accounts of our work and skillset are the most effective ways to put our best foot forward to potential employers.

Previous clients of Yeager’s Career Valet services have found AI to be a useful tool in resume generation. She found AI-assisted programs to be particularly useful for identifying keywords, job skills, and experiences to include on your resume.

Yet it is equally important to note that we should never rely on AI alone to craft our resumes. In addition to the awkward wording of previous experiences – and, at times, the presentation of explicitly false information – AI tools do not necessarily know the ideal format resumes should take, nor can they draw all the threads through your story to create a unique narrative. It is imperative to draft and fine-tune your own resumes.

Ultimately, people make the decision whether to hire someone or not, and our resumes should be crafted with that fact in mind.

Although AI tools can help us draft the best resume or identify the skills we should underline, we are the best evaluators and storytellers of our past experience. We are best placed to show, not tell our skills, and no one possesses the ability to craft a narrative around our life’s work and achievements. In the end, we cannot rely on AI to make our case for employment at our dream organization – we still have to tell our own story.

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