No recycled myths, no invented statistics. Just what actually happens to your resume after you hit apply — and what to do about it.
The old five-page federal resume is gone. Here is how to fit specialized experience, grades, dates, and measurable evidence into the new two-page USAJOBS format.
A good summary is not a personality paragraph. It is a three-line argument for fit. Use this formula and adapt the examples without copying generic claims.
The right resume length is not a status symbol. Use one page when it tells the whole relevant story and two when the second page contains evidence worth reading.
You need experience to get the internship, and the internship is how you get experience. Everybody hits this wall. Here's what's actually on the other side of it — and it isn't a job history.
It's Friday afternoon. There are 180 applications in the folder and one hiring manager. Here's what actually happens to your resume in the six seconds it gets — and how to build one that survives it.
The cursor is blinking under EXPERIENCE and you have nothing to type. Here's the thing nobody tells you: the problem isn't that you have no experience. It's that you're filling in the wrong section first.
Every AI cover letter opens the same way, and every recruiter has read it 500 times. The fix isn't a better model — it's giving it something only you could know.
Most bullets describe what you were responsible for. Interviews come from bullets that describe what changed because you were there. Here's the difference, mechanically.
Keyword advice usually amounts to 'paste the job description into your resume'. That's how you get a document that reads like spam. Here's how to find the five that count.
Tailoring isn't rewriting your resume for every job — that's why people give up on it. It's a re-ranking problem, and once you see it that way it takes twenty minutes.
The honest answer is more interesting than yes or no. Recruiters can't detect AI reliably — but they can detect *genericness*, and that's what AI-written resumes are usually guilty of.
Most ATS advice online is fear-based and wrong. Here's what applicant tracking systems actually do to your file, which formatting choices genuinely break them, and the layout that survives every parser.