Resume Red Flags Engineers Don't Know They're Sending

TL;DR

Many resume problems aren't about weak skills. They're about signals you're sending without realizing it.
Each red flag here causes a specific, predictable reaction in the person reviewing your resume.
Most of these are easy to fix once you know they're there.
The goal is not a perfect resume. It's a resume with no unnecessary friction.

Most candidates think resume problems are about what's missing: not enough experience, not enough skills, not impressive enough projects. Those concerns are real, but they're often not what's actually causing the problem.

The more common issue is that the resume contains something that triggers a quick negative judgment from the person reviewing it. Not a deliberate red flag, just a pattern that experienced hiring professionals have learned to associate with problems.

Here are nine of them, along with what the reviewer actually thinks when they see it and how to fix it.

1. Gaps with No Context

What the recruiter sees: A timeline with no explanation for a gap.

If your most recent entry ended in early 2024 and you graduated in 2023, a recruiter sees roughly a year of nothing. They don't know why. Maybe you were traveling. Maybe you were working a non-software job. Maybe you had a health issue. Maybe you just couldn't find a job.

The recruiter's instinct is to guess the worst-case scenario, not the best one. Not because they're unkind, but because they're screening dozens of candidates and uncertainty defaults to "pass."

The fix: Address gaps directly. If you were doing something during the gap (studying, freelancing, building projects, caregiving), put it on the resume. "Independent study: built three full-stack projects while transitioning careers" is a real entry. If the gap was simply an extended job search, framing it in a cover letter or a brief summary line is better than leaving it unexplained.

2. GitHub Links That Go Nowhere

What the recruiter sees: A broken or empty GitHub link.

You've listed GitHub on your resume because you know you should. The reviewer clicks it and finds: a profile with two repositories, both forked from other projects with no commits from you, and a profile photo that's the default gray avatar. Or the link 404s entirely.

This is worse than not listing GitHub at all. It suggests you added the link because you thought you should, not because you had anything to show. For a software engineer, your GitHub is part of your portfolio. An empty or neglected GitHub reads as a proxy for not actually coding.

The fix: Before you put a GitHub link on your resume, make sure the profile is presentable. At minimum: a real profile photo, a short bio, and pinned repositories that represent your best work. Each pinned repo should have a meaningful README. Check that the links actually work.

3. Skills Listed but Never Evidenced

What the recruiter sees: A long skills list with nothing in the resume body to back it up.

A skills section that lists "React, Node.js, Python, Django, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, Redis, GraphQL..." is impressive on its face. But if none of those technologies appear anywhere in the bullets or the projects section, an experienced reviewer grows skeptical.

Skills lists get inflated. Candidates add things they've watched a tutorial on, used once, or vaguely remember from a class. When a skills section names fifteen technologies and the rest of the resume shows maybe three of them in actual use, the credibility of the whole list drops.

The fix: Every technology on your skills list should appear in at least one bullet point or project entry in a context that shows you used it for something real. If you can't do that for a technology, either remove it from the skills list or add a project where you demonstrably used it.

4. An Objective Statement

What the recruiter sees: "Motivated software developer seeking an entry-level position where I can apply my skills and grow as a professional."

This is the most common filler in new grad resumes and it tells the recruiter exactly nothing. They already know you're seeking a job. The objective statement takes up three lines that could be used for something that actually demonstrates value.

Objective statements were standard resume advice for a long time and have persisted in career center templates long past their usefulness. They're now a reliable signal that the candidate is following outdated advice.

The fix: Replace the objective statement with either a concise headline ("Software Engineer | React, Node.js, Python") or a two-sentence summary that contains a specific technical claim. "Full-stack developer with experience building and deploying React applications backed by Node.js APIs" is a summary that communicates something. "Seeking a challenging role to grow my skills" is not.

5. Wrong or Unprofessional Contact Information

What the recruiter sees: An email address like [email protected]. Or a phone number formatted with dots separating each digit in an unusual way. Or a LinkedIn URL that's a string of random characters instead of your name.

Contact information is screened in seconds. Small things that look informal or careless here create a low-grade sense that the candidate hasn't thought carefully about how they present themselves.

The fix: Use a simple Gmail address that is some version of your real name. Your LinkedIn URL should be customized to your name (Settings > Edit public profile & URL). Your phone number should be in a standard format. Check that your email address works by sending a test message to it.

6. Responsibilities-Only Bullets

What the recruiter sees: A resume full of what you were supposed to do, not what you did.

"Responsible for maintaining the front-end codebase." "Assisted in developing API endpoints." "Involved in testing and QA processes."

These bullets describe the job, not the work. A recruiter reading them has no way to evaluate whether you did the thing well, what you actually built, or what impact your work had. The difference between an activity bullet and an outcome bullet is one of the most consequential differences in resume writing.

The fix: For each bullet, ask: what specifically did I build, change, or improve? What was the outcome? "Maintained front-end codebase" becomes "Refactored the cart component to remove a prop-drilling dependency, simplifying state management and reducing component re-renders." That's the same job, but now it's defensible work.

7. Generic Project Names or Descriptions

What the recruiter sees: "Personal Project" or "Class Project" with a one-line description.

"Personal Project: Built a web application using JavaScript and React."

This tells the reviewer almost nothing. What does the application do? What problem does it solve? What specifically did you build? Generic project names and descriptions make it hard to remember your resume and easy to set aside.

The fix: Give your projects real names. Describe what they do in concrete terms. "Budget Tracker: a personal finance app built with React and Node.js that lets users log transactions and visualize monthly spending by category" is a project description that's specific enough to be memorable and technical enough to be credible.

8. Inconsistent or Sloppy Formatting

What the recruiter sees: Dates that don't align, bullet sizes that vary, inconsistent spacing, a mix of fonts, bullets that sometimes end with periods and sometimes don't.

This isn't about aesthetic preference. Formatting inconsistencies signal a lack of attention to detail. For a software engineer, attention to detail is a job skill. A resume with sloppy formatting introduces a small but real doubt: is this person also sloppy in their code?

The irony is that formatting errors are the easiest things to fix, and they make a disproportionate impression because they're visible to anyone reviewing the document.

The fix: Before submitting any application, open your resume in a fresh window and scan it specifically for consistency. Do all dates use the same format? Do all bullets use the same character? Are all section headers the same size? Is the spacing between sections uniform? These take ten minutes to check and fix.

9. A Two-Page Resume with Under Five Years of Experience

What the recruiter sees: A candidate who doesn't know what to cut.

New grad and early career resumes should be one page. This is broadly known, but a surprising number of candidates still submit two-page resumes because they don't want to leave anything out.

Two pages doesn't signal thoroughness. It signals poor judgment about prioritization. Hiring managers reviewing hundreds of resumes do not read the second page of a new grad resume with the same attention they'd give the first page.

The things that make a new grad resume two pages are usually: a long list of every course they've taken, padded bullet points describing obvious responsibilities, and three or four jobs from before their software career (retail, food service, etc.) written up in full detail.

The fix: Cut to one page. The criteria is simple: does this line of text make a specific, credible case for my technical skills? If not, it doesn't earn its space. The software engineering resume guide covers what actually belongs on the page and what to cut.

The Common Thread

All of these red flags share something in common: they're signals that the candidate is either not paying close attention or is following template advice without thinking about how it reads to the reviewer.

Fixing them doesn't require better skills or more experience. It requires reading your resume from the outside, as someone who has never met you and has 50 other resumes to look at today.

What that reviewer sees in the first 10 seconds is your actual first impression. These red flags are concentrated in exactly the areas that get scanned first: the header, the top section, the first few bullet points, and the visual consistency of the page.

Once you've cleared the red flags, the work shifts to making the content actively strong. The resume bullet points guide covers how to rewrite weak bullets, and the software engineering resume guide gives you the full structure for every section.

If you want a structured review of your resume with specific feedback on what's working and what isn't, here's how the Globally Scoped program works.