📄 I Took a Friend's Coding Resume From 58% Fit to 82% Without Changing a Single Fact

A friend asked me to look at his resume because he was barely getting responses from job applications. Out of 40 applications he had sent, only 5 got a reply and just 1 led to an interview. I decided to see what was going wrong, and the answer turned out to be noise.

Hi, my name is Tom Smykowski, I'm a staff full-stack engineer. I build and scale SaaS platforms to millions of users, working end-to-end from system architecture to frontend to mobile. On this blog I write about the intersection of software engineering, career strategy, and the tools that help developers work smarter.

The Resume, Anonymized

I cannot share his actual resume for privacy reasons, but to walk you through the process I anonymized it. Here is what it looked like:

At first glance the content seems fine. There is a name, address, phone number, email, education, skills, projects, certifications and extra activities. He wants a position as a web engineer intern, and he knows HTML, CSS and JavaScript, so on paper it fits.

What Is Actually Useful on This Resume

Now let me show you what is useful on this resume in the context of a web developer internship, and what is not:

Red marks the information that does not help for a web developer role. Green marks what does.

To make this even clearer, here is what the resume looks like to a recruiter, an ATS system, or an AI screener that spends a few seconds per candidate:

When you blur the page you see that the parts that should convince someone to hire my friend take up about 5% of the total area. The rest is noise. The red areas are not just dead information, they actively obscure the green. The useful signals disappear in the clutter.

A few specific things that do not belong or are poorly framed:

• The exact home address. Nobody needs it.
• The CGPA score of 81% with no scale context.
• The entire "higher secondary" and "secondary" education sections.
• Skills like C, C++, Python, Java, SQL that do not map to a web developer role.
• Of the listed projects, only the first one mentions a web platform.

The Fit Score Problem

I asked ChatGPT to evaluate this resume against the job posting.

Fit score: 58%

At 58%, there is practically no chance of landing this job. But the full article walks you through exactly how we brought that number to 82%, what the AI system changed, what the heat maps look like before and after, and how the keyword match rate jumped by 71%. This is part 1 of the series: the next article will show how to refine the resume further using targeted follow-up questions.