ChatGPT
Perplexity AI
Claude
Your resume is supposed to be the most polished thing you've ever written—and yet, somehow, it's where good candidates quietly sabotage themselves. The achievements get buried under buzzwords. The numbers vanish. And nearly everyone, at some point, has called themselves "dynamic."
To find out exactly where things go sideways, Kickresume analyzed over 2 million resumes created in 2025. We looked at the words people lean on, the metrics they leave out, the sections they rename, and the formatting that quietly trips up the software meant to read them.
The results? Oddly comforting, occasionally cringey, and surprisingly fixable. Because here's the good news—most of these mistakes take just one line to undo.
Methodology
The language findings in this infographic—weak verbs, clichés, pronouns, and filler or hedging words—are based on 1,780,829 English-language resumes created by Kickresume users throughout 2025. We included only resumes longer than 200 words, filtering out incomplete or test profiles that could distort the patterns.
The findings on quantifiable achievements come from a wider pool of 2,133,734 resumes in all languages, since spotting numbers and percentages works the same regardless of the language a resume is written in.
Every percentage in this infographic is rounded to the nearest whole number. We measured phrases two ways: how many times they appeared across the entire dataset, and how many individual resumes contained them at least once.
The resumes span a broad mix of industries, career stages, and regions worldwide. No personally identifying information was used at any point—only aggregated, anonymized text patterns were analyzed.
