Dear Sam: I moved to Florida from New York in March of last year and was let go from my previous employer due to them wanting employees back into the office at least three times a week. I was officially laid off in October. However, I have been applying for mostly remote jobs since April, but I have only had 4-5 interviews.

I am hoping you can make suggestions on my resume and cover letter. I am excellent at interviewing, am a people person, have had recruiters say how much they like me, and have an excellent work history. – Lorraine

Dear Lorraine: Thank you for writing and attaching your resume and cover letter so I could identify any issues preventing offers for interviews. Allow me to describe your resume to paint a visual for readers. Your three-page resume opens with a “Qualifications Summary” describing your experience as an executive assistant. Following this five-line paragraph is your “Experience” section which includes 8 positions over the past 18 years. Each position is presented with 5 to 10, mostly one-line bullet points. You have bolded your employers, titles, and dates of employment and included each workplace’s location. Following the “Experience” section is a listing of “Skills,” which solely includes technology applications. Lastly, you present your “Education,” which consists of two colleges from which you studied but did not graduate.

My main issue with your presentation is that you have solely focused on summarizing your job descriptions. Reading through each of the 59 bullet points on your resume, I do not see a single accomplishment that would predict your ability to add value beyond your job description. Having said that, as a human screener (and not an automated system searching for only keywords that would have no ability to “read between the lines”), I can see that based on the pedigree of your employers and the executives you supported, it is evident you are exceptional at your job. What you are not doing, however, is validating why you are so good at what you do and how you have had the opportunity to build a resume of this caliber. If you only touch on the expected functions of your role, any other qualified applicant would likely include similar information on their resume. How you differentiate your candidacy in a competitive job search market is to not only present a brief overview of your position’s expectations but also focus your content on how you delivered value.

Prioritizing your content is also vitally important. Best practices-based presentations would call for a brief paragraph overview of your position, followed by a handful of bullet points focused exclusively on your accomplishments. I would also expect more attention to detail in the formatting of your document, given your line of work. With some bullet points extending to create widowed sentences, while others are only a few words, your resume appears visually unbalanced and messy for the reader to review. Additionally, if looking closely, and especially if turning on invisible characters, there seems to be a lack of attention to detail in the construction of your document. This would not bode well for an executive assistant trying to showcase document construction and communication expertise. For example, you have multiple spaces between some words in sentences, there is inconsistency in formatting, right-aligned content is pushed to the right margin through a combination of manual spaces and tabs (instead of programming a right-aligned tab marker), and there is just an overall, as I said, general messiness to the document. If your resume were replete with accomplishments, I would not be as concerned with how it looked. But, with a combination of a lack of focus on how you indeed added value in each of your fantastic positions, combined with an overall inattention to the aesthetic, I fear that your candidacy could be overlooked and surpassed by some lesser-qualified candidates that perhaps paid more attention to those aspects of their presentation.

Lastly, I will mention that your cover letter is far too brief and does not match the caliber of your experience. Partnering a three-page resume with a one-paragraph cover letter is not the best representation of your expertise as an executive office communicator. I would recommend paying as much attention to your cover letter for the 50% of hiring managers looking to that document to extend their understanding of your professional journey.

I am 100% certain that if you review your career, consider how you added value to each of the executives and organizations you supported, and follow today’s best practices in building an impactful resume, you will immediately see an uptick in your offers for interviews. I wish you much success securing a remote position.

Samantha Nolan is an Advanced Personal Branding Strategist and Career Expert, founder and CEO of Nolan Branding. Do you have a resume, career, or job search question for Dear Sam? Reach Samantha at [email protected]. For information on Nolan Branding’s services, visit www.nolanbranding.com or call 888-9-MY-BRAND or 614-570-3442.