No one needs to know about the summer job you had when you were 16.

When it comes to assembling a resume for the job hunt, the key phrase is “less is more.” I’m sure you’d love to tell everyone about every last mote of experience you’ve accrued over your entire life, but HR folks are very busy people. If your resume is more than a couple of pages, and sometimes even less than that, they’re just going to bin it and get on with their workload. As such, you need to keep your resume pruned of any unnecessary details and information.

Right off the bat, a big resume killer is photos. You’re not assembling a tourism brochure, nobody needs to see what you look like. Frankly, any company that would potentially hire based solely on your face is probably one you don’t want to work for anyway. A professional headshot is for a LinkedIn page, not a standalone resume. On that same subject, try to keep personal touches like pronouns out of the body of the resume. Keep it short, keep it simple. You don’t need to say “I led a team of hard workers to success in completing such and such project;” just “completed a project while supervising a team” is fine.

Speaking of the body, the stuff you put in there needs to be recent and relevant. Any job positions older than 10 years are effectively worthless, even if you consider them formative. If you put every job you’ve had over the last 10 years, you’re just gonna look desperate and indecisive. You should also stay away from hobbies and soft skills, unless they’re relevant to the position you’re applying for. No one needs to know what you’re doing with your time off unless it directly correlates with success in the field you’re getting into, and while a couple of soft skills like “leadership” or “multitasking” are okay, they should be vastly outnumbered by hard proficiencies.

Putting together a resume is kind of like assembling an abstract puzzle. The answer changes slightly every time, but as long as you keep it simple, it won’t be too much of a headache to revamp it.