The structure is nearly identical. The language is nearly identical. Even the bullets start to blur together:
- Directed federal, state, and local government affairs efforts.
- Manage budget for trade associations, sponsorships, and outside lobbyists.
- Advised clients on complex policy matters.
None of this is inaccurate. It’s just not distinctive. And that’s the problem.
The Real Problem With Resume Bullet Points (Why Strong Experience Gets Flattened)
When I see this pattern, it’s not because people lack strong experience. It’s because they’re describing their work in a way that flattens it.
Most resume bullet points read like a job description: a summary of responsibilities, scope, and general areas of ownership. While these elements need to be included in your resume (what I call the "job overview" that comes before your bullet points), they are merely the introduction to, or context around, the more important piece: evidence.
Hiring managers need to understand whether someone can actually do the job, in a particular environment, with a certain level of complexity. A resume that focuses primarily on responsibilities answers the question: What were you supposed to do? A strong resume answers a different one: What did you actually do that mattered?
Why Strong Experience Turns Into Generic Resume Bullet Points
What’s striking is how quickly this changes once you move out of the document and into a real-time conversation.
With these three clients, it becomes immediately clear that their work was not interchangeable.
- One created her company's first-ever government relations function and Political Action Committee (PAC).
- Another is leading efforts in AI and emerging tech, educating key stakeholders across the government about the importance of sound, data-driven policy frameworks while advising in-house leadership on the evolving regulatory landscape and its business implications.
- The third launched her own successful advisory firm and is a well-known media voice on small-business policy.
The substance of their work is different. The way they operate is different. The value they bring is different. None of it was showing up in those generic bullet points.
Why Most Professionals Struggle With Resume Writing (And End Up With Generic Content)
Translating your work into something specific and differentiated is hard. It requires you to go back through your experience and identify the stories that actually define how you operate. That might mean looking at old performance reviews, digging through emails, or finding the one article that mentions your team’s work.
It also means answering those follow-up questions, like:
- "Why was this initiative so important?"
- "Who else worked with you on this project?"
- "How did this work make a difference to the company's bottom line or advance its business strategy?"
These are the same questions you’ll get in an interview—formal or informal. Without someone asking you questions or forcing you to be more specific, people default to writing in broad terms. They rely on language they’ve seen before. They describe responsibilities instead of outcomes.
The result is a resume that is technically correct, but strategically weak. It communicates competence, but not distinction.
How AI Resume Builders Create Generic Resumes (And What to Do Instead)
Many AI resume tools reinforce this pattern rather than fixing it. They tend to start with the job description, optimize for keywords, and generate language that sounds polished but is ultimately interchangeable with what already exists. If the inputs are generic, the outputs will be too—just more polished.
That can create the illusion of improvement without actually changing how the resume functions.
What a Strong, ATS-Friendly Resume Actually Looks Like
A strong resume reads less like a job description and more like a tape of greatest hits. A set of selected, intentional examples—not a comprehensive record. It doesn’t try to capture everything. It focuses on the work that best illustrates how you think, how you operate, and where you’ve had real impact.
That often includes:
- moments where you influenced an outcome, not just contributed to a process
- situations that required judgment in ambiguous or high-stakes environments
- work that changed something in a meaningful way—policy, process, relationships, or direction
This is what allows someone reading your resume to understand not just what you’ve done, but how you would show up in their organization.
The Resume Writing Gap: Turning Experience Into Clear, High-Impact Bullet Points
Most people don’t have an experience problem. They have a translation problem.
They know their work. They’ve done meaningful, often complex things. But translating that into a clear, specific, and differentiated narrative on paper is a different skill.
It’s also the part of the process that gets the least guidance.
How Paige Works: An AI Resume Builder That Helps You Write Strong, Specific Bullet Points
This is exactly the gap I built Paige to address, and it’s very directly grounded in how I already work with clients one-on-one.
In a 1:1 setting, this process is conversational. You fill out a questionnaire and send over materials—performance reviews, old resumes, award write-ups, press. You talk through your roles, I ask targeted questions, and we start to build out stories to showcase what is actually distinctive about your profile. That’s where the shift happens—not just in reorganizing and formatting, but in how the work is understood and articulated.
Paige is designed to start that process.
Instead of starting with a blank page or a template, you bring in what you already have—your resume, your LinkedIn, bio, or even messy notes—and Paige builds a structured draft and begins asking the kinds of questions I would ask in a session. You can work through those prompts, refine your bullets, and get to a much stronger version on your own.
Paige will ask you general questions about your resume, or you can have it create targeted questions for specific sections, allowing you to zero in on a key role. Paige will suggest tailored edits you can apply directly, turning your answers into clear, specific bullet points.
For some people, that’s enough. They’re able to work through it independently, create strong resume content, and iterate.
Others want more back-and-forth, more judgment, more context, more conversations. That’s where I still work directly with clients—sometimes starting in Paige and then moving into 1:1 work, or layering in shorter working sessions to refine and finalize.
It’s not one or the other. It’s the same process, with different levels of support.
From Generic Resumes to Distinct Profiles: What Changed for These Three Clients
With these three clients, the work we’re doing now has very little to do with formatting or wording tweaks (although there is always some of that—this is a 2-page document after all!).
It’s about pulling apart experiences that initially looked the same on paper and rebuilding them in a way that reflects how different they actually are. In each case, the starting point was a set of bullets that could have belonged to anyone. The endpoint is something much more specific—and much harder to replicate.
That’s the goal.
Not just a stronger resume, but one that actually reflects how you operate—and makes it impossible to confuse you with someone else.
Margaret Gerety is a Certified Professional Resume Writer (CPRW), Certified Digital Career Strategist (CDCS), and founder of Paige Careers. A Harvard graduate and former attorney, she has helped over 300 professionals navigate successful career transitions.