I spent a whole weekend fixing my English resume just to realize nobody reads it

Downloading those expensive templates didn’t really help

I spent about 30,000 won last month on a fancy resume template I found on some design site because I was convinced that my old, plain Microsoft Word document was why I wasn’t getting any callbacks for these global roles. It looked sleek, definitely. It had those little progress bars for my skills—like 80% proficiency in Python or whatever—and a nice, clean two-column layout. But honestly, as soon as I started trying to cram my actual work history into those tiny text boxes, I realized how annoying it was. The formatting kept breaking every time I tried to add a bullet point about a project I did at my previous internship. I wasted three hours just fighting with the alignment, and by the end, I wasn’t even sure if it was ‘professional’ or just ‘distracting.’

The LinkedIn obsession that nobody talks about

Everyone keeps saying you need to be active on LinkedIn if you want to work at a place like Netflix or these big bulge bracket firms, so I started ‘networking.’ I tried reaching out to people who were in the positions I wanted, just asking for a quick chat. It’s exhausting. You spend so much time crafting the perfect English message, making sure you sound respectful but not desperate, and then you wait. Sometimes you wait for a week, sometimes forever. I spent probably four hours a day for two weeks just looking at profiles and trying to find someone who might actually reply. Eventually, I realized that sending these messages felt less like building a career and more like digital begging. I don’t think I actually learned much about the company culture, just how good I am at being ignored.

Trying to translate my actual work into English

Translating my experience from Korean to English was the most frustrating part. It’s not just about the language; it’s about the context. When I describe a task I did back in Seoul, I feel like I have to inflate it to make it sound like a ‘global-level accomplishment.’ I end up using all these buzzwords like ‘spearheaded’ or ‘leveraged,’ but when I read it back, it sounds like someone else wrote it. It doesn’t sound like me. I sat there with an English dictionary and a bunch of sample resume PDFs open, just trying to match my mundane daily tasks to the high-energy verbs they recommend in these ‘guide’ articles. It feels incredibly fake, but if I don’t do it, I worry that my resume just looks too modest compared to what everyone else is submitting.

Is the AI sorting out my future?

I read somewhere that these companies use AI to match resumes to job descriptions now. That honestly made me feel even more uneasy. I imagine some server somewhere scanning my document for keywords, and if I didn’t use the ‘right’ phrasing, I just get tossed into the bin. It makes the whole process feel like a game where the rules are hidden. I found a couple of free tools online to check if my resume is ‘ATS-friendly,’ and the results were inconsistent. One tool said my layout was perfect, and the next one told me the columns were confusing the system. I’m still not sure which one to believe, so now I’m back to using a boring, single-column document that looks like it was made in 2005. It’s ugly, but at least I know it won’t crash when an AI looks at it.

Sitting with the uncertainty

I’m at a point now where I’ve stopped tweaking the fonts every night. I think I’ve spent more time adjusting the margins on my resume than I have actually applying to jobs I’m genuinely excited about. Maybe that’s the problem. I’m so focused on making the document look like a winner that I haven’t even stopped to think if these roles are even a good fit for what I want to do next. I’m still waiting for a few replies, but to be honest, I don’t feel any more confident than I did a month ago. The whole process just feels like a cycle of editing and waiting, and I’m still not sure if this ‘career transition’ path I’m on is actually moving anywhere.