Candidates are listing every tool they’ve ever opened on their resumes because they want to sound as impressive as possible. They don’t get it.
Salesforce. HubSpot. Monday. Asana. Trello. Notion. ClickUp. Slack. Zoom. Canva. Mailchimp. Klaviyo. ActiveCampaign. WordPress. Shopify. Webflow. Google Analytics. Ahrefs. SEMrush. Figma.
They think they’re a walking and talking brochure.
117 tools. 26 different “specializations”. A dozen different “cross-functional and diverse initiative” thingies they’ve managed or been a part of.
Here’s what’s not on it:
“Sent every follow-up on time for six straight months without being reminded.”
“Kept the CRM updated every single day without a single missed entry.”
“Chased an overdue invoice on Tuesday. Collected it by Thursday.”
The boring stuff. The stuff that actually matters. The stuff that keeps the business or org running.
Nobody puts that on a resume.
Because it doesn’t sound impressive.
It sounds like…work.
Some candidates collect badges like they’re NPCs in a video game and others actually get the damn results.
If your inbox has 300 resumes that all look the same — all listing the same 30 tools, all claiming to be “detail-oriented self-starters” — here’s your filter:
Ask them what they did yesterday. Not what tools they used. What they DID.
The ones who can answer in one sentence are the ones you want.
The ones who need five minutes to describe their “workflow optimization framework” are the ones you don’t.
And if you see the phrase “proficient in Microsoft Office or Google Workspace Suite” on a resume in 2026…straight to the garbage it goes.
That’s like listing “can use a telephone” on a resume in 2005.
It’s garbage (no pun intended).
It’s useless.
Doesn’t help you hire them. Doesn’t help them get an income. All it does is great more work and garbage for you, the hiring manager, or business owner to sift through. A gigantic waste of the most precious thing and only thing that we can’t renew in this life:
Time.
To start taking back your time and hire the top remote talent, without all of the headaches of sorting through someone’s 827 different skills…
HireUA.
We keep a curated database of talent that “gets it”.
Click here learn how to access it:
Kyle Mau
CEO & Founder, HireUA
Read Next: What Does a Virtual Assistant Do? Here Are 130+ Real Tasks (And the Ones That Actually Matter)
