Several years ago I was hiring for a frontline support role with a fair amount of technical work attached to it. The pile of resumes all looked roughly the same. IT history, maybe a stint in support, the occasional helpdesk certification. We hired from that pile a few times and it was, fine. Not great.

Some of the people who actually thrived in the role didn't fit that template at all, so we pulled their resumes back out and asked what they had in common. The pattern was something I now believe pretty deeply. The best frontline support people we'd hired were support first, tech second. We'd been recruiting tech first, support second. So we flipped the search.

Which is how I ended up calling Tracy.

Tracy didn't have much customer support on her resume. A few years back she'd worked at a collections agency, doing collections on car loans. After that she went and got her massage therapy qualifications and had been a massage therapist ever since. That was it. Collections, then massage. No Zendesk, no helpdesk certs, no support history to speak of.

What stood out to me wasn't the collections, although for the record, doing collections (and repos) on car loans takes a kind of patience and temperament most people don't have. Yikes. It was the way she described her work as a massage therapist. She wrote about building trust. About creating a space where her clients could let their guard down. She described massage as something her clients had to engage in, something that required them to relax and believe in her ability before she could actually give them what they came for.

That's like the entire job of a frontline support agent as described by someone who'd never worked in support.

So we hired her. She was great.

If you're staring at your resume and wondering what someone in my chair is doing with it, here's the honest version.

I read it bottom to top.

I know nobody writes them that way. Everyone front-loads the "Professional Summary" because every template tells them to. I almost never read those. They're usually the lowest-effort, highest-AI part of the document, and you can spot a generated one in a half-second. So I scroll to the bottom.

At the bottom is the skills section. What does this person claim to be good at? Not because the list itself is decisive, but because it's a quick read of how someone describes themselves when they have a small box to do it in.

Then I move up to education. For a frontline role, education is rarely the deciding factor. But I want to see what they've pursued. Did they finish? In progress? A community college course they completed says something different than a four-year degree they're halfway through. None of it disqualifies anyone, for me it's just texture.

Then work history, bottom to top, which is to say, how did this person's career actually unfold? Did they start somewhere and grow inside that company? Did they jump fields? Did they hold a job for two months and then disappear and come back? You can read someone's progress over the last X years by reading their work history in chronological order, the way it actually happened, instead of in the reverse-chronological listing the resume forces on us.

By the time I get to the top, the "Why I want this role" statement, I've already mostly decided. If it's well-written, great. If it's clearly AI, I notice.

Now, here's where I disagree with most of the resume advice on the internet.

You don't need metrics on your no-experience resume. In fact, please don't.

Most of those candidates were baristas, teachers, retail clerks, servers. They don't have CSAT numbers, or Average Handle Times. And the ones that try to invent something close enough aren't impressing anyone.

Individual CSAT is full of bias. It's a fine measure of a group's performance over time. It's not a clean measure of an individual contributor, and even when I see real numbers from a real support job, they don't tell me much without context. "My AHT was 7 minutes" isn't helpful to me, here on the outside of your prior role's context. What was the team's AHT? What kind of work? What kind of customer?

It's like saying you managed a $500,000 budget. Maybe that's most of the company's spend. Maybe that's the office snacks line item. I have no idea, so I have to ignore it.

Putting a number out there just to put a number out there doesn't provide value. There are many other ways to tell the story of what you can do.

I do want to see tools. But only the ones you've actually used.

If you've worked in Zendesk, Salesforce, Intercom, Freshdesk, or any of the other major support platforms, list them. If you watched a tutorial or clicked around in a free trial, don't list it. Going through training on a website is wildly different from being in the tool eight hours a day for six months. You don't have the muscle memory, you don't have the speed, and within an hour of starting the job, you'll be exposed.

The tool literacy I'm actually looking for isn't a brand name. It's "this person has lived inside software all day and the new software won't faze them."

About cover letters.

Don't write one for a frontline role.

I know that's the opposite of what every career coach will tell you. Here's what actually happens on the receiving side. Cover letters are rare. Most of the ones I do see are clearly written by AI or pulled from a template, and they bring nothing the resume hasn't already told me. With AI screening cutting through application piles before they reach a human, a cover letter is mostly burning your time.

If you've got a specific reason you want this specific role at this specific company, write three sentences in the application's optional message box, or take time in your Professional Summary section - maybe rename it "For the hiring manager:". The thing that will move you forward in a frontline hiring process is your capability, your personality, and your work ethic. None of those come through in a cover letter that took thirty minutes and a template to produce.

A few last things I'd tell anyone before they hit send.

Your resume is a tool for telling your story. Read it bottom to top. Look at the language. Make sure the way you describe what you've done is specific enough to set you apart from the next person with similar qualifications. Tracy's massage therapy line worked because of how she wrote about it, not because she'd been a massage therapist.

Send a clean PDF. Don't build it in Canva or Photoshop, because resume parsers and AI screeners will mangle it and your application will get filtered before a person ever sees it.

And for the love of all that is holy, stop putting pictures on resumes. You're creating an opportunity for bias against yourself that you do not need.

The resumes that get phone calls are the ones where someone actually looked at their own life and noticed which parts mattered. Most don't. Tracy did. Be a Tracy.

Thanks. I love you. Bye.