Never Put These 5 Things on Your Korean Corporate Resume

Your Korean resume might be getting rejected due to these 5 unexpected reasons.

Here are five points to watch out for before you send another application.

1. Excessive personal information

There’s no need to put your full address, or your marital status, or your gender all cluttered on the resume. For address specifically, only put the brief address that helps identify where you’re approximately located. Also, avoid putting your marital status and gender in case they discriminate your application based on that. We’re trying to increase our acceptance chances here.

There is one exception though, which is your visa status. That's the one personal detail you should keep, and you should put it at the top where your contact details are located.

A Korean company’s first question about a foreign candidate is always the same: can we actually hire this person? Name your visa clearly, whether it's E-7, D-10, or an F-series. If you’re overseas, clearly state which visa you need to be sponsored by.

2. Irrelevant part-time experience

There’s a lot of resumes where irrelevant part-time experiences and projects are listed that have nothing to do with job position you’re applying for. Remove it from your resume and instead, replace it with real, validated projects that are tied to the job position.

If you’re having trouble actually coming up with these real project experiences, I wrote an article here and here on how you can find the best projects to work on to put into your resume.

3. Your thesis and every school detail

Unless you're applying for a university research role, your thesis title and your full academic history just create clutter that doesn’t get read.

Only put the education degree and year. If there’s other education experiences, like language exchange or awards, that are unrelated to the job position, just remove it and keep the section simple instead.

4. AI bullet points that don't match the job

AI is great for a first draft. In fact, I have a couple of verified prompts here that help you create your first draft.

However, what ends up happening is that you just get Claude or ChatGPT to blindly write everything for you to fill up space, and you end up with resumes that end up looking like this:

Recruiters can tell it’s AI-generated slop, so make sure to write STAR-L formatted bullet points that are actually proofread by human, and keep it concise and maximum 4 bullet points.

5. Messy selfie

Korean resumes usually include a photo, and this matters more than most foreigners expect. A selfie, a cropped vacation pic, etc.

Use a clean, professional photo with a plain background and good lighting. You can actually use my resume photo prompt here to create professional, clean LinkedIn style photos.

The final verdict

Your resume is the first thing recruiters see to make a judgement about you. Think of it as a targeted pitch for a job position, so spend time to make it tailored to each job application.

If you want the full resume guide, including the templates, prompts and system to land your first job in Korea, you can check out Korea Career OS.