While a résumé cannot make your career, it can certainly break it. Résumés fail every day. They make a candidate look too scattered, too junior, too specialized or too much of any other trait that is undesirable in general or a particular case and not enough of what an employer actually does want. In the hundreds of résumés I read last year alone, I can say that the greatest point of failure is that the résumé writer did not step back and consider what he or she was trying to communicate.