Sometimes harder than deciding what to put into a résumé is deciding what to take out.

You’ve worked hard your whole life, and you're proud of all the skills you’ve mastered that have brought you where you are—and rightfully so. You got your hands dirty while climbing that ladder, and you’re still willing to do the grunt work as needed to support the team. You want that all to be listed on your résumé as part of your success story, but there’s just no room. The résumé would be too long, and your best accomplishments could be lost in a sea of chores.

So how do you decide what to delete?

I call it the Rex Test.

Imagine your boss calls you into his office for a “special assignment” (and because “special assignment” is in quotation marks, you know it’s not going to be good). His nephew, Rex, has no discernible skills, admits to having no ambitions, is not particularly fragrant, never raises his eyelids more than halfway, and was supposed to be here a half hour ago, but got lost in the parking lot.

And he’s just been hired in your department.

Your “special assignment” is to give Rex something to do that he can’t mess up. It has to be simple, it has to be relatively unimportant, and it has to be something easily fixable because even though it’s something he can’t mess up… you know he’ll mess up.

Delegating the easiest jobs

So which of your regular job duties will you train him to do? In other words: What do you do as part of your job that’s so easy, so below-entry-level that you can hand it off to Rex and be relatively confident you haven’t just subjected the company to immediate and irrevocable financial ruin?

That’s the job responsibility you can cut from your résumé.

If it’s a chore is so simple that Rex can do it, it doesn’t deserve a place on your résumé with the higher-order, more challenging responsibilities you take on day after day. But if a prospective employer sees your résumé filled with Rex jobs, she may assume you’re not as valuable to your current employer as you’d like to portray yourself. After all, if you’re doing Rex jobs, your current boss must not have that much faith in, or respect for, your abilities… or worse: Maybe YOU’RE the Rex of your workplace?

You don’t want that.

So if you regularly negotiate multi-million dollar contracts with clients, your résumé doesn’t need to mention that you also use the copy machine. Let Rex do it.

If you devise treatment plans for patients and follow through to ensure they’re executed properly and adjusted as needed, you can let Rex make the coffee; you don’t need that on your résumé like he does.

If you have been operating heavy construction machinery for 20 years, and year after year are recognized by your company for having zero safety violations in your career, let Rex fill the gas tank; you have more valuable skills to put to use.

Giving Rex these jobs frees you up to focus on improving your more important skills, and these are the skills that will sell your résumé when you apply for your next job.

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