Blog
Resume writing tips, ATS advice, and job search strategy.
Keep Track of 50 Applications Without a Spreadsheet
Somewhere around application fifteen, the spreadsheet starts lying to you. Not dramatically. A row with no date. A status that still says "Applied" three weeks after a rejection you never logged. A job whose posting has been taken down, so the link in column B goes to a 404 and you can't remember what the role even was. By application thirty you've stopped opening it. By fifty you're running the search from your inbox and your memory, and both are terrible at it. This post is about what a job
The Questions You'll Almost Certainly Be Asked for Your Role
Last week we went through how to turn a job description into a list of likely interview questions. That gets you the questions specific to the posting. But there's a second set that turns up no matter what the posting says, because interviewers for your kind of role have asked them a hundred times and they work. Those are the ones this post is about. The good news is that the list is short. The less good news is that because everyone knows these questions are coming, a flat answer stands out fa
How to Prepare for an Interview Using the Job Description
You've got the interview. The usual next move is to search for "common interview questions", read through fifty of them, and hope the ones you rehearsed come up. Most of them won't. There's a better source, and you've already got it open. The job description is the closest thing to an answer key the company will ever hand you. In earlier posts we used it to tailor your resume and to understand what a match score measures. This post is about using it for the next stage: working out what you'll b
How to Write Resume Bullets That Prove Impact, Not Duties
Read most resumes and you'll see the same pattern. "Responsible for managing the deployment pipeline." "Worked on the customer onboarding flow." "Involved in migrating services to the cloud." Every one of those tells the reader what the job was. None of them tells the reader whether you were any good at it. Once your resume can be parsed, and once it's tailored to the posting, the bullets are where you actually make your case. This post is about writing them so they prove something. Duties v
The 10 Resume Formatting Mistakes That Break ATS Parsing
Most resume advice is about what to say. This post is about something more basic: whether the software reading your resume can find what you said at all. In our post on how ATS systems work, we covered parsing, the step where an applicant tracking system pulls your resume apart into fields like name, job titles, dates and skills. If that step goes wrong, it doesn't matter how strong the content is. The recruiter searching the database sees a garbled profile, or doesn't see you at all. Here are
What a Match Score Actually Tells You (and What It Doesn't)
You paste in a job description, upload your resume, and a number comes back. 62. Or 81. Or 47. It's tempting to treat that number like a grade. It isn't, quite, and knowing what it measures is what makes it useful. Our first two posts covered how applicant tracking systems read your resume and how to tailor it to a specific posting. This one is about the number in between: the match score, and how to read it without over- or under-reacting. What a match score is measuring A match score compa
How to Tailor Your Resume to a Job Description (Without Keyword Stuffing)
Sending the same resume to every opening is the most common reason strong candidates get filtered out. Here's what tailoring actually means, what to change, what to leave alone, and how to do a pass in twenty minutes.
How ATS Systems Actually Work (and How to Stop Losing to Them)
Applicant tracking systems reject more resumes than any hiring manager ever will. Here's what they actually check, the mistakes that trip them up, and how to fix your resume before you hit apply.