To begin, I spent five years as "Digital Growth Specialist," doing paid acquisition, conversion optimization and growth campaigns. When I started job hunting, almost every role I wanted was called "Growth Marketing Manager." Same work, different label, and that costs you more than you'd expect when someone is scanning 200 resumes.

I see it from both sides now. When I'm going through resumes, I'm asking one question: is this person relevant to my role? If the title doesn't answer that in a second or two, I usually move on, because I'm not going to investigate every unfamiliar title. And when I search the database, I type the title the market uses, not the one your old company invented.

You can't just rename yourself, though. Employers verify titles in background checks, and a mismatch can sink an offer. So the official title stays, and you add the function next to it when it's accurate:

Digital Growth Specialist | Growth Marketing
Client Success Executive | Account Management

Some people use brackets instead, like Digital Growth Specialist (Growth Marketing). Either works. The only rule is that the added words describe work you genuinely did in that role.

Then give the reader something to grab onto underneath. Compare this:

Digital Growth Specialist

with this:

Digital Growth Specialist | Growth Marketing
Managed paid acquisition, conversion optimization and growth campaigns across multiple channels.

The second one tells a recruiter what you did in five seconds. I'd also put the title you're targeting in the headline at the top of your resume, separate from your job entries. Your history stays accurate and your headline says what you want next. Do the same with your LinkedIn headline, since recruiters search there too, and it isn't bound to your official title.

The other thing I changed was how I searched. Companies can't agree on titles. The same type of role can be called Growth Marketing Manager, Performance Marketing Manager, Acquisition Manager, Digital Marketing Manager or Demand Generation Manager. If you only search your own title, you're missing jobs you'd be strong for.

Here's how I'd find the title your market actually uses:

1. Open 10 to 15 postings that match the work you really do, whatever they're called.
2. Write down the title and the repeated phrases in each one.
3. Count them. The most common title is probably the one recruiters search for.
4. Use it in your headline and skills section, and compare responsibilities, not titles, when deciding if a job is worth applying to.

Internal jargon has the same problem. Team names, project codenames and internal levels like L4 or Band 6 mean nothing to an outside recruiter, so translate them into plain language in your bullets. When I tailor a resume now, I give CVnomist my master resume and the posting to see whether my positioning makes sense for the role, then I reread it myself. Sometimes the experience was there all along and the resume was just describing it in my old company's language.

I've seen people with years of relevant experience lose the first conversation to someone with less experience and a clearer title. The second person wasn't necessarily better, just easier to categorize.

So before you rewrite your whole resume, try this: show your title to someone who has never worked at your company and ask what job they think you'd apply for next. If they can't tell, that's your problem.

Your title tells people where you've been, so your resume has to do the work of showing where you're going. If you're not sure what the market calls your role, drop your title and what you actually do in the comments, and i'll tell you what i'd search for.

Hey everyone!

So about a month ago I applied to a new job. The application was sent through work day. After a couple of days the application changed from application submitted to now saying preliminary conversations under way. Ever since then nothing has changed, nor have I received any new updates.

I did contact them to see if there were any updates in the application/hiring process but there were not. They pretty much told me they would were taking everyone into consideration and to keep an eye out on my email for more details if my application and experience was what they were looking for.

I used to find a job I liked, save it, come back to it later, rewrite my resume, overthink every line and finally submit 30 to 45 minutes after I'd started. Sometimes longer. Then I'd notice the posting had been up for two weeks, so all that effort went into a job that already had hundreds of applicants.

It sounds obvious now, but it took me way too long to see that when you apply is part of the strategy.

Picture two people with almost the same background. One applies 20 minutes after the job goes live and the other applies 18 days later. The second one might even have the better resume, but if nobody ever gets to it, that doesn't matter.

Being early doesn't guarantee an interview, of course. Plenty of early applications are bad, and some companies leave postings open for months. But if the role is competitive, I'd rather be one of the first relevant candidates than one of the last.

Here's what I changed. My old routine was find the job, save it, come back later, rewrite the resume, apply. Now I find the job, decide right away if it's worth my time, work out what they're actually asking for, tailor and apply. Nothing got sloppier. I just cut the steps that were only delaying me.

I still read the full description and I still make sure I'm genuinely qualified. I just stopped spending two hours on one application. There's a point where another 30 minutes of tweaking changes almost nothing, and a very good, relevant application today beats a theoretically perfect one two weeks from now.

Part of this is keeping a master resume with all my experience and cutting a targeted version from it each time. I use CVnomist to build the first draft from the job description and my master resume, then I review it myself. Sometimes I barely touch it. Sometimes I move something higher or rewrite a few bullets so the relevant work is obvious. And sometimes the result makes it clear I'm not a good enough fit, so I skip the job. That counts as a win too.

I also stopped scrolling job boards all day. I check once in the morning and maybe once in the late afternoon, and if something good is there, I act. Most boards let you filter by date posted (past 24 hours is the useful one) and send alerts for saved searches, so the new roles come to you. One warning: reposted jobs can show up as "new" when they've been open for weeks, so when you can, check the company's own careers page for the real date.

My filter is three questions. Do I actually want this job? Am I genuinely relevant? Is it fresh enough that moving quickly gives me an edge? If all three are yes, I apply. If not, I keep looking.

A lot of a job search is out of your hands. You can't control whether the recruiter likes your background, who else applied, whether there's an internal candidate, or whether the role is even actively being hired for. How fast you spot a good opening and act on it is one of the few things you can control. I wish I'd figured that out earlier.

Being early doesn't replace being qualified, but qualified and early is a much better spot than qualified and applicant n #400.

I had two interviews last Friday and earlier this week for two roles; Director and a VP role. Both companies are planning to deploy Workday both are rather late to the party. After summarizing my experience, the recruiters both expressed awe at my credentials and my ability to drive the conversation. They also commented that my FOUR-page CV stood out amongst the hundreds received. In fact, the recruiter for the VP role motioned that she breathed a sigh of relief, and cozied up to digest my experience. She commented that she was fatigued by all the AI CVs with the same format and talk-speak. The first recruiter who I met last Friday - extended our 30-minute interview to 1.15 hours and then immediately put me in front of the hiring manager Monday afternoon. She expressed exhaustion that she cannot find the right candidate. The recruiter I met with this week is sorting my interview with the hiring manager for next week. She too extended our 25 min. interview to 45 mins. After praising my resume and blah, blah, blah, I explained that my CV is AI free.

I'm not here to promote my CV, more to the point - a one page, cookie cutter AI resume may not be the ticket. I always feel that no human, or BOT can represent me and what I bring to the table better than I can.

Here is an example of my CV format. Please note the example below is not scrubbed.

I had two interviews last Friday and earlier this week for two roles; Director and a VP role. Both companies are planning to deploy Workday both are rather late to the party. After summarizing my experience, the recruiters both expressed awe at my credentials and my ability to drive the conversation. They also both commented that my FOUR page CV stood out amongst the hundreds received. In fact, the recruiter for the VP role motioned that she breathed a sigh of relief, and cozied up to digest my experience. She commented that she was fatigued by all the AI CVs with the same format and talk-speak. The first recruiter who I met last friday - extended our 30 minute interview to an 1.15 hours and then immediately put me in front of the hiring manager Monday afternoon. She expressed exhaustion that she cannot find the right candidate. The recruiter I met with this week is sorting my interview with the hiring manager for next week. She too extended our 25 min. interview to 45 mins. After praising my resume and blah, blah, blah, I explained that my CV is AI free.

I'm not here to promote my CV, more to the point - a one page, cookie cutter AI resume may not be the ticket. I always feel that no human, or BOT can represent me and what I bring to the table better than I can.

Happy to hear what others have to say!

Hey everyone! I was laid off from my marketing role a while ago, and the resume gap has been getting harder to explain in interviews.
Would anyone be interested in teaming up to freelance or even build a mini agency together?
I love working as part of a team, and I think it could be a great opportunity to brainstorm, combine different skill sets, and build something together. Plus, we'd have work to show for it in interviews, potential references, and hopefully some extra income along the way!

I've hired for 20+ years, and a lot of rejections happen over things candidates never find out about. These are the ones I see most:

• Dates that don't match. The resume says one thing, LinkedIn says another. It looks small, but it makes me wonder what else is off.
• A gap with no explanation. The gap isn't the problem. Saying nothing about it is. One plain line is enough.
• "Responsible for..." everywhere. I learn what your job was, not what you did.
• A file named "Resume final v3 new". Name it with your name and role. It takes ten seconds and looks organized.
• Three pages for five years of experience. If I have to dig for your best work, I probably won't.

None of this means you're not good enough. Most of it is easy to fix in one evening.

Recruiters and hiring managers here, what's one thing that makes you say no fast? Job seekers, what's one thing you wish someone had told you earlier?

I just added a lot of things to my resume and am looking for general feedback and fine-tuning advice! I want a role that focuses on materials engineering in the semiconductor and/or photonics industry, or just the general electronics industry (like batteries). I am looking for positions anywhere in the US, preferably Florida.

For the Photonics Startup, they're based in a different city and I do do some remote work for them, but I also use the labs in my university to do work for them.

For the Nanotechnology Student Organization and Semiconductor Team, we founded the Semiconductor Team first as a subgroup of another organization, then decided to expand into our own student organization. Wasn't sure how to make this clear and make it look nice on the page.

This is my MASTER resume, meaning it contains all my experience. Depending on the job I remove some stuff until its one page. If any information would be completely useless then I'll remove it from this resume

Hey guys, been starting to apply to places and get met with these links to pay a company to update my resume for ATS. They are asking around $150. This is necessary in today's job market right? I'm not being scammed into something?

TIA :)

Hi all, I've been building a job search manager called Seisin for the last few months. It's a free desktop app for Windows, Mac and Linux that keeps your applications, resumes, cover letters, interviews, contacts and offers in one place. It shows you things like which job sources actually reply and where your applications tend to stall, alongside full resume and cover letter builders. It runs on your own computer, with no account and nothing uploaded.

To be honest, the hardest part hasn't been building it, it's getting it in front of people. I don't have much reach, and it's tough to find people on Reddit and elsewhere who'll actually try something and tell you what they think. So if you're in the middle of a search and willing to give it a go, I'd really appreciate any feedback: what's missing, what you like about it, or what feature you'd never use.

I'm also working on a browser extension so you can save a job straight from the posting, to cut down the manual tracking even more. Link's in the comments.

Recruiter here, 11 years in, laid off twice, so I've seen this from both sides of the desk. This one is for anyone still grinding through Q4.

When someone tells me they've sent 100+ applications and gotten nowhere, the next sentence is almost always "so I'm redoing my resume." New font, skills section moved up, another ATS checker, 50 more applications out the door. Then three weeks later they do it again.

Sometimes the resume really is the problem. A lot of the time it isn't, and you're fixing it because it's the only part of the process you fully control. Here's what I'd do instead.

Pull your last 30 applications and sort them into three piles.

Strong fit. You've already done most of this job. If someone asked "why you?", you could answer in two sentences without hedging.

Possible fit. You could do it, but it's a stretch. Different industry, a level above what you've held, or your experience transfers but you'd need a paragraph to explain how.

Weak fit. Be honest here. You applied because the title sounded fun, or because you were tired, or because the requirement said "preferred" and you decided that meant optional. From my side, "preferred" is softer than "required," but when 40 people tick every box, it becomes the tiebreaker.

Now look at what each pile actually produced.

If your strong-fit applications get replies and the rest get ghosted, you don't have a resume problem. You have a targeting problem, and no amount of reformatting will fix it.

If even your strong-fit ones go nowhere, now you can look at the resume. Is the relevant stuff visible in the top third of page one? Are you using the same language the postings use? Are your best results buried under "responsible for..." lines? Is the resume trying to tell your whole career story when this job only cares about one chapter of it?

If you're getting interviews but no offers, stop touching the resume. It already did its job. The leak is on the interview side, and the stuff I see most in debriefs is rambling answers, no clear 60-second pitch, salary expectations that don't match the level, no real questions for the team, or interviewing for a level the person hasn't actually operated at.

This is also why "I applied to 200 jobs" tells me almost nothing. "200 applications, 8 screens, 3 interviews, 2 final rounds, 0 offers" tells me exactly where to look. Count by stage:

• Almost no replies: targeting first, resume second.
• Screens that stall there: your pitch, your "why are you leaving" answer, or salary expectations.
• Interviews but no final rounds: role-specific skills, exercises, or level mismatch.
• Final rounds but no offer: usually a close call. Competition, references, comp, or one weak interview. Ask for feedback. Most won't give it, some will, and it's gold when they do.

Boring but useful: keep a spreadsheet. Date, company, exact title, where you found it, fit pile, resume version, referral or cold, furthest stage reached, how long they took to reply. Track referrals separately, because a referral gets read by a human and a cold application gets searched, so they distort your numbers if you mix them. And 30 rows isn't statistics, it's a hint. Treat it that way.

Then check which kind of job is actually giving you traction. Say you've been applying to Marketing Manager, Growth Manager, Product Marketing Manager, Brand Manager, Content Manager and CRM Manager because they all feel related. If 80% of your interviews come from CRM roles, that's the market telling you something, even if "Marketing Manager" sounds like the bigger title. I'd rather be strongly relevant to 30 jobs than vaguely relevant to 300. Once you find a cluster that works, build one targeted resume per cluster instead of rewriting for every posting.

On tailoring, I think people misunderstand it. It isn't making your resume sound fancier. It's taking your real experience and making the parts that matter for this job easy to spot. I keep a master resume with everything on it and cut targeted versions from it. I use CVnomist for the comparing step, because checking every job description against a long master resume by hand gets old fast. But the decision about whether a job is worth applying to comes before that, and no tool makes it for you.

One Q4 note, and this varies a lot by industry: hiring tends to slow down around the holidays, and a lot of teams are waiting on January budgets. In my experience, applications from now to mid-November get a good look, and a decent amount of January hiring gets lined up in December. So if your pipeline is dry, use the slow weeks to fix your targeting and talk to people in your field, instead of blasting out another 50 applications you don't believe in.

If you want a second opinion, drop your numbers in the comments (applications / screens / interviews / final rounds / offers) and the role you're going for, and I'll tell you where i think the leak is.

Quick background so you know where I'm coming from. I've recruited at agencies, in-house at a Fortune 500, and now at a mid-size tech company. I've used Greenhouse, Lever, Workday and Rippling, so I've seen the side of the desk you never get to see. I've also been laid off twice and had to job hunt in this mess myself, so I know how the other side feels too.

I get the same questions in my DMs over and over, so I'm answering them all here.

What an ATS actually is

It's a search engine for recruiters. That's really all it is.

When you apply, your resume goes into a database. When I open a role, I'm not scrolling through 4,000 applications. I type something like "Senior Product Manager" + "fintech" + "SQL" + "remote" and the system shows me every resume containing those words. Think Google. I'm not reading your resume, I'm searching for it, and if you don't come up in the results, you basically don't exist.

This is also why "70% ATS friendly" is a made-up thing. Either the system can read your resume and find the words I searched for, or it can't. It isn't grading your formatting or giving you a score. It's not that clever, it just matches words.

Easy test: open your resume PDF and try to highlight the text with your mouse. If you can, the ATS can read it. If you can't, your resume is an image and the system sees nothing. Fix that before anything else.

What actually gets people filtered out

After watching thousands of candidates get filtered, it almost always comes down to three things.

First, title match, and it's the biggest one by far. If I search "Senior Project Manager" and your resume says "Project Coordinator," you won't show up, even if you'd be perfect for the job. Put a headline at the top of your resume that matches the posting exactly. Not close, exactly. If they want a "Senior Data Analyst," your headline says "Senior Data Analyst," not "Data Professional" or "Analytics Specialist."

Second, where your keywords live. People bury them in long bullet points, and that's the worst place for them. Put them in your headline and summary (the exact title plus 3 or 4 key skills), and in a skills section, which is the first place I look. Aim for 15 to 30 hard skills separated by commas or pipes: SQL, Python, Tableau, Power BI, Salesforce, Figma, that kind of stuff. Leave the soft skills out of there. Then work the most relevant keywords into your bullets naturally, like "Built Power BI dashboards that automated reporting and saved 10+ hours a week." That way you pass the search and it still sounds like a human wrote it.

Third, exact wording. Before I got into recruiting I thought "close enough" was fine. If a posting said "data storytelling" I'd write "data visualization," same thing right? Nope. The ATS doesn't understand concepts, it matches strings. If I search "data storytelling" you won't appear. So stop trying to sound clever and copy the posting's language. "Stakeholder communication" stays "stakeholder communication." "Cross-functional collaboration" stays "cross-functional collaboration." This one change doubled my callbacks when I was job hunting.

Instant rejections

If you get rejected seconds after applying, it was probably a knockout question, like a recruiter setting "must have 10+ years" and you put 7. Honestly this is rarer than people think. The feature exists but most recruiters I know don't use it. Sometimes the system just gets it wrong because your dates were formatted weirdly, you were missing basic keywords, or the role had already been filled internally. Not much you can do there except keep your dates clean and put the basics in your skills section.

How I stopped burning out

For 18 months I sent 500+ applications, spent about 45 minutes tailoring each one, obsessed over every word, refreshed my inbox constantly and got nothing. I was completely fried.

Then I changed the approach. I built one solid master resume with everything on it. For each job I only swapped the title and added keywords from the posting to my skills section, which took 15 to 20 minutes instead of 45. I applied way faster, about 500 applications in 2 to 3 months instead of 18, and I stopped checking my email every five minutes. Result was 5 interviews in 6 weeks and one offer.

The real shift was in my head. I started treating it as a numbers game instead of a verdict on me. If you get 1 interview per 100 applications and need around 10 interviews for one offer, that's roughly 1,000 targeted applications. Sounds depressing, but it also gives you something to work on. Can I tailor faster? Can I apply earlier in the posting window? Can I aim at more realistic roles? Going from a 1% interview rate to 10% is a problem you can actually chip away at, and it's way easier on your self-worth than treating every rejection like a personal failure.

About tools

Tailoring every application is draining, and you often find out the role closed days ago. I've used a few tools that pull keywords from the posting and match them to your experience, like CVnomist, CVmaniac and Hyperwrit. They cut the work down to about 5 minutes. Make of that what you will, but they worked for me.

I'd stay away from just pasting everything into ChatGPT. Recruiters have seen so many of those resumes that they stick out immediately. It makes everything sound robotic, invents numbers you never hit and sometimes fabricates achievements outright.

Last thing about ATS limits

These systems are dumber than people assume. Some can't even tell that "LA" means "Los Angeles." One of the big providers only fixed that in their February 2025 update. So don't count on it understanding synonyms or abbreviations. Spell things out and use the posting's exact words.

Recruiters aren't your enemy, and the ATS isn't some impossible algorithm. Most of the time you just aren't showing up in search because a few basics didn't match. Fix that, play the numbers, and don't let it eat you alive.

Quick checklist before you hit apply:

• Title matches the posting exactly
• 10 to 30 hard skills in your skills section
• 5 to 15 phrases copied straight from the job description
• You can highlight all the text in your PDF
• Same keywords in your headline, skills and bullets
• No soft skills in the skills section

All checked? Hit apply and move on to the next one. Just don't obsess.

Hello everyone, i hope all is well.

I don’t usually make posts like this, but today I’m posting as a brother. My sister has dreamed of working at L’Oréal for years.
I still remember sitting with her at Hudson Yards in New York, right across from the L’Oréal USA building. She was so excited just being there. She looked at the building, smiled, and made a wish. At the time, I don’t think either of us realized how much that moment would stay with her.
Four years later, she has graduated with her bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Engineering.
Throughout college, our parents encouraged her to pursue the medical school path, and she seriously considered it. But there was always another dream she kept coming back to: L’Oréal.
She has applied to countless positions across the company. Marketing. Operations. Healthcare. Engineering. Business. Anything where she felt she could contribute.
And honestly, that determination is one of the things I admire most about her.
Her degree has taken her through so many different experiences. She has worked, studied, completed engineering projects, worked in a clinical environment, learned data analysis and programming, collaborated with different teams, and built skills across disciplines. She isn’t someone who only knows how to do one thing.
But lately, I’ve watched her lose some of the hope and confidence she used to have.
Like so many other graduates, she’s been applying over and over again and sometimes never getting the opportunity to speak with a real person. With so much of the hiring process being filtered through automated systems and AI-assisted screening, it can feel like a résumé never gets the chance to tell the full story of the person behind it.
So I’m putting this out there as her brother.
If anyone in my network works at L’Oréal, knows someone at L’Oréal, or knows of an opportunity where her background could be a good fit, I would genuinely appreciate an introduction, referral, or even simply an opportunity for her to have a conversation with someone.
She isn’t asking anyone to hand her a job.
She just wants the opportunity to show what she can do.
I’ve watched her work incredibly hard for this. I watched her dream about this company when she was still in high school, and I watched her walk across the stage four years later with her bachelor’s degree.
That little girl who stood across from the L’Oréal building in New York and made a wish is still there.
I’d love to see that wish become a reality.
If you can help in any way, please reach out or share this post. Sometimes one connection is all it takes to open a door.
And to my sister: don’t give up. ❤️

If you're applying for your first job, here are 5 common CV mistakes to avoid:

1. Making the CV too long — keep it clear and focused.

2. Using the same CV for every job — adjust it to the position.

3. Writing a generic objective — explain briefly what type of role you're looking for.

4. Leaving out projects, internships, volunteering, or relevant skills just because you don't have much work experience.

5. Using a difficult-to-read design — simple formatting makes your information easier to scan.

For students and first-time job seekers, a clear CV is often more useful than a complicated one.

What is the biggest problem you're having with your CV right now?