u/Fresh-Blackberry-394

Qualified resume writer who has rewritten over 500 resumes across industries check my profile if you want to see my work. Earlier this week I had the chance to review a handful of resumes and honestly the response reminded me why I enjoy doing this so I figured I’d do it again while I have some extra time. First 25 people to message me get a free resume review. I mainly work with senior professionals, career switchers and people who have been applying for a while with no response. Students are welcome too. Redact your personal info before sending it over.

1.Two page resumes are not the problem everyone makes them out to be if your experience genuinely fills two pages forcing it onto one just means cutting the substance that actually makes you stand out.

2.The prettier the template the worse it usually performs most of those designed Canva resumes break completely when uploaded into an ATS and the formatting disappears before a human ever sees it. ( A simple white and black one is the best )

3.A long skills list at the top of your resume is doing nothing hiring managers skip it because everyone has the same one and honestly a skill only means something when there’s actual evidence of it somewhere in your experience.

If you want a quick second pair of eyes on your resume or some surface level advice my DMs are temporarily open to help some people out.

Qualified resume writer, check my profile for proof. I’ve been feeling a bit generous this week and wanted to help out. Normally I don’t do this but the first 15 people who message me get a free resume review. I specialise in senior professionals, career switchers and people who have been applying for a while with no traction. Students are welcome too. Obviously redact all your personal info before sending it over.

Edit : will delete post once request are to much

I used to be a recruiter. Yes I know, I know. Left that to pursue my passion in resume writing and now I do that basically full time. What I’m about to share isn’t from an article. It’s from what I actually saw happening on the other side of the table during hundreds of interviews.

What was already decided before you even walked through that door rarely gets spoken about. And honestly some of it might surprise you.

1.Sometimes the role wasn’t even really open. An internal candidate had already been told they were getting it and you were there to tick a box. I did this more times than I’m comfortable admitting.

2.Your LinkedIn was looked at before you ever walked in. If it didn’t match your resume or hadn’t been touched in years that conversation was already happening before you arrived.

3.The hiring manager had already formed an impression from the way you emailed when scheduling. How you wrote, how quickly you responded, whether you were clear or vague. Most people don’t think about that email at all.

4.Your subject line and opening sentence on your application already signalled whether you understood professional communication before anyone had read a single qualification you had.

5.Your most recent job title and the company name next to it told them what number to open with before salary ever came up in conversation.

6.If there was a gap on your resume it was already being talked about before you sat down. Not always negatively but a story had already formed in the room that you’d have to work against without knowing it was there.

7.The first sixty seconds after you walked in carried more weight than most people realise. How you greeted whoever was at the front desk, how you sat, how you handled the small talk before it started. That stuff lands before your answers do.

Knowing this doesn’t mean the game is rigged against you. It just means there are things most people never think about that actually matter. Your LinkedIn before you even apply. The email you send to schedule the interview. The gap sitting on your resume that you’ve never addressed. These aren’t small things and they’re all fixable. Most people just walk in having never thought about them once.

A few people who messaged yesterday never sent their resume, so I’m giving their spots away.

Edit for context :

Qualified resume writer, check my profile for proof. I’ve been feeling a bit generous this week and wanted to help out. Normally I don’t do this but the first 5 people who message me get a free resume review. I specialise in senior professionals, career switchers and people who have been applying for a while with no traction. Students are welcome too. Obviously redact all your personal info before sending it over.

Qualified resume writer, check my profile for proof. I’ve been feeling a bit generous this week and wanted to help out. Normally I don’t do this but the first 15 people who message me get a free resume review. I specialise in senior professionals, career switchers and people who have been applying for a while with no traction. Students are welcome too. Obviously redact all your personal info before sending it over.

Edit : will delete post once request are to much

The job market is genuinely so shit man. I don’t know how to say this but if you see it everyday writing resumes for good candidates whilst rewriting their resume you notice this guy is actually amazing he would be a catch for the company he’s targeting why is it taking him this long and you notice it every single time. Genuinely good qualified people getting passed over and it makes me angry. Like actually angry. These are not lazy people these are not unqualified people these are people who have put in the work and the market is just not rewarding them for it and nobody talks about that.

Some get their dream jobs after months of applying with their new resume but as a resume writer it crushes my ego that it’s taking them this long to find a new job even with my help and it makes me sad. I can’t blame myself because maybe without my help they would’ve taken longer but man I just wish things were easier for them.

I remember in the beginning when I started my clients always told me two weeks in after receiving the new resume they got a new job. That was prime 2024 immediately after Covid finding a job was easy then. Now two years in things like these get rare and that genuinely hurts to say.

Anyway just hope things will get better soon and wanted to rant.

As a resume writer I probably shouldn’t be answering this honestly. But I’m going to anyway.

I’ve been in the career space for years first as a recruiter, now running my own resume writing business. I see this question come up constantly and I think most people deserve a straight answer instead of the version that just happens to end with hiring someone.So here it is.

When you can do it yourself:

1.You’re staying in the same industry applying for the same type of role. Minimal translation needed just needs to look clean and current.

2.You’ve been getting interviews consistently and just hit a rough patch sometimes the market is the problem not the document.

3.You have someone in your life who actually hires people and will give you honest specific feedback not just tell you it looks great.

4.You’re early career with straightforward experience and just need something clean and easy to read.

5.Your background is simple and linear one industry, steady progression, nothing complicated to explain.

6.You just need to add a recent role to an already working resume not a full overhaul, just an update.

7.You’re not in a rush and have the time to research, rewrite, get real feedback and go through several rounds properly.

8.You’ve hired people yourself and already understand from the other side what actually lands.

9.Your resume has been getting you interviews recently it’s working, you just want a second opinion.

When you genuinely schuld consider :

1.You’ve been applying for months to roles you know you’re right for and the silence is consistent. That’s not bad luck. That’s a positioning problem.

2.Every time you open it to fix something you end up closing it feeling worse than when you started.

3.You’re making a career change and the resume is still telling the story of the industry you’re leaving.

4.You’ve run it through AI multiple times and each version sounds more polished and less like you and it’s still not working.

5.Your experience is strong but you’ve never been able to make the resume actually reflect that and you don’t know why.

6.You’re targeting senior or director level roles and one wrong impression costs you opportunities that won’t come back.

7.You’re returning after time away and don’t know how to frame the gap without it becoming the first thing anyone focuses on.

One last thing be careful who you hire. There are genuinely bad resume writers out there. Always ask for samples before you spend anything.For context I’m a resume writer myself over 500 resumes across pretty much every industry and background. Career changers, senior professionals, long gaps, years at one company. There isn’t really a situation I haven’t worked through.

If you want to work together or just have a question feel free to message me. \[https://hirespark.io/\\\](https://hirespark.io/)

As a resume writer I probably shouldn’t be answering this honestly. But I’m going to anyway.

I’ve been in the career space for years first as a recruiter, now running my own resume writing business. I see this question come up constantly and I think most people deserve a straight answer instead of the version that just happens to end with hiring someone.So here it is.

When you can do it yourself:

1.You’re staying in the same industry applying for the same type of role. Minimal translation needed just needs to look clean and current.

2.You’ve been getting interviews consistently and just hit a rough patch sometimes the market is the problem not the document.

3.You have someone in your life who actually hires people and will give you honest specific feedback not just tell you it looks great.

4.You’re early career with straightforward experience and just need something clean and easy to read.

5.Your background is simple and linear one industry, steady progression, nothing complicated to explain.

6.You just need to add a recent role to an already working resume not a full overhaul, just an update.

7.You’re not in a rush and have the time to research, rewrite, get real feedback and go through several rounds properly.

8.You’ve hired people yourself and already understand from the other side what actually lands.

9.Your resume has been getting you interviews recently it’s working, you just want a second opinion.

When you genuinely schuld consider :

1.You’ve been applying for months to roles you know you’re right for and the silence is consistent. That’s not bad luck. That’s a positioning problem.

2.Every time you open it to fix something you end up closing it feeling worse than when you started.

3.You’re making a career change and the resume is still telling the story of the industry you’re leaving.

4.You’ve run it through AI multiple times and each version sounds more polished and less like you and it’s still not working.

5.Your experience is strong but you’ve never been able to make the resume actually reflect that and you don’t know why.

6.You’re targeting senior or director level roles and one wrong impression costs you opportunities that won’t come back.

7.You’re returning after time away and don’t know how to frame the gap without it becoming the first thing anyone focuses on.

One last thing be careful who you hire. There are genuinely bad resume writers out there. Always ask for samples before you spend anything.For context I’m a resume writer myself over 500 resumes across pretty much every industry and background. Career changers, senior professionals, long gaps, years at one company. There isn’t really a situation I haven’t worked through.

If you want to work together or just have a question feel free to message me. https://hirespark.io/

Just want to be upfront this post is genuinely here to educate. Nothing else.

I spent years as a recruiter. I left because I got tired of watching good people get filtered out for reasons that had nothing to do with their ability. The system kept moving like that was just how things worked and at some point I stopped being able to pretend that was fine.

So I left and built my own resume writing business. Been doing it long enough now that I know exactly what’s working against people because I spent years being the one it worked through.

The job market right now is genuinely hard and most people have no idea how much of what’s holding them back has nothing to do with their experience or their qualifications. Alot of it lives on paper. And most people can’t see it.

These are the things I fix every single day. Take what’s useful.

1.Your resume reads like it was written by someone who was just happy to have the job. Not someone who knew their worth and expected the next one. Hiring managers feel that before they finish the first bullet.

2.You’ve grown significantly in your role but your resume still reflects the version of you from three years ago. The title never changed so on paper it looks like nothing happened but a lot happened.

3.You listed your achievements in the order you remembered them not the order that would make someone stop. Your most impressive result is sitting behind two bullets that don’t come close to it.

4.You stayed somewhere longer than you planned and added extra bullets to compensate. It doesn’t help. Two strong bullets in a role always land harder than eight average ones trying to justify the time.

5.You spent more time on your cover letter than your resume because it felt more personal. The cover letter rarely gets read first. The resume decides whether anyone cares enough to get that far.

6.The thing you’re most proud of professionally isn’t on your resume. You left it off because you weren’t sure it was relevant. It almost certainly is. And it’s probably the thing that would have made someone stop.

7.You described your role so thoroughly that anyone reading it knows exactly what the job involved. But nobody knows what you specifically did that nobody else would have.

8.You focused on getting past the ATS and forgot that a real person has to actually want to call you after. Those are two completely different problems and most resumes only solve one of them.

9.You’ve been sending the same resume to completely different types of roles because you figure the experience speaks for itself. It doesn’t. The resume has to do the translation and right now it isn’t.

10. The person on paper is a few years behind the person who would walk into that interview room. You’ve taken on more, delivered more, grown more and none of it made it onto the document because you haven’t touched it since you last needed to.

If any of these made you look at your resume differently that’s the point. Most of these things are invisible until you know what to look for.
Go back and read yours like a stranger would. You might see it completely differently now

Thanks for reading

Just want to be clear upfront this post is genuinely here to educate. Nothing else.

I was a recruiter for years. I left because I got tired of being inside a process that told itself it was fair and genuinely wasn’t. Good people got filtered out every single day and the system just kept moving like that was completely normal. At some point I couldn’t keep pretending it was fine.

Job hunting is brutal right now and most people have no idea how much of it has nothing to do with their ability or their experience. The process is broken in ways that aren’t your fault and that nobody really talks about honestly.

I run a resume writing business now and I’ve been doing it long enough to know what I’m doing. The switch probably looked odd from the outside but it made complete sense to me. I already knew exactly what was working against people because I’d spent years being the one it worked through.This is what I was actually looking for.

1.When I had 200 resumes to get through on a Monday morning my manager was checking fill rates by noon. I wasn’t reading. I was scanning for reasons to say no faster than reasons to say yes.

2.The font and layout told me something before I read a single word. A resume that looked like it was made in 2009 made me assume the person hadn’t been paying attention to their industry either.

3.I had a shortlist of words that made me move on immediately. “Results-driven.” “Team player.” “Passionate about.” The moment I saw those I assumed the rest was just as empty.

4.The job title at the top of each role carried more weight than most people realise. If it didn’t match what we were hiring for in some obvious way I was already half gone before reading the bullets.

5.I passed over people who were genuinely more qualified than the person we hired because their resume made the less qualified person easier to defend in a debrief meeting.

6.Candidates who had been somewhere for 15 years almost always described their most recent role the same way they described their first one. Same bullet structure, same language, same energy. It made 15 years look like

7.Two pages was never the issue. What killed people was putting their strongest work on page two. By the time I got there I’d already made up my mind.

8.The people I passed over that I genuinely regret and there were some weren’t bad candidates. They were good candidates who let a bad resume make the decision for them.

9.I could tell immediately when someone had been job searching for months and kept tweaking the same resume without changing the underlying problem. The tweaks were visible. The problem never moved.

10. The candidates I remembered the ones I actually fought for in the room had resumes that made me feel like I’d already met them before the interview. That’s not luck. That’s positioning.

If any of this made you look at your resume differently that’s exactly why I wrote it. Most people are sending out the same document over and over wondering why nothing is moving. Now you have a better idea of what’s actually happening on the other side of that application.

Go back and look at yours with fresh eyes. You might be surprised at what you notice.

Thanks for reading

I want to say upfront that this one is personal for a lot of people and I mean everything with a lot of respect for anyone going through it.

I’ve been in the career space for a long time now. Used to be a recruiter yes I know, I know lol. Left that behind and now I spend my days working with job seekers and writing their resumes. So what I’m about to say doesn’t come from something I read. It comes from real conversations with real people going through this right now.

Everyone talks about the financial side of unemployment. Nobody really talks about what it does to you when your whole circle is still employed and you’re the only one who isn’t. That’s a very specific kind of lonely and almost nobody talks about it. That’s what this post is really about.

1.Every social plan suddenly has a price tag you’re doing the math on in a way you never had to before. And you start quietly declining things without explaining why.

2.People stop asking how the search is going. Not because they stopped caring. Because they genuinely don’t know what to say anymore.

3.You start telling people you’ve been busy because the truth is something you’re not ready to hand to everyone.

4.Someone in the group complains about their job and you sit there and nod and say nothing.

5.You have a rehearsed answer for when people ask what you’ve been up to. You give it every time because the real one is too heavy for casual conversation.

6.The friendships that ran on work routines the lunch plans, the after work drinks start fading quietly. Nobody really acknowledges it.

7.You watch someone in your circle get promoted, buy a house, go on a trip and you like the post and close your phone and sit with something you don’t quite have a name for.

8.You start dreading “so what have you been up to lately” more than almost anything else. Not because you have nothing to say. Because everything you want to say feels like too much.

9.At some point you just stop telling people you’re still looking. Not because things are going well. Because saying it one more time takes something out of you.

10. The loneliest part isn’t being alone. It’s being surrounded by people who have no idea what you’re actually going through.

If any of this felt familiar just know you are not the only one going through this. This is honestly one of the least talked about parts of unemployment and one of the hardest to carry because nobody around you can see it. It’s completely invisible and most people in your circle have no idea it’s even happening.

Be patient with yourself and with them. The people around you aren’t trying to make it harder they just don’t have the language for what you’re going through. And honestly sometimes neither do you. That’s okay.This part doesn’t last forever. The circle will feel normal again when things start to shift. Just keep going.

I want to preface this by saying this might be one of the more sensitive things I’ve posted so just a small disclaimer everything I say comes from a place of genuine respect for anyone going through this.I’ve been in the career space for a long time now.

Used to be a recruiter yes I know, I know lol. Left that and now I spend my days working with job seekers, writing their resumes and helping people through some of the hardest moments of their professional lives. So what I’m about to say isn’t from an article I read. It’s from what I actually hear and see constantly from real people going through this in real time.

Most content about layoffs talks about what to do next. Polish your resume, reach out to your network, stay positive. But nobody really talks about what it actually does to you on the inside. Especially when it happens after you’ve given a company twenty years of your life. That’s what this post is really about.

1.The first few days feel like a holiday. Then at some point that changes and you can’t quite pinpoint the moment it did.

2.You keep waking up at the same time you used to leave for work. And you lie there not knowing what to do with the next hour.

3.People ask how you’re doing and you say fine. Because explaining the real answer takes more out of you than you have right now.

4.Your sense of time just falls apart. Days start bleeding into each other in a way that nobody warned you about.

5.You find yourself explaining the layoff to people who didn’t even ask making sure they know it was restructuring, not performance. As if you need them to understand it wasn’t your fault.

6.The colleagues you spent more time with than your own family go quiet a lot faster than you expected.

7.You realise somewhere along the way your entire identity got tied to that place. And without it you don’t quite know how to answer when someone asks what you do.

8.You open your resume for the first time in years and barely recognise it. And that moment hits harder than you thought it would.

9.Your partner or family tries to be supportive. But there’s a version of the worry they’re carrying that never quite makes it into words.

10. Twenty years of showing up, delivering, being reliable. And it ended in a conversation that lasted less than fifteen minutes.

If you’re reading this and any of it felt a little too familiar just know you are not alone. More people are living this exact experience than you’d ever guess and most of them are dealing with it just as quietly as you are.Don’t stay stuck longer than you have to. Update your LinkedIn. Look at your resume and if you haven’t touched it in years please get a professional opinion on it, it makes more of a difference than most people realise. Ask for help. Lean on your network. Do the things that feel uncomfortable because that’s honestly where the movement starts.

This is a dark period but it’s not a permanent one. It won’t always feel this way. Just keep going.

One of my clients asked me recently what advice would you give someone who’s been in the same industry for a long time and hasn’t touched their resume in years, where do you even start. So I figured let me just write a post about it. A little background I used to be a recruiter, left that, and have been in the career space for a long time now. Found a real passion in it. This is what I’d tell anyone in that situation.

1.The first thing a hiring manager sees isn’t your experience it’s whether the document looks like it was written by someone who takes themselves seriously. The visual impression comes before anyone reads a single word.

2.You’ve spent years describing your job to people who already know what it means. Now you have to describe it to a complete stranger in ten seconds. Those are two very different things and most people don’t realise that until it’s already too late.

3.The results you’re most proud of are probably buried at the bottom of a bullet point somewhere. Nobody is finding them there.

4.Staying at one company for a long time is not a red flag. The way most people present it on a resume is.

5.Every word in your summary needs to earn its place. If it could apply to anyone else in your industry just delete it.

6.Most people who’ve been somewhere for years end up with a skills section that reads like a job description. That’s not a skills section. That’s a list of things your employer needed from you. Those are two different things.

7.The role you’re most proud of and the role that will actually get you the next job aren’t always the same one. Knowing which story to lead with changes everything.

8.A resume that tries to show everything ends up showing nothing. Editing is the hardest part and also the most important.

9.The people who struggle most with this are the ones who haven’t talked about themselves to a stranger in so long they’ve forgotten how. That’s a skill that needs to be rebuilt and it doesn’t happen in one afternoon.

10. The goal isn’t a resume that covers everything you’ve done. It’s a resume that makes the right person stop scrolling immediately.

11. Get someone to read it who has actually hired people before. Don’t rely on AI it doesn’t know your background or what makes you different. And don’t ask someone who has never hired anyone in their life. If you don’t have that person in your network a professional is always worth it. A good resume is your entry point treat it like one.

If any of this resonates you’re probably already in that moment and you already know it. The experience is there it’s always there after years of putting in the work. The hard part is getting it on paper in a way that actually does it justice. Take your time with it, get the right eyes on it and don’t underestimate how much a proper resume can change things. You’ve put the years in. Make sure the document shows that.

Thanks for reading

Getting passed over for a promotion is one thing. Watching it go to someone you trained, someone you’ve been quietly carrying, someone who honestly doesn’t understand the role the way you do that’s a completely different feeling. And the worst part isn’t even the promotion. It’s having to sit across from that person every single day and act like you’re absolutely fine with it.

I used to be a recruiter and now I work with job seekers every day. This one comes up more than almost anything else. And nobody really talks about what it actually does to you.

1. You found out through someone else and had to act like you already knew.

2. You wrote the handover notes, trained them on the role, and were still answering their questions weeks later.

3. You went home that day and didn’t tell anyone straight away because you didn’t know how to talk about it without sounding bitter.

4. You started questioning whether the problem was you. That thought stayed a lot longer than it should have.

5. You stopped putting your hand up for things after that. Not out of spite. Something just quietly switched off.

6. The people around you knew it should have been you. Nobody said a word. Somehow that made it worse.

7. You’re now doing parts of their job without the title or the pay and everyone around you acts like that’s just how it is.

8. You’ve sat in meetings supporting decisions made by someone who couldn’t have made them without you.

9. You opened your resume that night. Then closed it. Then opened it again about three weeks later.

10. You’re still delivering. Still professional. Still showing up every day. And every day you do that you’re making it easier for them to never fix it.

If any of this resonates just know you’re not alone and you’re not being dramatic. What you felt in that moment was real and the people I see going through this are almost always the ones who deserved it most. Being passed over doesn’t mean you weren’t ready. It usually just means the wrong people were making the decision. It won’t always feel this way.

Thanks for reading

Staying at a job for years feels like the responsible thing to do until the day you realise the job stopped growing with you a long time ago and you were the last one to know. And by the time that hits you, you’ve already handed over the best years of your career. The hardest part isn’t leaving. It’s sitting with how long you stayed after you knew.

PSA this is not a post telling anyone to quit their job. Please don’t read this tonight and hand in your notice tomorrow and blame me lol. The job market is genuinely brutal right now and the smartest thing most people can do is look while they’re still employed. This is just about naming something a lot of people are carrying quietly and never really talk about.

1.You’ve had the same title for four years. Every time you brought it up something came up. Eventually you just stopped bringing it up.

2.You trained someone younger than you, watched them get promoted above you, and told everyone you were genuinely happy for them.

3.You know exactly what you’d say in an exit interview. You’ve been rehearsing it in your head for about two years now.

4.Someone asked you recently where you see yourself in five years and you realised you actually hadn’t thought about that in a really long time.

5.You’ve done the math on what you’re losing every month by staying. You come back to that number more than you’d like to admit.

6.You have a resignation letter saved somewhere. You’ve never sent it.

7.You bring your best ideas to that job every single day. At some point you just quietly accepted that the credit was never really going to land with you.

8.The people who joined after you are now earning more than you. You found out by accident.

9.You used to have goals in this job. Now you just have habits.

10. You’re good at your job. Everyone around you knows it. And somehow that’s become the exact reason they’ll never pay you what you’re worth.

If any of this hit close to home just know you’re not the only one. I see this every single week and honestly it’s almost always the same type of person. The ones who held everything together, never complained, kept showing up, and made themselves indispensable. You didn’t end up here because you weren’t good enough. You ended up here because you were good enough and they knew it and got very comfortable with that. It won’t always feel this way.

Thanks for reading

Ten years at one company feels like an achievement until the day you try to leave and realise the world outside has no idea who you are. Or the day you are forced to leave.

1. The way you describe your work makes perfect sense inside that building and means almost nothing to anyone outside it.

2. Your entire professional network is in one place and you don’t realise that’s a problem until the day you actually need to leave.

3. You’ve quietly taken on more and more over the years but the title never changed so on paper it looks like nothing happened.

4. The skills are real and the experience is genuine but it’s so tied to how that specific company works that pulling it out and making it land somewhere else feels almost impossible.

5. You’ve been out of the job market long enough that you genuinely don’t know what you’re worth anymore and most people in this situation are significantly underselling themselves.

6. You’ve been solving the same organisation’s problems for so long that you’ve stopped seeing those abilities as transferable skills. They are. You just can’t see it anymore.

7. The person sitting across from you in the interview has no idea what your company does, how it’s structured or why your role mattered and you’ve never had to explain it to a stranger before.

8. Inside that company your reputation walked into every room before you did. Outside it you’re starting from zero and nobody tells you how disorienting that actually feels.

9. The version of you that could walk into a room and sell yourself confidently got quietly buried under a decade of just getting on with the work.

10. You left a version of yourself at the door on your first day and spent ten years becoming exactly who that company needed. Now you have to figure out who you are when it’s not for them.

This isn’t about regret. It’s just about knowing what you’re actually up against so you can deal with it honestly instead of wondering what’s wrong with you.

Thanks for reading.

I’ve sat on both sides of this. As a recruiter I’ve watched it happen to candidates in real time and honestly it was never comfortable from that side either. Now I work with job seekers every day and almost every single one of them has been through this exact moment at least once.

The interview shifts and you can feel it before anyone says anything. And you still have 30, 40 minutes left to sit through.This one is for everyone who knows exactly what that feels like.

1. You start counting how many minutes are left and working out how to get through them.

2. You keep replaying the last thing you said trying to figure out exactly which answer killed it.

3. You stop trying to impress them and switch into a completely different kind of polite the kind that’s just about getting out of the room with your dignity.

4. You think about everyone you told about this interview and the conversation you’re going to have to have with them later.

5. You start mentally writing the follow up email in your head even though somewhere you
   already know it won’t change anything.

6. You wonder if they can tell that you know.

7. You start thinking about the next application before you’ve even left the building.

8. You think about how long it took to even get this interview and the fact that you’re back to zero.

9. You go on autopilot still answering questions, still nodding, but you’re barely there anymore.

10. You decide to finish strong anyway. Not because you think it’ll change the outcome. Just because that’s all you have left.

The job market puts you through things nobody talks about and this is one of them. It’s not a reflection of who you are or what you’re capable of. It’s just a really hard process and some days are harder than others.
Thanks for reading.

PSA this post isn’t about ageism. Just something I feel like I need to say and I say it with a lot of respect.I used to be a recruiter yes I know, I know left that and now I write resumes every day. A lot of the people who come to me are in their 30s, 40s, 50s. They’ve spent years building something real. They’re good at what they do. The people around them know it. And then at some point the job search just stops working the way it used to and nobody tells them why.That’s what this post is really about.

1. The job description was written for someone ten years younger and half your salary expectations.

2. The interview panel has nobody your age on it and you feel it the moment you walk in.

3. You get told you’re overqualified so many times you start wondering if being good at your job is actually working against you.

4. Your salary history is now a liability what you were earning tells them what you’ll expect and they’ve already decided that number doesn’t work before you’ve even had a conversation about it.

5. The questions feel subtly different less about what you can do and more about whether you’d be comfortable reporting to someone younger, adapting to new ways of working, fitting into a team that doesn’t look like you. Nobody says it out loud but it’s there.

6. You can feel something is off but you can never quite prove it and nobody will ever confirm it.

7. The things that actually make you valuable your perspective, your track record, your ability to see a problem coming before it becomes a crisis don’t show up in a job description and don’t get assessed in an interview. So it’s like they don’t exist.

If you’re going through any of this right now just know you’re not the only one. More people are in this exact situation than you’d think and most of them are dealing with it just as quietly as you are. The job market is genuinely brutal right now and everything on this list on top of that is a lot to carry. Just keep your head up and keep going. It won’t always feel this way.

Thanks for reading.

This topic might be a sensitive one just a small disclaimer, I’m not trying to offend anyone at all.

I feel like I’m probably one of the better people to speak on this just because of how long I’ve been in the career space. I used to be a recruiter for several years ( I know , I worked with the enemy lol ), left that, and now I work with job seekers every single day writing resumes and helping people through this. So everything I’m saying comes from what I actually see and hear constantly.I’m just very passionate about the job market and the people going through it and if you follow my account you probably already know I don’t post the same five resume tips everyone else posts. I try to talk about the things that aren’t really spoken about enough. This is one of those things.

1. The way your partner looks at you starts to change and you notice it long before they say a word.

2. Friends stop including you in plans and it’s never said out loud but you both know why.

3. The people closest to you start offering advice you never asked for and somewhere along the way that starts to feel less like support and more like they’ve quietly stopped believing you’ll figure it out.

4. You start telling the people you love that things are going fine when they aren’t and after a while the lie becomes easier than the truth.

5. There’s a specific moment when you realise the people around you have started losing faith in you before you’ve lost it in yourself and nothing about that moment is easy.

6. Someone asks what you do and you don’t know what to say anymore so you change the subject.

7. You stop bringing up the job search at home not because things are going well but because you can’t face the look on their face when they hear it isn’t.

8. The person you were when you had a job and the person you are now feel like two different people and you’re not sure how to get back to the first one.

9. Everyone assumes getting a job fixes everything but the confidence that left during the search doesn’t just return when the offer arrives.

10. At some point the people around you stop seeing you as someone going through something hard and start seeing you as a someone that needs to be fixed.

If you’re going through any of this right now just know you’re not the only one. More people are in this exact situation than you’d think and most of them are dealing with it just as quietly as you are. The job market is genuinely brutal right now and everything on this list on top of that is a lot to carry. Just keep your head up and keep going. It won’t always feel this way.

Thanks for reading