u/Nishmo_

As per The Sun, if you complete 9 job related tasks before 9am every morning you are better off with your job hunting. the tasks dont have to be huge,

• stuff like sending a follow up email,
• tweaking your resume for a specific role,
• connecting with someone on linkedin,
• researching a company,
• applying to a posting, etc.

the point is momentum.

the theory is, when youve already done 9 things before most people even start their day you feel like youre actually in control of the process instead of just doom scrolling job boards at midnight.

dont just blast out the same generic resume 9 times. make each task count even if its small.

Plus applying early in the morning may get more responses too.

Worth a try?

So after all making your resume absolutely flawless may not work. like when every single bullet point is perfectly quantified and the formatting looks like it came out of a design studio and every word is optimized for ats, it starts to feel... not human?

hiring managers read hundreds of these things and i think theres a point where a resume thats too perfect actually makes them suspicious or just makes you blend in with everyone else whos doing the exact same optimization tricks.

A mid size tech company recruiter said she actually gravitates toward resumes that feel like a real person wrote them. not sloppy ones obviously but ones where the personality comes through a little bit.

she said the overly polished ones all start to look identical and she cant tell candidates apart anymore.

Making your resume worse on purpose that would be dumb. but maybe stop agonizing over whether every line is perfectly structured and spend more time making sure your actual experience and voice comes through.

does anyone else feel like the resume game has gone too far?

People are stuffing invisible keywords into their resumes, using white text tricks, copying entire job descriptions into hidden sections, all kinds of stuff. and honestly some of it works. Its getting to a point where i think companies are gonna have to completely rethink how they filter candidates.

the more people learn to trick these systems the less useful the systems become for employers. so then employers add more layers of AI screening. so then applicants find new ways to game those layers. its just an endless cycle where nobody actually wins and the people who lose the most are qualified candidates who just submit a normal resume and wonder why they never hear back.

i think the real issue is that hiring got so volume heavy that companies leaned on automation they dont fully understand and now candidates feel like they have no choice but to game it just to get seen by a human. the whole thing is broken from both sides.

have you ever tried any of these tricks and did they actually land you an interview or did it backfire?

ive been watching the job market pretty closely for the last two years and one thing thats become super obvious is that the stigma around job hopping is fading fast. like five or ten years ago if you had three jobs in four years people would side eye your resume but now? most hiring managers (US only) ive talked to or seen weigh in on this basically expect it, especially from anyone under 40.

the reality is that staying at one company for seven years doesnt automatically make you loyal or dedicated. sometimes it just means you got comfortable or your company didnt have anywhere to move you. meanwhile the person who switched jobs three times in five years might have done it because they kept getting better offers, learned new skills faster, or got out of toxic situations. context matters way more than the raw number of jobs on your resume.

the one thing i will say is that if you are a job hopper you gotta make sure your resume tells a clear story. each move should show some kind of progression whether thats a better title, new industry experience, or a bigger scope of work. if it just looks random with no thread connecting anything thats where it starts to hurt you.

curious what yall think though. has anyone actually been rejected specifically because they had too many short stints? or is this whole red flag thing just outdated advice that wont die?

every job posting wants 1 to 2 years now even for entry level stuff. i figured out helping 20+ entry level candidates in last few months that most of the time they dont actually need you to have held that exact job title for a year. they need to see that youve done the tasks. heres the bullet formula i started using on my resume that got me way more callbacks even when i technically didnt meet the experience requirement.

the formula is: action verb + what you did + who or what it was for + result or scale.

so instead of writing something like assisted with social media you write something like created and scheduled 30 plus social media posts weekly for a campus organization increasing follower engagement by 40 percent over one semester. that semester of running your clubs instagram suddenly reads like a year of marketing experience.

you can pull from class projects, freelance gigs, volunteer work, even stuff you did for family businesses. the key is framing it with specifics and numbers. hiring managers skim for about 6 seconds so if your bullets look thin they move on.

use that formula on every single bullet. quantity and results make you look experienced even when youre not.

i got laid off in january and decided to track everything obsessively in a spreadsheet. 145 total apps, 14 callbacks, 6 phone screens, 0 onsites, 1 offer accepted in may.

the first 80 apps i sent out were basically the same resume with minor tweaks. got 1 callbacks from those. for the next 65 apps i rewrote my top 3 bullet points for every single application to mirror the job posting language. not lying, just reframing what i actually did using their words.

changed the job title to their advertised job title. callbacks jumped to 13 out of 65. other stuff i noticed. applying within a day or 2 of a posting going live had way better results than applying to week old listings. like almost all my callbacks came from jobs posted that day or the day before.

once i got in front of people i could hold my own. the entire game was getting past the resume screen. if youre just blasting the same pdf everywhere you are actively hurting yourself.

ive been following hiring trends closely for the past year or so and the landscape for new grads is looking very different than it did even two years ago.

- Employers are caring less about your degree and way more about what you can actually do.

- Skills based hiring is not just new thing anymore its actually happening at scale.

- AI literacy is becoming basic requirement for a lot of roles.

- Remote roles still increases competition for local candidates

If you want to stay ahead,

- Build small portfolios or side projects that proves that you could do the work.

- Show that youve used AI tools to solve real problems, even for non tech roles this matters now.

what are yall seeing out there? if youre graduating soon what feels like the hardest part of breaking in right now?

ive been helping friends with their resumes a lot lately, as I have been on the job hunt journey for over 8 mons. What actually gets callbacks is simpler than people think.

nobody cares about your objective statement (unless you are in Europe). nobody cares that you listed 47 skills in a sidebar (No one reads them).

what actually works is making your bullet points about results not tasks. like dont say managed social media accounts. say something like grew instagram following 40% in 6 months which led to whatever business outcome. thats it thats the secret.

also stop sending same resume for every single application. Even just tweaking your summary and a few key phrases to match the job posting makes a huge difference with ats systems. you dont have to rewrite the whole thing every time just adjust the top third.

Last one, dont use Canva, use Google docs, or any of the paid resume builder platform.

so ive been tracking my own job search data for the past few months like a total nerd and the difference between sending a generic resume vs a tailored one is very different. im talking like double the callback rate when i actually take the time to match my resume to the job posting.

While this doesnt change, ghosting or months being unemployed in this job market, at least I am getting more interviews and conversations.

you dont have to rewrite the whole thing from scratch every time. i mean reading the job description, pulling out the key skills and responsibilities they mention, and making sure those same words show up naturally in my resume. I use AI as well as manually editing it after. if they say project management dont just say i managed stuff. use their language kind of things. ats systems are scanning for keyword matches and so are recruiters who spend like 6 seconds on your resume.

I am now keeping like 3 or 4 base versions of my resume for different types of roles and then tweaking from there. one for more technical roles, one for leadership focused ones, etc. saves a ton of time vs starting from 0.

I am 8 months in, searching for a job. theres a massive disconnect between the headline employment numbers and what its actually like trying to find a job specially in tech right now? Even when you dig into the numbers theres so much slack hiding underneath. part time workers who want full time hours. people who just stopped looking entirely. wages that arent keeping up.

i talk to fellow unemployed people every week who are 4, 5, 6 months into a search with solid experience and theyre getting ghosted left and right.

In the meantime we just need to keep tailoring every single application, networking like crazy, following up relentlessly.