u/ResumeRory

As a resume writer, I talk to a lot of people mid job search. There's something I see a lot of and I'm wondering if it holds outside of my experience.

Under roughly $80k, almost nobody brings up balance. Every conversation is comp, then title, then comp again. Somewhere around $120-130k it flips. Suddenly the first questions are remote policy, PTO, whether the manager emails on weekends...

Part of me thinks it's just Maslow with a paycheck (the pyramid thing from Psych 101). Hard to care about boundaries when rent eats half your income. But I've also worked with people at $250k who still answer Slack at 11pm, so the ceiling clearly isn't universal.

So where was the line for you? Actual number if you're willing to share. Trying to figure out if this is a salary thing or a got-burned-once thing.

Every time overemployment comes up, the thread turns into an ethics debate. Greed, loyalty, whatever.

Nobody tries to really understand it.

Greenhouse's own data put ghost listings at roughly 18-22% of postings last year. Harvard Business School found 88% of employers admit their software screens out qualified candidates. So some of your applications go to jobs that were never real, and another chunk die in a filter before a human sees them. The pipeline is contaminated at both ends and you can't tell which rejection was which.

If your income depended on a supply chain that's unreliable, you'd diversify suppliers and nobody would blink! You carry homeowners insurance and separate flood coverage and no one accuses you of hoarding policies...

A second job is the same instinct. Backup income you can actually verify, in a market where "we're hiring" frequently means nothing.

I keep landing on the idea that OE is the new emergency fund. The old advice of six months of expenses in savings assumed you could replace a job in six months. Not sure that assumption survives contact with what's going on in 2026 :(

Or maybe that's giving it too much credit and it's just burnout with extra speed bumps.

Worked with a client last month, a senior operations manager, 14 years in, three promotions over two companies. She came to me with a one-pager because "that's what you're supposed to do." :( Half her career was gone. The turnaround results, the team she scaled, the system she built that's still running... all cut to make it fit.

Nobody hiring at her level wants a pamphlet. They want proof. One page more than not, forces you to delete that proof.

The one-page rule made sense when resumes were physically mailed and screeners were drowning in stacks of paper. It does NOT make the same sense for a director-level candidate in 2026 applying through a job portal where no one is printing anything :)

Two pages is fine. Two strong pages beats one cramped page every time! If you're early career with under 5 years, sure, keep it tight. But if you've got a decade of progressively complex work, you are not doing yourself any favors by compressing it.

I think the advice spread like human papillomavirus because it's easy to hand out and sounds logical. One page seems focused. Mostly it just sounds like something a career center told you in 2005.

So... what's still circulating out there, because I still see this advice handed out in interviews, bootcamps, university career centers. Where are people even getting it at this point.

About half of all job listings at any given time are either expired, on hold, or were never going to be filled externally anyway. Half of applicants are getting auto-rejected before anyone reads their resume.

So if you're applying to 20 jobs a week and wondering why nothing's moving, That's just how the math works out.

It's not a performance problem. Or ok... sometimes it is. A lot of rejections happen before anyone made a judgment call about you. One wastes your time. The other skips you before someone pays attention. What's left is a narrow window where your resume actually matters.

The people I've seen get through it faster aren't necessarily better candidates. They've just adjusted their inputs to match the actual odds. More networking, fewer cold applications, tighter targeting.

What's actually working for people right now. Networking-only? Volume play? Stopped applying through portals entirely? What's your strategy when the funnel itself is the problem?

44% of hybrid workers admit to coffee badging. Around 5.5% of the workforce holds multiple jobs simultaneously, and that's just what BLS can actually prove. Both numbers have been climbing since RTO mandates started rolling out in real life.

Nobody's connecting these two trends because they look different on the surface. Coffee badging reads as passive resistance. Overemployment reads as a hustle. But the mechanic is the same person, same day...

Badge in. Grab the coffee. Say hi to the right people :) Leave. Open the laptop at the café down the street and clock into your second job.

The office appearance handles the optics. The freed hours handle the income problem. One stone two ducks. Not two strategies running in parallel, that's one system.

What makes this hard to study is that nobody's self-reporting the overlap. They're posting anonymously for a reason. Coffee badgers mostly get caught and shrugged at (59% of employers who noticed reportedly didn't care, per Owl Labs). Neither group is advertising the combination.

But someone figured out that showing face for 45 minutes buys you a full remote workday. And a full remote workday, unscheduled, is exactly what a second job needs.

Nobody's going to admit it anyway.

Leonardo da Vinci wrote the first one in 1482. A personal letter to the Duke of Milan listing what he could build, what he could design, and what he could do. One person proving their worth to another Specific, personalized, human. And it worked.

For the next four centuries almost nothing changed. Resumes stayed close to that simple origin. Then came the Great Depression, forcing documented work history into the administrative system. Corporate America scaled up in the 1950s, and the resume became a sorting mechanism for volume it was never designed to handle.

So they built ATS to manage the volume. Candidates learned to game the keywords. Then AI started writing resumes en masse. Now we're at the point where a Robert Half executive is telling HR Dive that qualified candidates are getting auto-rejected because their application "doesn't look as good as one created by AI." The tool that exists to discover talent is filtering by prompting skill.

It wasn't super surprising when I read in the Willo 2026 Hiring Trends Report that only 37% of employers still consider credentials and work history among reliable indicators of talent. On top of all that, 40% are moving away from resume-first hiring completely.

Here's where I think the discussion becomes an argument. There's a lot of recruiter energy right now around spotting and rejecting AI resumes, as if that's a problem that will ever get solved! It doesn't. Nobody debates whether Word-processed resumes are cheating. Resisting AI-written content is the same argument, just earlier in the cycle. The format changes and everyone needs to and WILL catch up. Eventually it's just assumed.

The more useful question is what makes an AI-assisted resume actually work in the interim. A couple things seem to resurface consistently.

A resume that says "led a team" tells a screener and a recruiter the same amount of nothing. The ones that make it have real numbers in them: ramp time, headcount, revenue, something that couldn't have been invented (at least easily:)).

AI can generate the structure, but the specifics still have to come from somewhere real. And they need to hold up under a LinkedIn cross-check, since that's happening pretty routinely now. Generic language that looks refined but doesn't match anywhere else kills applications that would have otherwise gotten through.

The resume probably ends up as a formality that everyone treats like a cover letter... technically required, rarely decisive. The interview and the skills test do the actual work. The document just gets you in the door. Which is basically da Vinci's letter again :)

What are you seeing on the hiring side? Are skills assessments replacing the resume screen or is it still resume-first with more skepticism layered on top? And do you think the "we can tell it's AI" rejection phase has a shelf life, or does it stick around?

It became known as the Friedman Doctrine. And it rewired how American corporations thought about everyone who wasn't a shareholder.

Before 1970 the dominant model was stakeholder capitalism. The idea that a company had obligations to employees, customers, and communities, not just investors. It wasn't perfect. But it produced a labor market where long tenure was rewarded, pensions were real, and layoffs were a last resort rather than a line item on a quarterly report.

The shareholder primacy model flipped that. Labor became a cost to be optimized. Loyalty became a one-way street. And every mass outsourcing wave, benefits cut, and "we're a family" layoff since then has been the logical downstream of one guy's opinion piece.

Worth knowing next time your company tells you they value their people.

At Enhancv we study resume and career trends, and the OE numbers in our latest research surprised even me. It's not just early-adopter tech workers anymore. Finance, ops, consulting, healthcare admin. The practice has spread into roles nobody expected.

The pandemic is where it started shifting. Remote work proved, at scale, that presence and productivity weren't the same thing. Then the 2021-2022 hiring boom created a window where companies were desperate, remote-first, and not asking too many questions. That's when a lot of people ran the experiment for the first time.

The 2023-2024 layoff wave took out people with a decade or more of tenure, good performers at companies that just didn't care. Real wages kept falling behind inflation. And somewhere in there the loyalty contract stopped feeling like a real contract, because companies made it very clear it wasn't one for them either.

The ethics debate around OE annoys me juuust a tiny bit. It frames this as a worker integrity problem. But workers have been watching companies optimize their labor costs aggressively for years. This looks like people optimizing back!

So where do you actually stand.

Quick poll. Drop your letter in the comments or send them to me telepathically:

A) Yes, already doing it or actively looking for job #2
B) Seriously considering it
C) No. It's an ethical line for me
D) No. It's too much risk