r/EnhancvResumes

We build resume software, so we occasionally get to see which resumes correlate with actual job outcomes, not just downloads. People who cancel because they found a job tell us which version worked. 6,684 of them over the past year.

The photo finding caught me a little off guard. Nearly half of the winning resumes had one. In the U.S., where the norm is pretty firmly "no photo," the gap between winners and the overall base was bigger than I expected.

But the part I keep thinking about is the experience breakdown. Photo use goes from about 15% among people just starting out, up to 37% among people with 21+ years. Every career stage higher than the last, no exceptions. Which suggests this isn't random — senior professionals are making a different call somewhere along the way, and enough of them are landing jobs that it shows up consistently in the data.

Honestly, not sure what to make of it. The standard advice exists for real reasons and I'm not ready to say ignore it. But I also can't look at that gradient and pretend it's noise.

Curious if anyone here has thought about this differently at different points in their career. Did you add one at some point? Drop it? What changed.

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.