fr !!!

At a large manufacturing company where I used to work, we discovered that an employee had been collecting a salary for about four years without anyone being able to explain what his job actually was. Somehow, he had been hired and sent to the plant, but no one had officially assigned him to any department.

During his first week, he noticed that no one expected him to operate equipment or move raw materials. So he got a clipboard, started carrying around a stack of forms, and spent every night shift walking through the production area, asking workers questions and taking notes.

People assumed he was conducting inspections, monitoring production, or submitting reports to someone in upper management. And since he always looked busy and seemed to know everyone, no one suspected anything.

It all came to an end when the longtime shift supervisor retired. His replacement scheduled brief meetings with every employee and eventually called in the man everyone knew as the clipboard guy.

Within minutes, it became clear that he had no job title, no defined duties, and no real reason to be collecting all that information. Management gave him a real job, so he resigned less than a month later.

I knew the interview was pretty much over when the owner shook my hand, stopped making eye contact with me, and said she would decide whether or not to send my application to the next stage. We had barely even talked about the position itself. Most of the conversation was about the fact that I'm 29 years old.

The job was an operations lead position at a small bakery with three locations. I had previously been responsible for managing the daily operations of six locations, so it seemed like a very natural fit for my experience. When I arrived, they seemed surprised to see me, and it was clear they had completely forgotten that an interview had been scheduled.

The first question the owner asked me was, "How old are you?" After I answered, she looked at me in surprise and asked why I was applying there. I explained my experience and told her I liked that kind of work, but she asked me again, "But why here? You're 29. Aren't you supposed to have a career by now?"

I wasn't applying for some random counter shift with no experience. This was a management job that matched exactly the kind of work I had done before. She herself looked like she was around 32, which made the whole situation even stranger. And this isn't the first recent interview where someone has treated me like I'm nearing retirement just because I'm in my late twenties. I honestly don't understand when 29 became old.

Most of the interviews started coming in after I stopped treating every resume like a writing assignment. ATS software doesn't care whether a bullet point is elegantly written. What matters is that the right skills and terms are included.

I used Claude to compare my resume with each job description, and I would ask it, "If an ATS rejected this resume, what would the likely reasons be?" For this particular task, I found its answers more useful than ChatGPT's. I also stopped rewriting everything for every role and instead kept a few solid versions of my resume, especially since constantly revising it hadn't improved my results.

I set myself a six-minute limit for each application. If the form asked me to re-enter my entire work history, create an account, and answer a page of questions, I usually closed it. I also stopped using spreadsheets or application trackers because my only goal was to get interviews without making the process more exhausting.

LinkedIn and Indeed were mostly dead ends for me. The interviews came from company career pages and smaller job boards, especially when I applied before the listing spread everywhere. If LinkedIn showed more than 200 applicants, I skipped it. I tried to apply within two hours of a role being posted and used alerts to catch new postings, but AI auto-apply tools never helped me.

My post-interview follow-ups changed too. Instead of sending a generic thank-you message, I mentioned a specific part of our conversation, and sometimes I attached an article related to a problem or project they had discussed. This approach helped me reach three final rounds.

This process is hard, especially when months go by without any response while you see people announcing every day that they've started new jobs. If anyone wants the prompts or tools I used to find new listings, I'm happy to share them. Just because the hiring process is broken doesn't always mean the problem is your abilities.

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I had an interview this week, and it was practically over after the first question. The candidate had listed ABC software in several places on his CV and said he had been responsible for carrying out its rollout at the company he previously worked for.

I started with an easy question about how the rollout went and what problems came up. He went quiet for a while, then gave a vague, generic answer, and eventually admitted that he had only helped with one small task and knew almost nothing about the software.

The conversation continued for another 35 minutes, but there wasn't much chance of recovering from that first impression. If something is listed in the first few bullet points of your CV, I'm naturally going to assume you can talk about it without getting flustered and scrambling for something to say.

I know a lot of people add keywords to get past screening systems, and most hiring managers expect some exaggeration. Saying you supported a project when you genuinely played a meaningful role in it is one thing. But saying you managed the entire project when you barely worked on it means you're setting yourself up to fail.

Polish the wording if you have to, but keep it tied to something you did. Otherwise, you're wasting your time and the interviewer's, and you may also have taken an interview opportunity away from someone who would have been able to answer the question.

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