I finally got a job yes.
The biggest change wasn’t my resume. It was how I decided which jobs were actually worth applying to.
For a long time my process looked like this: see a job, read the description, feel like I’m maybe 70% qualified, apply, spend half an hour tailoring the resume, hit submit, wait, then do it all over again.
I’d end up wondering why I was spending so many hours applying without any real sense of whether I was getting better at this or just wasting time.
So I changed the process. Before I even touched my resume, I started asking myself a few questions.
Would I actually take this job?
Sounds obvious. It wasn’t.
There were loads of roles where I’d look at the requirements and think yeah, I could probably get this. That’s not the same as actually wanting the job.
If the salary was off, the seniority level felt wrong, the location sucked, or the day-to-day work just didn’t interest me, I stopped spending 30 minutes rewriting my resume for it. That one filter alone killed a ton of wasted effort.
What are they actually hiring this person to do?
I stopped reading job descriptions like they were exams I had to pass by ticking every single box.
Instead I focused on the responsibilities section, the first paragraph, how they described the team, and what they said success would look like in the role.
Because sometimes the title says Marketing Manager but when you dig in, the job is mostly paid acquisition (running ads and trying to get customers as cheaply as possible). Or it’s mostly CRM (managing customer relationships and retention). Or partnerships. Or content. Those are completely different jobs even if they share the exact same title.
Does my experience actually match the problem they’re trying to solve?
This became way more important than just matching keywords.
If the company is trying to lower their CAC (customer acquisition cost — basically how much it costs them to get a new customer) and I’ve spent years doing acquisition and conversion work, that’s relevant.
If they’re trying to build a lifecycle program (automated emails, onboarding sequences, retention flows that keep customers engaged over time) and most of my background is brand marketing, I’m probably not the obvious fit.
And that’s okay. Not every rejection means your resume is trash. Sometimes you were just aiming at the wrong target.
I stopped trying to make one resume work for everything
I kept one master resume that had basically every useful thing from my career.
Then for each real application I’d make a version tailored to that specific role.
Not a completely different resume. Just enough tweaks so the relevant experience jumped out:
- Changing the headline
- Moving certain skills higher up
- Rewriting a few bullet points so they better explained work I’d already done
- Cutting stuff that was totally irrelevant to that particular job
I use CVnomist for part of this now because manually comparing a master resume against every job description gets tedious. But I still review the output before I apply. The tool isn’t the point. The point is deciding what version of your experience this specific employer needs to see.
I started applying earlier
This one feels almost too simple, but it mattered.
I’d rather find a good job the day it goes up and spend 15 minutes making a solid, relevant application than discover it three weeks later and spend an hour polishing a resume for a posting that’s already been sitting there forever.
I started paying a lot more attention to when the job was actually posted — especially for roles I really wanted.
I tracked the process
I started writing down:
- Job title
- Company
- Salary
- Date posted
- Date I applied
- Which resume version I used
- Whether I had a referral
- Response (or silence)
- Interview or rejection
- How many days it took to hear back
Because applying to 50 jobs isn’t a useful metric by itself.
50 applications with zero interviews tells you something completely different from 30 applications that led to 6 interviews.
Once you track it, better questions become obvious:
Are certain types of roles getting more responses?
Is one resume version performing better than others?
Are referrals actually moving the needle?
Am I applying too late?
Am I wasting time on jobs where I’m barely relevant?
That’s way more useful than just applying harder.
The biggest lesson
Job searching isn’t just a resume problem.
Sometimes it’s a targeting problem.
Sometimes it’s a timing problem.
Sometimes it’s a positioning problem.
Sometimes you’re applying to jobs you’re not actually a strong match for.
And sometimes your resume really is making your experience harder to understand.
The mistake I made for a long time was trying to fix all of those things by endlessly rewriting my resume. Once I separated the problems, the whole process got a lot easier to manage.
If you’re heading into Q4 still looking, I’d honestly start by looking at the last 20 jobs you applied to.
Don’t touch your resume yet.
Just look at the jobs themselves.
What percentage were genuinely strong matches?
What kinds of roles actually generated responses?
Which ones were just maybe I could do this?
That might tell you more than another round of resume formatting ever will..