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Hey There!

Welcome to Issue #186 of Jobseeking is Hard!

Today's issue is brought to you by HubSpot! If you're a free subscriber and value our content, it costs $0 to support us by clicking the ad and checking out the service. Show our sponsor some love for supporting Jobseeking is Hard! Thanks!

Happy Wednesday!

Over the last few weeks, I’ve spent a lot of time talking about clarity, positioning, recruiter interpretation, and why broad or complicated backgrounds struggle in the current hiring market. A lot of those ideas are connected because hiring has increasingly become a process built around speed, filtering, and quick interpretation.

But there’s another layer to this that I think gets overlooked: A resume can be perfectly clear and still fail.

That’s what I want to talk about this week. Hiring managers don’t just want to understand your experience. They want to believe it translates into their environment.

I’ll also walk through why one Comprehensive Resume Review client publicly recommended our services, and why they said the feedback felt completely different from what they’d been hearing from friends, family, and online career content.

This week we’re talking about:

• Why believable experience gets interviews

• Why resume advice from friends, family, career influencers, and recruiters often conflicts, and why all advice isn’t equally useful in real hiring situations

• The best (worst?) job posting of the week

And for Premium subscribers I’m:

• Debunking a recruiter’s take on why candidates shouldn’t ask for job descriptions before hopping on a call

• Answering a Premium subscriber’s question about whether recruiters should communicate rejections and feedback after multiple interview rounds. I’ll explain why candidate communication often breaks down during hiring processes, why feedback is less common than jobseekers expect, and whether it’s ever worth calling recruiters out for ghosting.

Let’s get to it!

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SOUNDING IMPRESSIVE AND SOUNDING CREDIBLE

Over the last few issues, I’ve spent a lot of time talking about clarity, positioning, recruiter interpretation, and why broad or complicated backgrounds struggle in the current hiring market. Some of these ideas probably sound similar because they are connected. But there’s an important distinction I think a lot of jobseekers miss: Clarity and credibility are not the same thing.

Clarity is whether someone understands what you do. Credibility is whether they believe you can do the job they’re hiring for.

Those sound similar, but they’re very different parts of the hiring process. A lot of candidates improve their resumes enough that recruiters can follow the story. The experience makes sense. The responsibilities line up. The background feels directionally relevant. But they still don’t generate much traction because the experience, while clear, isn't impactful. The recruiter understands the words being used, but they still don’t fully trust the claims behind them.

This happens constantly with experienced professionals because the more senior someone becomes, the more likely they are to communicate in summaries instead of specifics. They’ll write things like:

“Led strategic transformation.”
“Improved operational efficiency.”
“Built cross-functional alignment.”
“Drove organizational growth.”
“Managed key stakeholder relationships.”

The problem is that experienced professionals already know what those phrases mean internally because they lived them. Hiring teams didn’t. They’re experiencing your career from the outside, through a document, under time pressure, with no connection to your work. If the language stays too broad, the experience starts sounding inflated...even when it’s completely legitimate.

That’s one of the most irritating issues with hiring. Successful people often communicate themselves less effectively because they understand how complex the work actually was. They compress years of operational decision-making, conflict resolution, prioritization, leadership, execution, and problem-solving into polished language that sounds important but doesn’t actually help someone visualize the work. And hiring managers trust visualization more than summaries.

A hiring manager is usually trying to determine whether your experience feels "real," while trying to imagine how it would play within their work environment based on their needs. They’re imagining you inside meetings, solving problems, interacting with executives, handling pressure, making decisions, and operating within the kind of business challenges they already deal with. Vague language makes that harder to picture.

This is why candidates with objectively weaker backgrounds sometimes outperform more accomplished people in interviews and on paper. The weaker candidate may communicate more concretely. Their examples are easier to follow. Their business impact feels more tangible. Their answers create a clearer mental picture of how they operate. Meanwhile, the stronger candidate talks at such a high level that the experience starts feeling too theoretical and feels distant.

You see this a lot in interviews too. Someone gets asked about leadership and responds with a polished overview about collaboration, communication, and stakeholder management. Another candidate answers by explaining a specific operational problem, the disagreement that existed around it, the decision they made, why they made it, how they got buy-in, and what changed afterward. The second answer usually feels more credible because it sounds lived-in. Specificity creates trust.

That doesn’t mean people need to turn resumes into novels or overload interviews with unnecessary detail. The goal is "believable" information, not "maximum" information. Strong candidates understand how to move fluidly between high-level business thinking and grounded operational examples. They don’t just tell you they’re strategic. They explain strategic decisions. They don’t just claim leadership. They describe leadership situations. They don’t just say they improved a process. They explain what was broken, what changed, and why it mattered. Hiring managers are looking and listening for signs that someone has genuinely operated at the level they claim to have operated at. The more specific and natural the examples feel, the easier it becomes for someone to trust that experience. That’s part of why vague “executive language” can backfire so badly in modern hiring. Candidates need enough proof-of-concept detail to anchor the claims.

Honestly, I think this is one of the biggest differences between candidates who know they’re capable and candidates who consistently get hired. The candidates getting traction usually make their expertise easy to picture.

Have a topic you want me to cover in an upcoming issue? Reply or email [email protected] and tell me what you want to know!

SHAMELESS PLUG

If your job search needs a little more help, Karpiak Consulting offers resume and LinkedIn services, as well as job search strategy coaching.

Who knows…maybe the advice will feel completely different from what you’ve been hearing from friends, family, and online career content, like this client found 🤷

So what advice made this Comprehensive Resume Review client publicly recommend our services?

Perspective.

One of the things this client mentioned recently was that the advice felt completely different from what they were hearing from friends, family, and online career content. Honestly, that’s probably because most resume advice focuses on sounding more impressive, while very little of it focuses on how hiring teams actually evaluate credibility.

This client already had solid experience. The issue was that the resume communicated experience in broad summaries instead of believable examples. Like a lot of professionals, they were describing responsibilities, capabilities, and general strengths without helping the reader actually visualize the work, the decision-making, or the operational impact behind those claims.

That’s where a lot of online advice falls flat. It teaches people how to sound polished without teaching them how to sound believable. AI-generated/assisted resume do the same thing.

The review focused heavily on context, specificity, operational clarity, and helping the experience feel more tangible to the reader. Not just what was done, but how it was done, why it mattered, and what it looked like in practice. You need to break down vague language, broad summaries, and generic phrasing that technically sounds professional but doesn’t actually help establish trust with the reader.

That’s also why this kind of feedback tends to stay useful long after the review itself. Hiring trends change. Resume trends change. LinkedIn trends definitely change. But understanding how hiring teams interpret experience, evaluate credibility, and look for proof-of-concept examples tends to remain useful throughout someone’s career.

If you’re feeling like your resume isn’t telling your story the way it should and don’t know how to frame your experience, our services can help. 

Curious what the process has been like for other clients? Check out our testimonials here!

BEST (WORST?) JOB POST

OF THE WEEK

Here’s the job post that got the most people talking on my Instagram this week!

this feels like a HIPAA violation

If you come across an irritating job posting, email it to the newsletter or DM me on Instagram and I’ll add it to the list to post!

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PREMIUM SUBSCRIBER QUESTION

“Is it reasonable to expect that a recruiting company who has introduced you to a company, scheduled interviews, and coordinated an assessment, would let you know at some point if you were chosen or not? And if any feedback was provided?

Last, (though I intuitively know this answer): is it ok to call them out for not doing so? 😉”

Check out the Premium Section below for my answer! Not a Premium Subscriber? Upgrade here: www.JobseekingIsHard.com/upgrade

Why upgrade? For less than $0.63/day, you get:

• Subscriber-Only Discounts: Get exclusive promo codes for Karpiak Consulting services, available only to Premium subscribers. Whether you're updating your resume, need a LinkedIn profile review, or want expert help tailoring your applications, these occasional discounts make expert support more accessible.

• Extra Tips & Advice: Gain exclusive insights, strategies, and advice from a recruiter with over 20 years of experience in the field. Discover what hiring managers truly value and how to stand out at every step of your job search.

• Access to Previous Issues: Explore a library of knowledge with all 100+ past issues of the newsletter. Each edition is packed with proven strategies, practical advice, and real-world jobseeking stories to give you an edge in today’s competitive job market. From resume tips to handling tough interview questions, you’ll find answers to every challenge.

• Exclusive Q&A: Have questions about your job search? Premium subscribers can ask Adam directly! Questions will be featured in upcoming issues, with detailed answers tailored to real-world scenarios, ensuring you get the guidance you need.

• Bonus Content: As part of your Premium subscription, you’ll receive 20 additional job search tips delivered to your inbox over the next 20 days. This includes advice on avoiding common mistakes and maximizing your job search strategy to land interviews faster.

Jobseekers, have a great rest of your week, and good luck with those applications!

-Adam

PS!! If you're enjoying the newsletter, let people know! Forward it, post it on social, tag me, whatever...the bigger the discussion, the better! The idea is to help as many people as possible!

About Adam- Recognized as a leading voice on hiring and workplace trends, Adam has been recruiting and providing career advice since 2003, developing high-trust relationships based on honesty with companies and jobseekers. A highly sought-after speaker, he has appeared in numerous outlets, including Bloomberg News, Business Insider, LinkedIn, and CNNMoney. You can find out more about Adam's resume and coaching services here.

AFFILIATES

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