In partnership with

200 Ways To Make Money With AI

Ready to transform artificial intelligence from a buzzword into your personal revenue generator?

HubSpot’s groundbreaking guide "200+ AI-Powered Income Ideas" is your gateway to financial innovation in the digital age.

Inside you'll discover:

• A curated collection of 200+ profitable opportunities spanning content creation, e-commerce, gaming, and emerging digital markets, each vetted for real-world potential

• Step-by-step implementation guides designed for beginners, making AI accessible regardless of your technical background

• Cutting-edge strategies aligned with current market trends, ensuring your ventures stay ahead of the curve

Download your guide today and unlock a future where artificial intelligence powers your success. Your next income stream is waiting.

Get The Free Guide

Welcome to Issue #197 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!

A lot of jobseekers leave useful information off their resumes because they’re worried about sounding arrogant. They know they worked with a team, they know other people contributed, and they don’t want to make every accomplishment sound like it happened because of them alone.

That instinct creates a problem when the recruiter reading the resume doesn’t know anything about the work beyond what’s written on the page. If you don’t explain what you owned, how you contributed, and why the work mattered, recruiters are left to guess.

That’s what I want to talk about this week. Explaining your value is about giving recruiters the information they need to understand your experience and advocate for you internally.

I’ll also share how one Basic Resume Review client was presenting too much of their experience at the same level, which made the work that actually showed seniority much easier to miss.

This week we’re talking about:

• Why explaining your value is “recruiter education”

• How equal emphasis on a resume can make experience look underwhelming

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

• The meme of the week

And for Premium subscribers I’m:

• Debunking yet another viral post that the green “Open to Work” banner is a red flag

• Answering a Premium subscriber’s question about how much context to include on a resume. I’ll explain how relevance should determine which examples get more detail and which information can be shortened, combined, or removed.

Let’s get to it!

RECRUITERS DON’T KNOW YOU OUTSIDE OF YOUR RESUME

You’ve lived your career, so the significance of your work feels obvious. You know which projects were difficult, which decisions were yours, how much resistance you faced, why leadership trusted you, and what changed because you were involved. You also know the difference between a routine responsibility and something that required real judgment or leadership.

The recruiter knows none of that.

They have your resume, the job description, and whatever information they can quickly gather while reviewing a large number of applicants. They may understand the general function they’re recruiting for, but they probably don’t understand your company’s structure, internal politics, operating environment, or the specific challenges behind your work. They weren’t in the meetings. They didn’t watch you resolve the problem. They don’t know which parts of the outcome were ordinary and which required you to do something unusually well.

That information has to come from you.

This is where a lot of candidates become uncomfortable. They’ll describe their responsibilities but avoid explaining what made their work valuable. They’ll mention that they supported a transformation, contributed to a strategy, partnered with leadership, or worked with a team to improve something. All of that may be accurate, but it leaves the recruiter trying to determine what the candidate personally brought to the situation.

Recruiters usually won’t spend much time on that. We’re working under volume and time constraints, and screening is largely an elimination process. When someone’s experience feels vague, the safer and faster decision is often to move on to a candidate whose contribution is easier to understand.

That doesn’t mean recruiters enjoy rejecting people or don’t care about finding strong candidates. It means every unclear application requires additional time, interpretation, and assumptions. When there are plenty of other candidates available, most recruiters aren’t going to stop and conduct an investigation into what someone probably meant.

We want to understand your value. You have to educate us.

The word “bragging” creates the wrong mental model for this. Bragging is exaggerating your importance, making unsupported claims, or trying to impress people with how exceptional you think you are. Statements like “visionary leader,” “world-class strategist,” or “transformational executive” are opinions. They tell the recruiter how you’d like to be perceived without providing much evidence to support the conclusion.

Candidates often assume their job title or company name will do some of this work for them. Sometimes it does. A recognizable employer, senior title, or respected function may create an initial level of credibility. But titles aren’t standardized, and companies distribute responsibility differently. Two people with the same title may have completely different levels of ownership, authority, and influence.

Education works differently. Education gives the reader enough context to understand what happened. You inherited a struggling team, identified the source of the performance problem, changed the management process, coached the people involved, and improved the outcome. You recognized that a project was failing, secured executive support for a different approach, coordinated the implementation, and got it back on track. You developed employees who were later promoted, created a system that other teams adopted, or became the person leadership relied on for a specific type of problem.

Those are facts. Explaining them isn’t arrogance.

That’s often why strong candidates sound less impressive on paper than they are in real life. A useful way to review your resume is to ask what a stranger would still need to know. They may understand that you managed a process, but do they know its size or complexity? They may see that you improved something, but do they understand what was wrong before you became involved? They may know that you partnered with executives, but do they understand what you were asking those executives to approve? They may see an outcome, but do they know what you personally did to create it?

You don’t need a dramatic story or a paragraph for every bullet. You need enough specificity for the recruiter to understand the scope of your work, the decisions you made, and why the result mattered.

It’s also worth remembering that recruiters aren’t only evaluating you for themselves. They often have to explain your candidacy to someone else. A recruiter may need to tell the hiring manager why your background is relevant, defend why you should receive an interview, or summarize your strongest evidence during an internal discussion. The clearer your resume is about your contribution, the easier it becomes for that recruiter to advocate for you.

Vague candidates are difficult to advocate for.

None of this means your resume should become a collection of inflated claims or self-congratulation. Recruiters are skeptical of exaggerated language, especially now that AI has made it easy for every candidate to sound strategic, transformative, and visionary. The strongest resumes don’t rely on bigger adjectives. They rely on better explanation.

Explain what you did. Explain how you did it. Explain why it mattered. Then let the recruiter decide what those facts say about you.

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 you’ll find it SUPER insightful like this client 🤷‍♂️

So how did I help this Basic Resume Review client see their resume with much clearer eyes?

By creating a clearer hierarchy.

Their resume was presenting too much of the work at the same level, which made the most important parts harder to recognize. The current role read like a complete inventory of responsibilities, so the examples that actually showed seniority were buried inside everything else.

This happens a lot with experienced professionals. Once someone has taken on enough responsibility, they start treating every part of the job as equally important because all of it feels relevant. Recruiters don’t read it that way. They’re trying to understand what the person owned, what changed because of their work, and whether the level of responsibility matches the role being filled.

When routine duties receive the same space and emphasis as the work that required judgment, influence, and organizational leadership, the resume can make someone look more underwhelmingl than they really are. The strongest examples should appear early and receive enough context to show why they matter. Routine responsibilities can still be included…but they shouldn’t compete with the work that best proves the level of the candidate.

This is also where resume structure starts shaping perception. A recruiter usually assumes the most prominent information is the information the candidate considers most important. If strategic work is buried halfway through a dense section, it can totally be missed (or ignored).

Good prioritization helps the recruiter understand the candidate’s level before they start forming the wrong impression from everything else.

If you're not getting the response you expected from your resume and want an honest assessment of why, 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!

nothing says “efficient hiring experience” like an 8-step interview process

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!

MEME OF THE WEEK

This meme got more reactions on my Threads than anything else I posted this week.

Today's issue is also brought to you by I Hate It Here! C’mon give it a click…it costs $0 and helps support your favorite job search newsletter 🙂

The free newsletter making HR less lonely

The best HR advice comes from those in the trenches. That’s what this is: real-world HR insights delivered in a newsletter from Hebba Youssef, a Chief People Officer who’s been there. Practical, real strategies with a dash of humor. Because HR shouldn’t be thankless—and you shouldn’t be alone in it.

Sign Up Free

PREMIUM SUBSCRIBER QUESTION

“How much context should I include on my resume before it becomes too long?”

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

NOTE: As an affiliate to these services, we will receive compensation if you purchase products or services through the links provided.

SALE! SAVE 40% ON COURSERA PLUS FOR 3 MONTHS!

$35.40 per month, for 3 consecutive months (regularly $59 per month)

You can save 40% on 3 months of unlimited access to thousands of top-rated learning programs with a Coursera Plus monthly subscription. That’s over $70 in savings—and more than a month of free learning!

Make this the start of something new for your career. Build in-demand skills, discover new career paths, and earn multiple job-ready certificates through expert-led instruction from leaders at Google, IBM, and more at a special low price.

Sign up here!

https://imp.i384100.net/c/4709194/2979777/14726

BETTERHELP: 15% OFF YOUR FIRST MONTH OF ONLINE THERAPY

Mental health is a massive part of your career. Anxiety, depression, self-worth issues…all become more intense the longer a job search goes on. With my link, get 15% off your first month of online therapy with BetterHelp!

​http://www.betterhelp.com/jobseekingishard

Subscribe to Premium to read the rest.