A résumé seems like a fairly simple document.
Where did you work?
What was your job title?
What did you do?
What skills do you have?
After talking with recruiter and career coach Josef Stetter on my podcast, I started wondering whether those are the right questions. Josef has an interesting perspective as he works on both sides of the hiring process. He helps people looking for jobs, and he recruits candidates for companies. He's also changed careers nine times, and jobs 18 times, himself.
I expected the conversation to be about résumés, LinkedIn, recruiters, interviews and salary negotiation. It was, and I noticed a problem:
Most people describe what they’ve done.
Employers are trying to determine what they can do.
Someone can have decades of experience and have a résumé that tells surprisingly little about what they’re capable of doing. The problem becomes greater when someone wants to change careers. Your previous job title may not match the job you’re pursuing. Your relevant experience may not have been part of your formal job description. It may not even have been paid work. Yet it may be the best evidence you have that you can do the job.
That made me rethink what a résumé is supposed to accomplish.
Your Job Description Isn’t Your Value
Consider these statements:
Hard working.
Dedicated.
Team player.
Excellent communication skills.
They may sound positive. As Josef says, "They tell me nothing." Nobody applying for a job describes themselves as lazy, unreliable and difficult to work with.
What does hard working mean? One person might work 80 hours a week during tax season. A nurse might work fewer hours while spending an entire shift making decisions involving sick patients. Counting hours doesn’t necessarily tell us which person works harder.
The problem is that we’re using descriptions, where we could provide evidence.Consider a receptionist. A résumé might say: Experienced answering phones and assisting customers. Answering a telephone is something we expect a receptionist to know how to do.
Compare that with: Managed 12 incoming lines and approximately 60 calls per day.
The task hasn’t changed. The information has. One tells a recruiter what you were responsible for. The other is what you’re capable of handling.
Don’t Make Someone Guess How Good You Are
Imagine a salesperson whose résumé says: Experienced in B2B and B2C sales, account management, relationship building and lead generation. Words matter. They tell us something. They don’t establish that a person was good at it.
Josef gave me an example from his career. He joined a private college that had generated approximately $530,000 during the previous year. He says he generated $860,000 in one month. Now I know something I didn't know. That leads to the suggestion: Don’t make the employer guess how good you are.
That doesn’t mean every accomplishment has to involve hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Numbers provide scale.
How many customers?
How many transactions?
How much money?
How much time?
How much faster?
How much did you reduce?
How much did you increase?
Numbers tell someone something important about your capabilities. Josef had also worked as a stock trader. Saying he answered trading calls tells us what he did. Saying he handled 151 trading calls during one shift tells us something about the volume he could handle.
The number doesn’t need to be spectacular. It needs to make the experience concrete.
Numbers Aren’t Enough
A résumé isn’t a collection of impressive statistics. Describe what you know. If you’re an engineer, what kind of engineering do you do? If you’re in finance, which products do you understand? Stocks? Bonds? Options? Mutual funds?
Saying, "Knowledgeable about financial products" forces someone to guess what that means. Specific terminology matters, as the first person or system reviewing your résumé may be looking for particular skills, and not understand your profession.
For example, a recruiter doesn’t need to understand an enginnering positon to recognize:
Reduced X by 30 percent.
Managed Y number of projects.
Improved Z from this to that.
Technical language helps to establish what you know.
Results establish what you’ve done with what you know.
You need both.
What If Your Experience Doesn’t Match the Job You Want?
We looked at the résumé of a recent college undergraduate with a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience who was working as a pharmacy technician. His education appeared near the bottom, of the second page of his resume.
That’s reasonable if you’re following a conventional résumé template which assumes your recent employment is your strongest qualification. What if it isn’t? If you’re trying to move into neuroscience, why lead with unrelated employment and while buring neuroscience? Look at what the person y did while earning the degree:
What research projects did he complete?
What subjects did he excel in?
Did he write a thesis?
What questions did he investigate?
Did he complete internships, cooperative education or laboratory work?
What did he actually learn and do?
That changes the question from:
What jobs have you been paid to do? to:
What evidence do you have that you can do the work you’re asking someone to hire you to do?
Experience Doesn’t Mean Employment
This made me think about my own engineering education. As an engineering student, I completed semester-long projects for professors as part of my curriculum. I was doing engineering work. I wasn’t being paid as an engineer. Does that count as experience? Why wouldn’t it?
A résumé doesn’t have to be limited to paid experience. If you completed a meaningful university project, conducted research, built something, solved a technical problem, volunteered in the field or otherwise demonstrated the ability you’re trying to sell, that may be relevant evidence of what you can do. That's important for recent graduates, people changing careers, people returning to a field after time away, and people whose formal job titles don’t accurately describe what they’ve done.
Instead of asking:
What am I allowed to put on my résumé?
ask:
What have I done that demonstrates my ability to solve the problems this employer needs solved?
Then describe it accurately.
Your Résumé Doesn’t Have to Follow the Formula
There’s an assumption buried in the conventional résumé: recent employment goes first. Education goes toward the bottom. Skills go in a particular section. Everything proceeds chronologically.
That structure makes sense when your employment history tells exactly the story you want it to tell. What if it doesn’t? For the neuroscience graduate, the most compelling evidence might be education and research.
For an experienced engineer, it might be projects and measurable accomplishments.
For someone changing careers, it might be transferable achievements from several unrelated positions.
The purpose of the résumé isn’t to obey a template - it's to help someone understand why you’re worth talking to. If the information relevant to the job is buried on page two because that’s where conventional résumé advice says it belongs, the format is working against you and the purpose of a resume.
The question isn’t: Where is education supposed to go?
It’s: What does this employer most need to know about me? How quickly can I make that apparent?
Your LinkedIn Profile May Have the Same Problem
The same principle applies to LinkedIn. Josef gave me an interesting example from his work as a recruiter. He was searching approximately 1,000 LinkedIn profiles for someone with a combination of banking regulatory, compliance, sales and relationship-management experience.
About 700 profiles provided a title, employer and dates. That left him unable to determine whether those people had the capabilities he was looking for. He wasn’t going to contact hundreds of people to find out what they actually knew.
That made me think about LinkedIn differently. The purpose of being on LinkedIn isn’t to show your employment history online, rather it’s a searchable representation of what you know and have accomplished. If a recruiter searches for a technical term you understand, and you’ve never put that term anywhere in your profile, how would they find you?
When they find you, if your profile says, "Engineer — Company X — 2018–2024," how would they know if you’re the engineer they’re looking for?
Make the Recruiter’s Job Easy
There’s a larger principle running through this: Reduce the amount of work someone else has to do to understand your value. That applies after a recruiter contacts you as well. One suggestion from our conversation that I particularly liked to ask a recruiter you're working with:
"Is there anything I can change on my résumé that would make it easier for you to represent me to your client?"
That’s a different approach from repeatedly asking, "Have you found me a job yet?"
You and the recruiter want the same thing. They want to place someone their client wants to hire. You want to be that person. Give them useful evidence that you're the best fit. Give them relevant terminology. Give them results. Don’t make them reconstruct your capabilities from a list of job titles.
What Employers Are Actually Buying
Near the end of our conversation, we talked about salary negotiation. If, for example, an employer sees you as an engineer with five years of experience, salary becomes a comparison against other engineers with five years of experience.
Suppose you’ve demonstrated:
Here’s the problem I solved.
Here’s how I solved it.
Here’s the result.
Here’s what that result was worth.
There’s more to discuss than how many years of work experience you have.
Josef's advice is to understand the market range. Don't throw out an arbitrarily high number, and then use your demonstrated experience and results to make the case for where and why you belong within that range.
The salary negotiation didn't begin when somebody asked, “What are your salary expectations?” It began when they looked at your resume and tried to determine, "What is this person capable of doing for us?"
The Résumé Isn’t the Problem
People spend time changing fonts, rearranging sections, choosing templates, adding keywords and trying to make their résumé “sound professional.” Those things matter. They are not solving the right problem.
If you're not getting interviews, your response might be:
Send more résumés.
Apply to more jobs.
Rewrite the résumé.
Make it sound better.
Have AI improve it.
What if the problem isn't that your résumé isn't polished - it's that it doesn't provide evidence of what you're capable of doing?
That gives us a different way to evaluate a résumé. If someone knew nothing about you except what you've written, would they understand what you're capable of doing?
Not what your responsibilities were.
Not adjectives you use to describe yourself.
Not where you've worked.
What problems have you solved?
What do you know?
What have you produced?
At what scale?
What changed because you were there?
If you're trying to do something different next, what have you already done that provides evidence you can solve the problems in the job you want now?
Landing your dream job starts before you search for one. It starts with figuring out what you bring to the table, and making sure the person on the other side doesn't have to guess at what that is.
Watch or listen
The episode with Josef Stetter on:
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About the Author
Daniel Stih (danielstih.com) is an aerospace engineer, software engineer, indoor environmental consultant, and author of 12 books. For more than 30 years, he has investigated complex problems spanning engineering, technology, the built environment, and human decision-making. His work explores how evidence, assumptions, and systems shape the conclusions we draw—and whether we're solving the right problem. Learn more about his approach in Why I Think This Way.
Connect with Josef Stetter
Website
https://josefstetter.com/
LinkedIn
ca.linkedin.com/in/josefstetter