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Don’t bury your talent in everything you've ever done.
Hi Friends,
We’re going to get really tactical today.
We need to talk about how we talk about ourselves.
A few weeks ago I had coffee with someone I hadn’t seen in a while. I worked with her while I was at Experian and she asked to sit down to review her resume and talk track before an interview she really wanted to crush. We grabbed coffee and after a quick catch up, we dug in.
I’ll call her “Danielle.” She gave me permission to turn our conversation into a Substack article. 🙂
Danielle is super sharp. A ton of experience with a great track record. She’s been applying for about a month and hearing almost nothing back and she couldn’t figure out why.
Let’s talk through this.
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I’ve hired hundreds of people across my career. I’m currently talking to job seekers nearly every week who are in a similar boat as Danielle. And the pattern I keep seeing actually has nothing to do with qualifications.
It has everything to do with how they tell their story.
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The job market is brutal right now and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. Applications per role are at historic highs. The voluntary quit rate is at a ten-year low, which means fewer openings and much less movement. Sarah O’Connor at the Financial Times recently called it “The Great Hunkering Down.”
The deck is stacked against you.
So what are most people doing in response? Applying to more jobs. You see it all over Reddit. I applied to 200 positions and heard nothing back. The logic is that volume fixes odds. In this case, not necessarily. It means you’re sending the same ineffective resume to more people.
To quickly comment on the “Resumes are dead” or “Linkedin is dead” hot take you’ve probably seen recently. Everything is evolving and nobody can say how this will shake out a few years from now. But at this moment, in 2026, a resume and a great Linkedin profile are still necessary tools for most jobs. Hiring managers still open them. Whatever replaces the resume hasn’t arrived yet, and you cannot afford to wait for it while you’re actively looking for a job.
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Back to Danielle.
I asked her to walk me through her resume, the way she would in an interview. What followed was a thorough, detailed, 15 minute tour of her entire career. Most tools she’d ever touched.
It was complete. But it had no point.
Not because Danielle hadn’t done impressive things. I’ve followed Danille for years and any company would be lucky to have her. But she was presenting her career like a documentary when what a hiring manager needs is more like a closing argument.
Here’s what a hiring manager is actually doing when they open your resume: they’re not reading it. They’re scanning it for the answer to one question.
Why does this person fit what we need right now?
If they have to work to find that answer, they move on.
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Your resume is not your biography. It’s your argument.
Every line should be earning its place by answering one question: so what?
Not just “led a team of six.” What did that team produce, and why does it matter here?
Not just “implemented a new process.” What changed as a result, and how does that connect to what this company needs right now?
This applies in the interview room as well. When someone asks you to walk me through your background, the right answer is a curated case. Lead with the headline and use your experience as evidence. Don’t narrate through every job you’ve had.
As the saying goes, less is almost always more.
At the end of our coffee chat, I gave Danielle one filter to apply to every line on her resume: Does this tell the hiring manager why I’m the answer to their problem? If it doesn’t, cut it or refine it until it does.
She came back to me a couple of days later. The resume was half the length. Cleaner. Much more white space.
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8 years ago, when I started raising a series C investment round with my CEO at The Muse, I knew I had to dramatically change how I talked about my career in investor pitch meetings. I’d roll up to a meeting with my CEO and would always get the question: Tell me about your prior experiences. The investor group was really just looking to understand “Why are you qualified to be in this room.”
So I started to talk about myself. It went something like this: “I started my career at Microsoft, where I spent two years in a finance rotation program and then spent a subsequent two years as a Finance Business Partner inside Microsoft Dynamics. After Microsoft, I led a team of 5 people at Fox Interactive Media.” I went on and on.
I could literally see eyes wandering around the room, looking for anything else to focus on other than my boring background. I knew I had to change.
After a lot of thought and cycling through my talk track with mentors (who are investors themselves), I made a major change. I wanted to let investors know a few things right off the bat.
1. I’m a storyteller and know how to distill information down to patterns
2. I’ve run finance organizations in all types of operating environments. Growth, decline and the messy middle
3. My M&A experience is better than most in similar roles. I’ve been involved in acquiring 7 companies at this point and I took lead in every part of the acquisition process, from sourcing to integration
4. I know how to work with boards, broad investor groups and I put a lot of focus on being a really close ally to the CEO. I’m a true peer.
Have I done much more than this? Absolutely. But after pitching hundreds of investors and raising more than $150M in capital across the last 20 years, this is what I’ve found most investors want to understand.
So I tell them this. I don’t talk about working at Fox Interactive Media. I don’t talk about how I’ve managed countless successful audits. I don’t talk about anything in my intro other than these four bullets. If they want to know where I worked, they can ask the question.
It really changed the game. I kept attention, I could see positive facial expressions, and I often got follow up questions positioned to make a connection with me.
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The candidates who get hired aren’t the ones with the most experience. Every hiring manager can tell you this. They’re the ones who can make the clearest and synthesized case for why their experience matters.
Dave
