Your resume, your LinkedIn profile, and your applications are your invitation to the party. Here’s how to get every one of them working hard for you.
I read resumes for hours every day, and I can tell you the difference between the candidates who get called and the ones who don’t usually comes down to fixable details: the verbs, the numbers, the formatting, the consistency between documents.
This page collects everything on the candidate paper trail, from the resume itself to what happens after you click apply.
Get the Resume Right
Start with the tough call: if your resume isn’t working hard for you, fire it, and rebuild it on three keys: verbs, formatting, and length. The length rule gets its own case: five reasons your resume should be no more than two pages, including the 6,250-resume math from a recruiter’s inbox.
Then upgrade the content. The one simple shift swaps duties for measurable proof, the ten resume tips for tech sales include 18 action verbs that beat “managed,” and when you’re short on time, five quick fixes handle the essentials in an afternoon.
Get LinkedIn Right
Hiring managers check your profile before they ever contact you. Work through the seven killer LinkedIn profile tips, including why a boring job title wins searches and what the About section must say.
And know what LinkedIn knows: recruiters may be able to see your uploaded resume, and most candidates have no idea how it got there or how to remove it.
Applications, Cover Letters, and the Black Hole
First, understand the machine: what actually happens when you apply online, why 300 applicants is less scary than it looks, and how to pick postings you can win.
Then stand out from it. Six ways to double your response rate on cold submittals covers tailored letters and following up with the hiring manager directly, and what your mom never told you about cover letters makes the case that in the AI era, a real letter is one of the last effort signals left, with 18 do’s and don’ts.
Still not getting called? There are five fixable reasons good salespeople don’t get interviews, and every one of them lives on this page.
Paper Gets You in the Room
None of these documents will close the deal for you, but any one of them can cost you the meeting. Fix the paper, win the interview, and then the selling is up to you. When the interviews start coming, the complete interview guide takes it from here.
