u/FinalDraftResumes

After the latest update, Notion has become super slow and laggy - it's nearly unusable. Wondering if anybody else is experiencing this.

Saw another post this week recommending people add a dedicated AI section to their resume, where you group your AI tools, projects, and training together in one block so a recruiter can spot it at a glance. The argument being that AI work doesn't really count unless it's visible in its own block.

That isn't really how resumes get read in any hiring process I've been around, and I've reviewed enough of them this year to feel comfortable saying so.

AI work belongs inside the experience where you actually used it, described with the same context you'd give any other tool you worked with. If you cut a reporting cycle from three days to three hours by building a workflow around an AI tool, that detail goes in the bullet about the reporting cycle. The part that makes it meaningful is what you did with the tool and what changed because of it, and that context disappears when you separate the tool from the work (same thing happens with any other tool taken out of context).

A list of AI tools sitting on its own doesn't tell a hiring manager whether you used them well, and most of the people reading resumes right now already know what these tools are anyway.

Take home message: AI is a tool, and treating it like a separate category on your resume will probably work against you even when the intent behind it is to look current.

I do intake calls with clients before writing their resumes, and one of the first questions I ask is about their story - essentially the “tell me about yourself” that recruiters often ask. It’s the same question almost every interview opens with, so it doubles as a useful warm-up.

A lot of people struggle with this question and the answers tend to take too long, (I've had people take 15 minutes to answer this question; most hover around 5-7 minutes, which is still too long). Or they list a string of disconnected facts without any thread holding them together.

If someone can’t summarize their own career to me in a low-pressure call, they’re going to have a much harder time doing it for a hiring manager.

What catches people off guard is that “tell me about yourself” feels casual, which is why people relax into it instead of treating it like the structured question it actually is and then they wander, and by the time they’ve finished, the relevant parts of their background are mixed in with too much other context the listener didn’t need.

I think most people assume the answer will come together naturally because it’s their own life and they know it inside and out but it usually doesn’t. If you struggle with this and want to get it right, practice makes perfect. Treat it like the structured pitch it is: for each past role, jot down why you took it, what you gained, and why you left. Then record yourself answering out loud, aim for around two minutes.

I know that for most of you on this sub, the challenge is just getting to the interview stage, but the challenges don’t end there, and this is just one example. Prepare accordingly.

Thanks for reading.

EDIT: Someone point out that people don't come to my intake call prepared in the same way they would for a job interview, which is probably true. That said, a lot of people do find this question difficult.

Often times, the issue is not that you don't have the experience, it's that you're not presenting it properly.

Heck, with AI, most people's resumes even sound great too (at least on the surface) - that's not even the problem anymore. The problem is that a recruiter often has to work too hard to figure out why they applied to the role, and in this market nobody's putting in that effort on your behalf (see my past posts - this is a point I've been hammering on for a while now).

In reality, your issue is that your resume lacks clarity. Some examples of what i mean by that.

• Bullets that describe responsibility instead of what you actually did. "Responsible for managing client relationships across the West Coast" tells me your job title. It doesn't tell me how many clients, what kind, what you did with them, or what changed because you were there. Rewrite it to show the action and the result, even if the result isn't a percentage.
• Summaries that read like personality descriptions. "Strategic, results-driven leader with a passion for innovation" - how many of you have used something like this, now or in the past? Replace it with a two or three sentence positioning statement that names what you do, who you do it for, and the kind of outcome you're known for. If a recruiter can't tell what role you're targeting from your summary, the rest of the resume is already working against you.
• Job titles that don't match the work. Internal titles often don't translate. If your title is "Solutions Architect II" but you're really running enterprise implementations, put a clarifying line under the title or use a functional title in parentheses.
• Achievements without context. A bullet that says "cut costs by 30%" without saying how, against what baseline, or with what scope is just a number. Add one line of context so the reader can understand what you controlled.
• Skills sections that list everything you've ever touched. If it's on the resume, you should be able to talk about it confidently in an interview. Remove anything you'd hesitate to be quizzed on.

What usually fixes this stuff is a quick pass focused on one question: can a recruiter who knows nothing about you tell within 10 seconds why you applied to this role and why you'd be good at it? If no, then you've got work to do.

And as Forrest Gump once said, that's all I have to say about that.