Your experience may not be the problem

You can have a strong career behind you and still struggle to get interviews.

I hear this all the time from experienced professionals who’ve spent 15 or 20+ years taking on bigger responsibilities, leading teams, solving difficult problems and delivering strong results.

On paper, they’ve got plenty to offer.

But they’re not getting the response they expected.

And that’s when the second-guessing starts.

Is it my resume?

Am I targeting the wrong roles?

Is my LinkedIn hurting me?

Do I need to apply to more jobs?

Is it my age?

Is the market really this bad?

The problem is, when you don’t know what’s actually getting in the way, it’s very easy to spend weeks fixing the wrong thing.

Take your resume.

After 15 or 20 years in a field, it’s easy to assume the page carries the same context you have in your head.

It doesn’t.

Writing “20 years of experience” tells an employer how long you’ve worked.

A list of titles tells them where you’ve been.

Neither necessarily tells them why your experience matters for the role they’re trying to fill.

At the Manager, Director and VP level, employers are looking for more than responsibilities.

They want evidence that you’ve handled problems similar to the ones they need solved now.

And I often review resumes where that evidence is already there.

It’s just buried 🫣

The strongest accomplishment is halfway down the page.

A major business result is hidden inside a long bullet.

The summary spends more space describing years of experience than communicating what this person is especially good at.

But here’s where it gets interesting:

The resume may not actually be the biggest problem.

You could be targeting roles where your experience isn’t translating clearly.

Your LinkedIn could be positioning you differently than your resume.

You could be relying too heavily on applications online.

Or your positioning could be strong, while something else in your job-search strategy is preventing you from getting enough opportunities.

That’s why I’m not a fan of automatically telling someone, “You need a better resume.”

First, we need to diagnose what’s actually happening.

If you have strong experience and your job search isn’t producing the interviews or opportunities you expected, don’t keep guessing at what needs to change.

That’s exactly what we’ll look at on a strategy session.

We’ll look at where you’re trying to go, what you’ve been doing, what’s happening in your search and where I see the biggest gaps.

The goal is to figure out what’s actually holding your search back, so you know what needs to change to start getting traction.

And if I believe we can help you solve it, I’ll walk you through what working together could look like.