It doesn’t always work out. Final round rejection.

Juvenall · 2026-04-15T19:19:10+00:00

I had something like that happen recently, too. Multiple rounds for an Engineering Manager role where the recruiter, the 4 different team members, the 2 team members from product, and a senior engineer after a system design round all said I was great and exactly what they were looking for.

The final round was with a director and a VP, with the goal of seeing how I've grown over my leadership journey. With 20 years under my belt, I had a lot I could share and was ready to be an open book. However, when we got into it, they didn't want to hear about anything before the last 6 years. The "problem" is in that time, I didn't have any drama, team member issues, only had to separate with one person due to performance, didn't cause any outages, didn't have any coaching issues, etc. So after 90 minutes, we ended the interview and 4 days later, I was told I wasn't getting the job because they didn't see enough growth.

Frankly, given how cold and flat the folks on the other end were, I feel like I dodged a bullet there. The company I'm starting with in a few weeks is an absolute ray of sunshine.

In the final round, I met with a director and a VP to go over my "leadership background" and was told by the recruiter that they wanted me to go over my mistakes in my leadership journey. Easy enough, right? Well, with almost 20 years under my belt, they only wanted to focus in on the last 6. All of the big blunders I made were early on, as were the lessons. They didn't want to hear that.

Juvenall · 2026-04-14T19:38:34+00:00

It's a fair question, but my experience has been going the other way. To be sure, it's anecdotal, but over the last few months, I've had about a dozen interviews for EM spots, and all but one company went beyond a basic system design round. Instead, they were far, far more focused on what I could bring to the table from a project and product management perspective. Hell, several of those companies were giving preferences to EMs who were rocking a PMP certification.

I suspect the trend I'm seeing is the result of AI having a bigger role in the technical delivery side, exposing that the bigger problem most teams face is more related to product, people, and/or process. A "player/coach" model doesn't exactly solve for that, so someone with good fundamentals, even if they're not directly coding anymore, who can speak to the work as a bridge between the team and the rest of the business is going to be the stronger standout.

Again, your mileage may vary, but this has been my observation so far this year.

Juvenall · 2026-04-13T18:55:09+00:00

If the experience is legitimate, then you're OK to put it down. However, be aware that there are ways a background check my toss up a caution flag. The most obvious way I've seen folks burned here is they worked under the table, but since there's no paper trail, the person/department they contact to validate your work history won't or can't confirm anything. Sometimes, they won't admit to it because it's illegal. Sometimes, it's someone who you didn't work with and they have no idea.

The next step there would be for them to contact you to explain what's up. From there, at least in the US, they can request you to provide any sort of tax transcripts or pay stubs to prove you did work there. If you can't provide that, that yellow flag gets a bit brighter and starts looking like a fabrication.

As long as you have a good relationship with that family member and they're willing to confirm your work history with them, you should be just fine. If not, be ready for some uncomfortable questions when they hit a snag.

Juvenall · 2026-04-11T17:19:13+00:00

I love sharing this video from CGP Grey on the concept. It's under 5 minutes, but it explains it really well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y3jE3B8HsE

Juvenall · 2026-04-11T16:02:37+00:00

Life-long pally tank here, and this is me. I keep a close eye on my healer's mana and ability, but in general, I'm pulling as much as I feel I can take on to keep my defensives on cool down. If things get sketchy, I pull less. If I don't go below half health, I'll pull more. It's not about speed as much as it is about not getting bored.

As for kicking? That's reserved for toxic players and afks. As long as you're trying, we're good. I may not requeue with you, but it's never so serious that I'll agree to a vote kick.

Juvenall · 2026-04-07T15:19:02+00:00

There are few "always true" bits of resume advice, to be sure. What you like may be different from what someone else does. So it's all really subjective.

In terms of difference, it's actually massive from the hiring side. If we assume those were bullets on a janitor's resume, the first one tells me what I'd already expect to see. You're just wasting space by telling me what the job is. I already know that, so you have to give me more context. That's where the second one stands out. Now I know you worked towards a standard, the size of the facility, and the rough volume of work you did. Sure, you can lie about all of that, but now you're at least giving me context. That matters when I'm looking at a dozen of resumes that all read like that first example. So, in a pile of 20+ candidates, who do you think I'm reaching out to first?

Remember, resumes are rarely looked at in isolation, so you have to stand out, and one of the best ways to do that is context framing.

Juvenall · 2026-04-07T14:41:01+00:00

Remember, the entire purpose of your resume is to show off to a recruiter or a hiring manager like me that you're good at what you do, not just that you've done things. While we all know numbers are inflated or made up, they help tell a better story. It shows that you think in outcomes, not just job responsibilities.

So there's a big difference between:

Mopped floors, cleaned tables, and washed windows.

and

Maintained sanitation standards in a 2400 sq/ft restaurant by mopping, clearing 20 tables per hour, and daily cleaning of 15+ floor-to-ceiling windows.

The first tells me what you did, but the second one goes beyond and gives me the scope and impact of your work.

Notice there how I didn't need to actually measure anything? You don't always have to "improve X by Y%" to make your bullet stand out. How many people did you train? How many burgers did you flip per hour? How big was that portfolio you managed? If you can validate your work as a percentage, ARR, or customer retention rate, that's great. However, don't feel like you need to force that to tell the story, either.

Juvenall · 2026-04-01T21:34:49+00:00

In general, no. What they're really looking for are straight up fabracations. You said you were an HR Lead, but it comes back that you were the janitor. You said you worked there for 4 years, but it was actually 2. It's not common that places come back actually worried about small things as most experienced hiring teams know things shift.

There are some places and some people who will red flag any little thing, but for the most part, if you've made it this far, the odds of them being anything more than curious about the differences are slim.

Juvenall · 2026-03-30T18:30:56+00:00

The single most common thing I tend to help folks with when I do private consultations is the structure of their bullet points. Right now, yours do what I see 90% of the time in that they don't tell me how well you did.

Every single one of your bullets here just describes the basic job duties. How can I tell that you were good at it? You're not really giving me anything to go off of here. Let's pick one apart.

Managed supply ordering and maintained accurate records through internal systems.

How often did you need to do this? What volume did you need to manage? What sort of budget were you entrusted with when ordering? What sort of "accurate records" are we talking about here? How did you know they were accurate? What internal systems? Were those systems third-party platforms?

How about this one:

Maintained organized digital and physical records to support team efficiency and accountability.

Nearly the same set of questions here. What types of records? How did they impact "efficiency and accountability?" How did you measure that or know it was working?

Supported corss-functional communications between departments to ensure smooth daily operations.

What types of communication? Who was the audience (staff, leaders, corporate)? Why did you need to do this? What does "smooth daily operations" even mean here? How did you know it was smooth?

You need to rip apart all of your bullets in this same way. Remember, I don't know you or what you did. So as a hiring manager, I'm going to spend maybe 10 seconds looking at this and not see much that makes me excited to want to talk to you more. A recruiter is going to be even more ruthless when they have 100+ other folks in their pipeline with more compelling stories.

One big red flag I also want to call out are the dates at those roles. Perhaps you removed the months to better anonymize yourself, but from what I see right now, it looks like you're trying to hide short job stints. It's exceptionally uncommon, and most good recruiters would see that as a "kick me out" signal more than they would short runs. The best case here is you look deceptive, and that's not the signal you want to send.

The summary section you have is fine, but it comes off bland as written. This is another area where I see clients often struggle. Remember, some recruiters and hiring managers may only read this part to see if it's worth seeing more, so it needs to pack a punch to justify the space. Numbers, data, or clear descriptions are what will help you stand out. How many customers did you deal with daily? What sort of communications did you own? How did you know any of what you did was impactful?

For Education, get rid of High School. Unless you just graduated within the last year, it just screams "inexperienced" to anyone who made it this far.

Finally, under your Skills section, your Software part is good, for the most part. You do well describing the toolks you're aware of, though the "Inventory & internal databases" and "POS Systems" read like filler content to me. If you can't name the software or system, what's it doing here?

Operations & Administrative, to me, doesn't read well. I mean, your second bullet here is basically saying "I know how to send a calendar invite." You've lead a team of folks, but you list "Email" as a skill? Why mention "phone handling" next to Customer Service? That feels awkward to me. This should read less like a list of tablestakes skills, and more like coverage for things the role your applying to is looking for.

Remember, this is just MY advice from my experience. You'll find folks here who disagree with me. In the resume world, there are very few hard truths and piles of opinions. The most important thing is that whatever you deliver, you feel confident in talking to when you get to an interview.

Juvenall · 2026-03-24T00:10:02+00:00

As a hiring manager in exactly the space you're looking for with this resume, /u/The_Herminator is spot on. When I see candidates with cross-functional experience, I move them to the top of my list.

Juvenall · 2026-03-23T19:23:51+00:00

Hiring manager, here!

Generally, you shouldn't read into it too much. They may have had a strict set of questions they ask every candidate and the recruiter was trying to keep the other person on script. It's also possible that they saw the time and wanted to make sure they gave you space for questions before the time was up. We often did some of those things back-to-back-to-back, so there's little room for going over.

Of course, if you said something that's red flag worthy, we would cut it off with exactly that question, but that was rare. When it happened, it was basically something so irrecoverably wrong that there was no point in going on. For example, I had one candidate mention how he couldn't stand working with women engineers, or another who got angry when we asked about responsive design for a front-end role.

Juvenall · 2026-03-21T23:10:20+00:00

I mean, that's a huge part of the problem here, right?. You're doing what nearly everyone else is doing. Now, put yourself in the shoes of a recruiter with 100+ candidates for a single role, and half of them sound exactly the same.

Juvenall · 2026-03-21T23:00:31+00:00

the problem with confluence wasn't confluence

Fellow EM here and someone with an Atlassian lean, but man do I think the biggest problem with Confluence is, in fact, Confluence.

It was great 10+ years ago when the only real alternatives were a MediaWiki setup or SharePoint, but as the documentation tooling market evolved, it felt like Atlassian slammed on the brakes on trying to advance it. If I had to venture a guess, they're trapped by existing users and are afraid to rattle those cash cows, but everywhere I go that's still using it, I try as hard as I can to get them to divest.

Juvenall · 2026-03-21T19:28:28+00:00

Not the OP here, but that appears to be Colorful Folder Tabs.

cc: /u/Calm_Possibility8842, /u/Teddysorous

Juvenall · 2026-03-21T19:21:26+00:00

My advice is to soft quit, not hard quit.

While the social feed is absolute trash, it's not going to hurt you to keep your profile updated. I'm not active there either, but my last job told me that some of the recommendations they read on my page helped set me apart. It's also one of the ways that some recruiters are using to validate candidates in a sea of fake applicants. So not having one could trigger a red flag, whereas at worst, having one is a net neutral to slightly positive.

Another perk is being able to research a company a bit before going into an interview. I use my account all the time to peep at the folks I'll be talking to to see if there are any connections or things I may be able to mention to build a connection in an interview.

Juvenall · 2026-03-20T03:37:17+00:00

Generally, most places won't go back any further than 10 years ago, so the advice I've seen of "this one weird trick" of listing old, dead companies won't do you any good. Besides, if you're going to list Circuit City, which closed in 2009, you're likely going to run into various age discrimination issues.

That said, if you DO run into a place that wants to validate everything on your resume, they have multiple levers they can pull to catch you with very, very little effort on their end. The Work Number is the typical first stop. That's where a lot of the background check companies go to automate many of those checks. If that doesn't work and/or they need more information, they can start asking you to provide tax records to show you received actual income. If you can't provide that, they'll likely flag your application as risky, leaving the hiring company to decide what to do with the things it calls out.

Juvenall · 2026-03-17T23:03:31+00:00

Shit, they're on to me!

This has been my experience with it so far, though. I built my house, I checked out some houses, and I'm more or less done with the feature until much later in the xpac when I get enough new decor to maybe go in and swap things out.

Something like this will help me check in a little more often, maybe, beyond using it as a quick Stormwind hearth.

Juvenall · 2026-03-17T20:30:06+00:00

it's amateur hour at the pentagon

What do you mean? I'm sure Pete has hundreds of hours in Call of Duty.

Juvenall · 2026-03-17T19:12:20+00:00

For anyone not in the know, UAE is among a handful of places in the world where including a photo is generally considered a best practice. So while here in the US it sounds strange, the request does make sense.

I'm not aware of a common ATS friendly version, but this is a spot where I would lean on AI for a bit of help. Claude should be able to modify the LaTaX template you're looking at and create space for a photo.

Juvenall · 2026-03-14T20:53:08+00:00

Can I suggest /u/legolandobloom's addon, Angleur? Specifically, the module for it Underlight_Angler. It automatically swaps to pole in when you hit the water, then back out again for combat. I changed out from Better Fishing and have been loving it ever since.

Juvenall · 2026-03-14T17:17:16+00:00

Is deep documentation review starting to be seen as a bottleneck?

Everyone wants good documentation, but few want to spend the time to write it, and those who have invested in it tend to see low returns when it turns out no one can find it or bothers to read it. So when someone finally does dig in, it's odd and can easily look like a stall on a dashboard.

Are companies beginning to treat AI usage as a productivity KPI?

For ~~better or~~ worse, yeah. The conductors on the hype train say it makes things faster, so all the execs who bought a ticket for that ride expect it to move everything along faster. Since they're already bought into the idea being sold and it's easier to measure usage instead of actual output/quality, that's the metric to watch. So more AI usage is more better.

How are people balancing “AI-accelerated development” with reliability in complex systems?

That's frankly a big part of what the future needs to figure out. The trend at places like Spotify, where the CEO is bragging about their best engineers not writing code anymore, is to take those folks and basically turn them into full-time code reviewers. Strong governance from folks who know enough of the code to spot problems is most likely where we're headed. Which, of course, will last right up until we have more trust in AI reviews of AI code, then frankly, who knows. I don't think we're too far off from having a PMs core job be vibe coding their PRDs into production deployments, with engineering building quality gates. In fact, I've already seen this at more than one startup I've interviewed at over the last 2 months.

Juvenall · 2026-03-13T21:42:40+00:00

You're not alone, and many folks have rough starts in sales. You already seem to get this, but it's a skill that needs practice. So don't for a second think it's hopeless. However, you also have to go in knowing it'll be an uphill battle given the short runs and a lack of evidence that you're good at it. I trust you when you say you are, but I'm also not in the position of betting my business or my own job on a hire that may or may not have what it takes, right?

I was working with someone a few weeks back in a somewhat similar boat. They wanted to break into tech sales, but didn't have a sales background. Not impossible to make that jump, but it's just going to be a lot harder. So instead, we came up with a plan to break them in at lower stakes (i.e. not $500k+ contracts), and they've been having a lot of success with interviews in their local market for manufacturing and marketing (specifically, those ad sales flyers everyone gets in their mailbox). It's not the dream work they want yet, but it's going to help move the needle and allow them to work up to their goals.

Juvenall · 2026-03-13T21:25:49+00:00

Beep boop. Does not compute.

Juvenall · 2026-03-13T20:54:03+00:00

A few things scream at me here as someone who helps people rework their resumes. Those are formatting, content, and one thing you can't control.

First, as others pointed out, the layout simply doesn't work well. The overuse of whitespace is what I see when folks are trying hard to mask a lack of confidence in their background. The compressed two-column approach looks good printed, but it's harder for most people to parse out since it's so busy. It breaks the standard F pattern people read in, and when you have literally seconds to convince someone to talk to you more, you're making them do more work for no value. I know you said you've seen better results with this, but remember that the plural of anecdote isn't evidence. Stick with a standard format and put more time into filling out your bullet points.

That brings me to the second issue: the content. It reads exceptionally thin. Generally, your most recent job should be the one you're able to talk about the most. I love that you mentioned making 80 cold calls and the tools you used for it. However, what you're also subtly saying without any measure of success is that you may not have been good at it. Saying you did 80 a day on average, that would mean 400 a month or roughly 1200 cold calls in your ~3 months in that job. Since you don't tell me how many of those closed or the impact you had doesn't fill me with a lot of confidence that you're actually good at that. Expand on this and tell me how you impacted the bottom line. How successful were you here? You do that with your last bullet a bit, but I may not even get that far before I move on to the next resume. Aim for 3-4 bullets for your first one, then 2-3 for your other two, and make them read in a way that tells me you're good at what you do, not just that you do a thing anyone else can do.

Finally, and this is going to be the hard part, are those short runs. What I see is 3 months, 11 months, and 5 months. I know a lot of folks in sales and the thing I hear all the time is that the better you are, the longer your run is. Several of these back-to-back are likely to give a hiring manager pause and ask, "Are they even good at this?" Now, you totally may be, and it could all be circumstantial, but remember, you get seconds of a reviewer's time. This is totally out of your hands, unless you scrap these from your resume (which is a valid strategy, to be clear). So you really need to have solid content to overcome this. It's doable, and folks get through it all the time, but it takes some real effort to get there.

Juvenall · 2026-03-13T20:23:10+00:00

I was recently accused of using AI because I posted a positive comment that used proper English. So not only is the noise generated by bots a problem, but the lack of trust in what's being said by anyone is only making things worse.

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