Guides to getting hired

An applicant tracking system is the software an employer uses to receive and manage applications. When you apply for a job online, you are almost always filling in an ATS rather than emailing a company.

Matching a job description's vocabulary is real advice. Padding your résumé with every term in it is not — and the two get confused constantly.

The single highest-leverage thing you can do after applying is reach the person who owns the role. Most people skip it because identifying that person is genuinely hard.

Plenty of strong applications fail for reasons that have nothing to do with the candidate. Most are mechanical, and all of them are avoidable.

A good note is short, specific and easy to act on. Most bad ones are long, general, and ask the reader to do the work of figuring out why you are relevant.

Your browser's built-in autofill was designed for checkout pages. Application forms break it in four specific ways, and knowing which ones explains why the same forty fields keep taking ten minutes each.

They are not interchangeable, and approaching the wrong one wastes the approach. The difference is simple: one owns the role, the other owns the process.

Almost every company uses one predictable format. Find one confirmed address and you have the pattern for everybody — the work is in confirming it rather than guessing it.

Yes — and it is one of the few things that reliably moves an application. The reason people hesitate is that doing it badly is genuinely worse than not doing it.