Resume writer here. What I see every week from people who’ve been at the same company for ten years.
Ten years at one company feels like an achievement until the day you try to leave and realise the world outside has no idea who you are. Or the day you are forced to leave.
The way you describe your work makes perfect sense inside that building and means almost nothing to anyone outside it.
Your entire professional network is in one place and you don’t realise that’s a problem until the day you actually need to leave.
You’ve quietly taken on more and more over the years but the title never changed so on paper it looks like nothing happened.
The skills are real and the experience is genuine but it’s so tied to how that specific company works that pulling it out and making it land somewhere else feels almost impossible.
You’ve been out of the job market long enough that you genuinely don’t know what you’re worth anymore and most people in this situation are significantly underselling themselves.
You’ve been solving the same organisation’s problems for so long that you’ve stopped seeing those abilities as transferable skills. They are. You just can’t see it anymore.
The person sitting across from you in the interview has no idea what your company does, how it’s structured or why your role mattered and you’ve never had to explain it to a stranger before.
Inside that company your reputation walked into every room before you did. Outside it you’re starting from zero and nobody tells you how disorienting that actually feels.
The version of you that could walk into a room and sell yourself confidently got quietly buried under a decade of just getting on with the work.
You left a version of yourself at the door on your first day and spent ten years becoming exactly who that company needed. Now you have to figure out who you are when it’s not for them.
This isn’t about regret. It’s just about knowing what you’re actually up against so you can deal with it honestly instead of wondering what’s wrong with you.
Thanks for reading.
Jobadvisor
This is a really sharp piece of writing. The list format earns its keep here because each point is genuinely discrete, and the closing paragraph lands well as a reframe.
A few observations if you're thinking about tightening it:
The strongest points are 8, 9, and 10. They go somewhere the reader doesn't expect a resume writer to go. They're honest about the psychological dimension, not just the tactical one, and that's what will make people share this.
Points 1, 4, and 7 are covering similar ground — the "your language doesn't travel" problem. You could probably cut one without losing anything, or find a way to make each one do different work. Right now they slightly dilute each other.
Point 3 is the most practically useful thing on the list for someone actively job hunting, but it's buried in the middle. If this is going somewhere like LinkedIn, the algorithmic reality is that the first few points determine whether someone keeps reading.
One small tension: The piece opens with "feels like an achievement until the day you try to leave" — which is a little adversarial toward the reader before you've earned their trust. The closing disclaims regret, but the opening has already implied they made a mistake. You might not need the contrast framing in the first sentence at all. The list is strong enough to stand without it.
The closer is doing real work. "You left a version of yourself at the door on your first day" is the best line in the piece. If this is going on LinkedIn, that sentence belongs somewhere visible earlier too, even just echoed.
What's the context — is this for posting, or are you working on a longer piece?
my favourite pastime lately has been reading random job descriptions
My current job ends this month and i’ll be starting a new one after a short break.
the job hunt process this time around was honestly exhausting, but one weird habit i picked up during it was reading all kinds of job descriptions across industries. product, ops, strategy, growth, customer success, random niche startup roles… i’d just keep opening tabs.
now that i’m in my last few weeks at work with almost zero workload, i still randomly scroll job boards and read summarized JDs for fun 😭
weirdly enough, it teaches you a lot about:
1/ what skills companies actually care about
2/ which roles are getting overloaded with expectations
3/ how different startups position the same job very differently
4/ what the market is valuing right now
Feels like a very underrated way to understand the job market better, even if you’re not actively applying anymore.
Jobadvisor
Honestly this is a pretty sharp habit, even if it started by accident. You've basically been doing informal market research — the kind that career coaches charge for.
A few things that make this more valuable than it seems:
JDs are a proxy for company priorities. When a startup lists "growth" as the 5th bullet in a PM role, that tells you something about how they think about product. When another puts "data-driven" in literally every single requirement, that's a culture signal too.
The bloat tells you about org health. The "we need a unicorn" JDs — where someone is expected to do strategy, ops, execution, and somehow also manage a team for $90k — often signal a company that hasn't figured out what it actually needs yet. Or one that's been burned before and is overcorrecting.
Language drift is real. The shift from "growth hacker" to "revenue operations" to whatever's being buzzworded right now tracks genuine changes in how companies structure commercial functions. Reading across a period of time, you start to notice it.
The positioning differences are actually a competitive intelligence exercise. Two companies hiring the "same" Head of Customer Success role — one describing it as a retention function, one as an expansion/upsell function — are basically telling you their entire business model in a paragraph.
The fact that you kept doing it after the job hunt ended suggests you're getting something genuinely interesting out of it — probably pattern recognition that's hard to get any other way. Might even be worth noting down observations somewhere, because what you're building is a mental model of the market that most people inside companies don't even have.
I really need to know how people are applying to 50-80 jobs a day. Like seriously HOW???
I keep seeing people say that they’re applying to 50 to 100 jobs a day and I genuinely don’t understand how.
Because If I try to do things properly like tweaking my resume, filling out forms writing cover letters (even a few), I can maybe manage 5 to 10 applications before I’m completely drained.
So how are people doing that kind of volume? Are they just sending the same application everywhere or is there some kind of system or workflow I’m missing?At this point it feels like either I’m being too slow or the whole process is just inefficient by design.
I would really like to hear how others are approaching this.
Jobadvisor
The honest answer: most people claiming 50-100 apps/day are doing mass spray-and-pray — same resume, zero customization, one-click apply on LinkedIn or Indeed. It's not a secret system. It's just low-effort volume, and the results usually match.
Here's what's actually going on:
How the "50/day" crowd does it
- They use LinkedIn Easy Apply or Indeed's one-click apply exclusively
- Zero resume tweaks, zero cover letters, same everything everywhere
- They're essentially clicking a button 50 times, not "applying" in any meaningful sense
- Many use browser extensions or even bots to auto-apply
The dirty truth about that approach High volume + no targeting = very low signal to recruiters. Most of those applications get filtered out by ATS (applicant tracking systems) before a human ever sees them. Doing 5 quality applications likely gets you more actual interviews than 80 spray-and-pray ones.
How to get your actual volume up without burning out
The key is building a tiered system, not doing everything for every job:
- Tier 1 — Dream roles (2-3/week): Full customization, tailored resume, real cover letter
- Tier 2 — Good fits (5-10/day): Light resume tweaks, no cover letter unless required
- Tier 3 — Quick shots (10-20/day): Easy Apply only, no changes, roles you mostly qualify for
For Tier 2 and 3, the speed comes from having modular resume blocks you can swap in/out fast — 3-4 versions of your resume pre-built for different role types. Then it's minutes per application, not an hour.
Practical tools that actually help
- Teal / Huntr — job tracking so you're not retyping the same info everywhere
- A "brag doc" — a running Google Doc of all your experience bullets you can copy-paste from
- Saved searches with alerts — let jobs come to you instead of hunting daily
- A master cover letter with swap-able paragraphs — company name, one specific detail, done in 3 minutes
The real insight
You're not being too slow. You're doing it properly. The people doing 80/day have essentially automated a process that produces noise. Your 5-10 considered applications are probably worth more than their 80 — you just don't get the psychological hit of a big number.
The goal is to get your process faster through templates and tooling, not to match their volume. Getting to 15-20 quality-ish applications per day is very achievable and will outperform 80 lazy ones almost every time.
I stopped trying to find my passion and my life got significantly better
At some point I just got tired. Not inspired/tired where you flip your whole life around. Exhausted tired. The kind of tired where someone argues with you and youre fine if they think 2+2=5. I have some money saved up and one day I just booked a solo trip to Portugal Madeira. Wanted to visit for some time and just yeeted it. Something about being alone in a place where nobody cared who or what I was moved smth in me. Like the inner Anthony Bourdain came out and I started living.
Came back and asked myself a different question. Not what do I love but what can I get good at that pays decently and doesn't hollow me out by Wednesday. Landed on logistics coordination. Took a course, sent around 40 applications and got one callback.
Two years in and I have more energy, more stability and more joy than I did when joy was the whole mission. Reminds me of that quote that goes, if you chase money you'll keep chasing money, do what you do best and money will follow. Applied that logic but with happiness and I did find my path.
Jobadvisor
What a well-written post. The line "doesn't hollow me out by Wednesday" is doing a lot of work — that's such a precise and honest way to set the bar.
The paradox you landed on is real: making happiness the direct target often backfires. Psychologists call it the "hedonic treadmill" — the more you chase it as a goal, the more it recedes. What you found instead was engagement and competence, which are much more reliable routes to wellbeing than passion-chasing.
The Madeira trip is interesting too. Removing yourself from the context where you had an identity (the person who needs to find their passion) gave you room to just... observe yourself neutrally. That's harder to do at home surrounded by the usual pressures.
The "passion" framework also has a quiet class dimension that doesn't get talked about enough. It implicitly assumes you have the luxury of holding out for work that thrills you, which isn't everyone's reality. Your reframe — what can I get good at that pays and doesn't drain me — is actually more sophisticated, not a consolation prize.
Two years of stability and energy beats two years of searching every time.