I’ve sat on an interview panel and, afterwards, struggled to say why a strong candidate would be right for the job. The candidate had a lot of experience. But they walked us back and forth through the resume, role by role, and when the hiring team compared notes afterwards, the connection between that experience and what the role actually needed wasn’t there.

Could we have asked better follow-up questions? Absolutely. And still: you don’t want to leave the connection between your experience and the role entirely in the hands of the interview panel.

I spent over ten years in HR before I moved to this side, and there’s another pattern I saw just as often. Someone applies for a role without really understanding what that role is being hired to solve.

Every open role exists because something needs to happen and isn’t happening.

If you don’t know what that something is, you end up describing your experience as a list of things you were responsible for, rather than as evidence that you can solve this particular problem for this particular team.

So here’s how I’d close that gap. It starts long before the interview, and it starts with your skills.

The order most people run

Here’s the sequence I see:

Start looking → find a posting → apply → hope my background matches what they want

Everything in it happens after somebody else has already defined what matters. You’re reacting, and hoping their definition happens to match what you’ve built.

More applications don’t fix that. They repeat it faster.

The sequence I’d rather you run:

→ Decide the role you want

→ Find out what it's actually assessed on

→ Audit honestly which of those you have

→ Build the ones you're missing

→ Create evidence for all of them

→ Position them in the language that role uses

→ Then apply

It might be slower at the start, but that’s exactly what turns a job search into a strategic job search.

When you leave a job interview, the people in the room compare impressions. If you haven’t given them a clear reason why you’re the right fit for the role, they’ll have to piece that story together themselves.

Don’t make the hiring team connect the dots. Make the connection clear for them.

Your job is to prepare well enough to share where you stand. You want the hiring team to leave understanding not only what you’ve done, but how your experience matches what this role needs, on this team, at this company.

And that match has to hold across every conversation, not just one. Keep in mind that interviews are increasingly recorded, transcribed and summarized with AI tools, which means hiring teams now have a far more detailed record of what was said at each stage than they used to.

Your examples will naturally change depending on the interviewer and the questions you’re asked. Your core message remains consistent. What you’re good at, what you’ve accomplished and why your experience fits this role should sound the same in the first conversation and the fourth.

You’re not trying to memorize a script. You’re making sure that whoever speaks with you comes away with the same understanding of who you are and the value you bring.

Your work doesn’t always speak for itself. Your resume doesn’t always make it obvious how you can help a company succeed. How you position your experience does.

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Ask yourself

1. If the person deciding on your next role had nothing to go on except the words you’ve written about yourself, what would they think you’re capable of? Your resume, your LinkedIn, your answers in the last interview. That’s the entire picture they’re working from.

2. Which of your skills has nobody ever asked you to explain, because the people around you already knew you had them? Those are often the skills that become invisible the moment you change teams, companies, or countries.

What being intentional actually does

I recorded an episode of The Driven Career Podcast with Lucas Estevão, and he said this:

“Be intentional about what you want. Be intentional about your goals. Be intentional about where you’re putting your time on, because time is limited.”

He was talking about life. In a job search, I think it does two specific jobs, and most people only hear about the first one.

Forward: it shapes what you build. When you know the role you’re going for, your limited hours go somewhere specific. You stop taking whichever course appeared in your feed and start closing the distance between where you are and what that role requires.

Backward: it lets you explain a trajectory. This is the one that wins final rounds. When you’ve been intentional, your history has a direction and you can walk someone through it. Every role becomes a step rather than a detour, and the job you’re interviewing for becomes the obvious next one. Without that direction, your experience is a set of things that happened to you, and you’d be amazed how quickly that reads across a table.

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What the market is asking for right now

There’s a version of career development that’s really just accumulation: another course, another certification, another tool added to the list. It feels productive because it takes effort, and effort can easily feel like progress.

But when you know where you want to go next, you can be much more intentional about what you build. Instead of asking, What else should I learn? ask, What does the role I want actually require, and where are the gaps between that and what I can demonstrate today?

When you talk with successful professionals, you notice one thing: how intentional they are about what is needed in the market and where they put on their time and effort. They don’t take a new course just for the sake of it, just because the company is paying for it, they spend their time on what they know that will take them to what’s next for them. They work out what the target actually requires, then go and get precisely that.

This is even more important in today’s job market where employers want more than a list of credentials. It’s not enough to say you have a skill; you need to be able to show where you’ve used it, what you did with it, and what changed because of it.

So before you spend another hour learning something new, the question isn’t simply, What would be good to learn?

It’s: What will I actually be assessed on for the role I want, and which of those capabilities can I already demonstrate?

The Skills Translation Map

The exercise I run with the professionals I work with is something I call the Skills Translation Map.

The idea behind it is simple. You start with the role you want, work out what that role is actually being assessed on, and then go looking through your own experience for the evidence that proves you can do it. What comes out the other side is a short list of things you can say about yourself that a hiring team is able to verify.

Most people never reach that list, because they get stuck at the very first part. Before you can position your skills, you have to be able to see them. And most people read their own experience as a list of activities.

Your title can change. Your skills mostly won’t

Job titles have multiplied. AI is reshaping what sits inside a role, companies restructure and rename things constantly, and the same job goes by four different names at four different employers. A title tells a hiring manager less than it used to, and it tells you less about whether you’re qualified for one.

The work underneath moves more slowly. The World Economic Forum expects 39% of workers’ core skills to change by 2030. That’s a lot. It’s also down from 44% in 2023 and 57% in 2020, so the pace of disruption has been slowing. Read the number the other way and roughly six in ten of the skills you have will still be the ones that matter.

That makes a skill a more durable thing to build a career on than a title.

So look at what you’ve actually done and name the skill sitting inside it.

For example:

• You covered for your manager while she was on leave. That’s delegation, decision ownership and interim leadership.

• You trained the two new hires. That’s onboarding, coaching and knowledge transfer.

• You were the one who caught the error before it went out. That’s risk identification and quality control.

• You kept the client everyone else had given up on. That’s conflict resolution, negotiation and client retention.

• You built the spreadsheet the whole team still uses. That’s process design.

• You talked your manager out of the original plan. That’s influence without authority, and that exact phrase shows up in a lot of senior postings.

• You worked out why two systems were reporting different numbers. That’s data analysis and problem diagnosis.

Those are transferable skills. They came with you from your last job and they’ll go with you to the next one, whatever the title on the door happens to be. Job seekers who understand this stop being limited by which titles they’ve held, because they can show the capability underneath.

One caution. “Leadership” on its own is too broad to help you. Everyone claims it and nobody can assess it. If you led a team, say what that involved: running performance conversations for six people, hiring three of them, deciding who worked on what. Specific enough to be checked is specific enough to be believed.

If you’re building a career across borders

Same principle, harder version. Skills outlast titles, and they also outlast borders.

“You don’t have local experience.” “Your degree isn’t from here.” “We’re not familiar with that company.”

Those sentences are all about proxies. A country of education, a company name, a job title, a rigid years-of-industry rule. Indeed describes skills-first hiring as removing exactly those proxies from the process, and that’s the door that opens for you.

Your credentials may not transfer perfectly across a border. Your job title probably means something different here. Your company may be unknown to the person reading your resume.

Your skills travel with you.

Project management doesn’t stop working when you land in a new country. Neither does stakeholder management, financial analysis or leading a team through change. What changes is whether you can put them in the language and the evidence this market recognizes.

That’s a positioning problem, and positioning problems are solvable. The mistake I see is treating it as a starting-over problem and going back to school for a credential nobody asked for.

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Here is one of the strategies you can use to position yourself for your next role:

1. Pick the role you want. Not the industry, not the vague direction. The role.

2. Find five real postings for it and write down every skill that shows up in at least three of them. That’s what you’re actually being assessed on.

3. Then take the piece of work you’re proudest of and write one sentence about what it changed for the company. Not what you did. What changed. If that sentence is hard to write, you’ve found the reason your experience isn’t speaking for you in interviews.

Lucas is right that time is limited. What I’d add is that the role you want has a specific set of requirements, you can find out what they are, and knowing them changes both what you build and how you talk about it.

If the job search is the part that feels stuck, The Driven Job Search Playbook is free on my website. I created it to help you take a more intentional approach to your search and think more strategically about your next move.

Rachel

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^Sources

• ^{World Economic Forum, Future of Jobs Report 2025, Skills Outlook}

• ^{Indeed, What Is Skills-First Hiring}

Here’s what happens on the hiring side. Every time a role opens, two piles form: hundreds of online applications in one, a handful of referred names in the other. The referred pile gets the call almost every time.

Applying to more jobs won’t fix this. Referrals are a tiny share of applications and a huge share of hires. One warm introduction beats fifty cold applications.

This week, pick five companies you’d love to work for. Find one person at each, someone in your field, a shared employer, or the same school. Send a short message asking about their experience there. No resume attached. You’re not asking for a job, you’re starting a conversation.

When that role opens, you’ll be a name they recognize instead of application number 347.

Have you ever landed a job through someone you knew? Tell me in the comments.

I don’t recommend Easy Apply. I know skipping it means more work per application. Each one needs intention and strategy, and that’s exactly why it works.

Let me walk you through what happens on the other side, because I’ve been the person receiving those applications.

Easy Apply postings pile up hundreds of applications within hours because applying takes under a minute. Low effort means everyone applies, qualified or not. And the results show it. Loopcv, a job search platform that tracks this, puts Easy Apply callback rates at 1 to 2%, compared to 3 to 5% for direct applications. Same person, same experience, double the odds just by choosing a different door.

And here’s what the recruiter actually sees when they open it. Not your resume. LinkedIn shows them a condensed candidate card first: your headline, your recent job titles, and whichever of your listed skills match the posting. Your resume sits behind a small link most recruiters only open as a backup. Before any human even looks, they can filter the whole applicant list by skills and years of experience. If your Skills section is thin or outdated, no one ever reaches your resume at all.

Your LinkedIn profile is a decision page. It gets seconds, and in those seconds it has to answer one question: why you for this role?

If your profile isn’t fully updated and aligned with the roles you’ve been clicking on, you’re missing opportunities you were qualified for. That part stings, and it’s also fixable.

Here’s what applying with intention looks like in practice.

Choose the role you’re actually targeting. One title, maybe two if they’re close cousins.

Pull up five postings for that role and write down the requirements that keep repeating. Those repeated lines tell you what the market wants to see.

Rewrite your headline, your About section, and your Skills section so those requirements show up in your story, backed by real results you can speak to in an interview. The Skills section matters more than most people realize. It’s a filter field, treat it like one.

Apply through the full application whenever you can, with a resume adjusted for that specific role.

Then follow up. Find the recruiter or hiring manager and send one short, specific message about why you fit. When I worked in HR, a message like that made me stop and look twice at applications I might have scrolled past. That one message does more for you than the next ten applications would.

A tool that helps here: paste your resume and a few old performance reviews into ChatGPT and ask it to spot patterns in your career wins. It’s a fast way to find the through line in your experience and sharpen your message.

One warning before you touch anything. Stay honest about what goes on your resume and your profile. Lies get caught, in interviews and in reference checks. Recruiters bring this up constantly, and it comes up often in my conversations with them on The Driven Career podcast.

Now the part you want to think about your positioning. Your behavior on LinkedIn before you apply changes how you rank after you apply. LinkedIn shows recruiters signals on each applicant, called spotlights, including whether you’ve engaged with that company’s content and whether you’re likely to respond. So following your target companies and commenting on their posts in the weeks before you apply changes the card the recruiter sees next to your name. Your application starts being scored before you ever click apply.

There’s a bigger shift behind all of this. LinkedIn now sees around 11,000 applications a minute, up 45% in a year, much of it from AI tools that auto-apply on people’s behalf. Recruiters are drowning in inbound, so they’re going back to searching for candidates directly. The same profile work I just described is what makes you findable in those searches. Do it once, properly, and you’re working both doors at the same time.

The result the professionals I support get when they make this switch: fewer applications, more responses. Ten intentional applications will outperform a hundred Easy Apply clicks, and they’ll cost you less energy than watching a hundred applications disappear into silence.

If you want a structured way to run this, my free Driven Job Search Playbook walks you through it step by step. You’ll find it on my website, thedrivencareer.com, right on the home page.

And if your job search has felt draining lately, hit reply and tell me which part feels hardest right now. I read every reply.

Talk soon, Rachel

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