Insights
 

Employers read job hopping differently than they used to. What's changed, when a move helps your career, and when short stints start to cost you.

One-click applying makes it easy to apply to everything. Why applying to roles you know you can't do slows hiring for everyone, and what to do instead.

You spent years learning not to talk about your work. Then you sit down to write a resume, and the whole point is to talk about your work. For cleared engineers and IT professionals, the goal is a resume that shows what you can do and gives away nothing it shouldn't. Put the clearance where it will be seen Your clearance is one of the first things a hiring manager on a defense program looks for, so put it near the top, in one line. Include: Level: Secret, Top Secret, or TS/SC

For most technical roles, the hardest part of hiring is finding the right person. For cleared defense roles, the wait often starts after you've found them. A strong candidate can interview well, accept your offer and still not be able to start, because the clearance the job needs hasn't been granted yet. If that wait isn't in the plan, the program schedule absorbs it. How long does a new clearance take? The government publishes quarterly figures on clearance processing. In th

In our last post, we looked at how AI can make almost anyone sound like a senior engineer on paper. This one is for the engineers who actually are. Recruiters are reading resumes more skeptically than they used to. That's good news if your experience is real, because real experience leaves details that a tool can't make up. Here's what we look for, and how to make sure your resume shows it. 1. Specific work, not a list of tools A long list of software, standards and platforms

AI has made it easy to apply for a job. It has also made it easy to fake one. Gartner predicts that by 2028, one in four candidate profiles worldwide could be fake. The problem is already here: the Staffing Industry Analysts (SIA) research firm reports that four in 10 staffing buyers are dealing with candidate fraud. AI tools now produce polished resumes tailored to each job description, and remote interviews make it easier for someone to pretend to be someone else. Most hiri

Resumes used to give recruiters a reasonably reliable first look at a candidate. That's changing. Today, anyone can paste a job description into an AI tool, add a few lines about their background, and get back a resume that reads like the career history of a senior engineer or technology executive. Using AI isn't the problem. Fixing grammar, tightening formatting, and clarifying real accomplishments is perfectly reasonable. The problem starts when the prompt becomes "make me