The Break Through: You Are Not Getting Ghosted Because You Are Unqualified

Full Bloom Season continues with Episode 2: Break Through. We are done planning. We are done auditing. This is the episode where we actually do the thing. Lauren breaks down the online application process and why your perfectly good resume is getting filtered out before a human ever sees it (spoiler: it is not you, it is your formatting). Five specific fixes that take 30 minutes and will change everything. Plus, Horror Story of the Week features K, who panicked in a panel interview and accidentally told four strangers she once roasted her CEO in a reply-all. The Listener Mailbag tackles the question everyone is too scared to ask: at what point should I start worrying that something is wrong with me? And the answer might surprise you. Segment 4 is a full deep dive on interview prep that actually works, including the STAR framework the way Lauren teaches it to her coaching clients, not the watered-down version you Googled at midnight. Tip of the Week: send one networking message this week. Just one. Lauren gives you the exact script. There is homework. You will do it.

Topics covered: ATS optimization, resume formatting, applicant tracking systems, interview prep, STAR method, networking scripts, job search strategy, panel interviews, follow-up emails, job market trends

New episodes drop every Tuesday. Submit your career questions and horror stories at careerbloomsolutions.com.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey y'all, and welcome back to the Career Bloom podcast. I'm Lauren Dietz, HR professional, career coach, founder of Career Bloom Solutions, and the person in your HR department does not want you listening to, but here we are, and I appreciate you. This is season four, episode two, and we are in the thick of full bloom season. And if you've been following along this month, first of all, thank you, and I see you and appreciate you. Second of all, you already know the deal. Four weeks, four themes, one goal. We're gonna get your career, your business to a place where you actually feel good about it. Not just surviving it, feeling good. And here's a quick recap for anybody joining us for the first time. Hi, and welcome. You actually picked a great week to show up. Episode one was plant your seeds. We talked about the career audit, taking on a stock of where you are, and why most people avoid doing that until they're already in crisis mode. And if you haven't listened to that one yet, go back. It's a good one. I'll wait. I mean, I won't actually wait because this is a recording, but spiritually I'm waiting on you. And this week's theme is breakthrough. And I want to be really clear about what I mean by that, because breakthrough can sound like one of those corporate retreat buzzwords that gets printed on a banner, you know, above the continental breakfast on the retreat. That's not what I mean. What I mean is we're done planning, we're done auditing, and we're done talking about doing the thing. This is the week we actually do the thing, whether that means submitting applications, prepping for an interview, sending a networking message, or if you're on the business side, taking an honest look at your company culture and making the decisions you've been avoiding. Breakthrough means action. Messy, imperfect, slightly terrifying action. And I'm gonna walk you through exactly how to do it without losing your mind in the process. So grab your coffee, your Alani, your water, your emotional support iced tea, where whatever gets you through the day. Let's get started. And we're gonna start with the thing that is making most people lose their minds right now. And that thing is the online application process, or as I like to call it, screaming into the void and hoping someone screams back. If you've been applying for jobs and hearing nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, no rejection, no confirmation, no hey, we got your stuff, just silence. I need you to know something, and I need you to really hear me when I say this. It's not you, it's almost certainly your strategy. Because here's what's happening behind the scenes that nobody tells you. Most mid to large companies use something called an applicant tracking system. You'll hear a lot of our like us career coaches call it an ATS system. It's basically just a software. It scans your resume before a human ever lays eyes on it. It's looking for keywords, formatting it, can actually read, and whether your experience lines up with the job posting, like the things that we asked for. And if your resume doesn't check the right boxes, it gets filtered right out. Not rejected by a person. It's filtered by the machine. So the recruiter never actually sees your name. They never see your experience, they never see the cover letter that you spent two hours writing. The machine said no and moved on. Y'all, 90% of these Fortune 500 companies use an ATS system of some kind. And it's not just the big companies anymore either. It is everywhere. In fact, about 40% of companies are you now using some kind of AI artificial intelligence specifically just for screening resumes and writing the job postings themselves. So you're not just competing with other applicants anymore, right? You're competing with a robot gatekeeper that has no feelings whatsoever and no context and no idea that you would be amazing at that job. So I'm gonna walk you through this stuff that is getting your resume tossed before anyone actually sees it, because it seems to be an issue. And please, if you're driving right now, just remember uh you can fix these when you get home. Let's let's not do anything crazy. You can also pull over. Um, but also I'm not your mother. So do what you want. Moving on. Number one, that gorgeous two-column resume layout you got off Pinterest or Canva or wherever y'all are finding those, the ATS cannot read it. It literally can't see it. It's looking for single column, top to bottom, left to right. When you give it two columns, it tries to read across both all at once. And your work experience comes out looking like some sort of like weird ransom note. It has no idea what's happening. So single column always. And here's number two: your section headers need to be ball ring. And I know I'm an excitable person, all right? And I love to make fun words for things, but I'm sorry. The ATS system is looking for the words experience, education, skills, not my journey, not where I've been, not the good stuff. I need you to save that creativity for the interview because your resume headers need to be the career equivalent of plain white rice. Functional, predictable, easy to digest. And number three, I need you to submit it as a doc file. Or if they specifically ask for something. So if it says PDF, you give them a PDF. Obviously, follow the rules. And I know PDF feels a little bit more professional, but a lot of ATS platforms really actually have a hard time parsing through or like reading through the PD, like the PDFs, because it's more like a picture, especially the one exported from like Canva and stuff like that. So when in doubt, do a.docx file or a doc file. Your design instincts will recover. Like you'll be fine. Just give us it in the format that the computer can read it and then we can read it. And then number four, keywords. And I don't know why I put this one in number four because it's probably the most important, but here we are. That this is the biggest one. If the job posting says project management, your resume needs to say project management, not managed projects, not oversaw deliverables, not some fancy synonym you found on thesaurus.com. You need to mirror the exact language from the posting. I'm gonna say that one more time just in case. You need to match the exact language from the posting. The ATS is matching words, not vibes. And number five, take out all of those graphic elements. No icons, no skill bars, no little circles that are supposed to represent how good you are on Excel in a scale of one to five or other things. And for the love, if you are in the United States, no headshots. I don't need them. No logos. The ATS system reads texts, it reads words. Everything else is invisible, so it can't see it, and then it gets confused if you leave it. Your resume might not look beautiful to a human, but let's keep in mind that the human's not gonna see it unless the machine can read it. So it's kind of a multi-step thing. Now, here's the last thing I really want you to hear. Fixing this stuff takes like 30 minutes. That's it, or it should. Run your resume through an ATS checker. They have tons of them. Job scan has one, resume worded has one, and it takes five minutes to scan it. And then you spend those 25 extra minutes fixing what it flags, half an hour, and all of a sudden now all the machines can see you, and it's wonderful. And actually, I wrote a whole blog post about it just so y'all can like, if you don't just want to hear me talk about it, you can go read it and then save it. And it's called How to Get Noticed When Applying Into the Void. And it goes more in depth, and that way you can save it and read it when you're safely at home or pull over. Remember not to do any crazy things while we're driving. But I do have to tell you something else first. I have to tell you about something that happened to one of our listeners that I cannot stop thinking about. And that's right, it's time for everyone's new favorite segment. I have been told, the horror story of the week. So let me break it down what happened. I got a message from a listener. We're gonna call her Kay for today. Little men in black reference there. And Kay told me about an interview she had last year that is still haunting her. Like she said, she thinks about it at least once a week, and we all know that feeling where you do something and then you just keep thinking about it. Which honestly, I do that all the time. Anyway, the brain loves replaying those moments at like 2 a.m. when you're trying to sleep, too. It's a whole thing. So anyway, Kay applied for a role she was really excited about. Marketing director, right? Great company. She made it through the phone screen, the first interview, the second interview, she was feeling great. She was feeling confident. She had done her research, she had her stories ready. Then she got to the final round. Panel interview. Four people in the room, and one of the panelists asked her, Tell me about a time that you failed. And y'all panicked. She had prepped for strength. She had prepped for the tell me about yourself question that nobody likes. She had prepped for the where do you see yourself in five years? But she had not prepped a failure story. So she did what any panicking human does. She improvised. And the story she told in a moment of absolute chaos, it sounds like, was about the time she accidentally sent a company-wide email that was supposed to go to one person. And the email, and I quote, contained some opinions about the CEO's new open open office layout that were not suitable for a professional setting. End quote. She essentially told a panel of four strangers that she once roasted her CEO in a reply, all lot happening with that, that we don't love in a job interview for a director level position. Now look, Kay is a little bit of a legend for doing that. I want that on the record, but she did not get that job. And the lesson here is kind of twofold. One, always prep a failure story before an interview. Always. And you have to make it real, make it professional, and make sure the ending shows that you learned something. And two, check your uh recipients before you hit sand, always, forever until the end of time. And K, if you're listening, you're an icon. And I hope you found your dream job by now. And if you haven't, call me. We'll get you there. If y'all have your own horror story that you want me to feature, you can always send it to me. You can DM me on Instagram, TikTok at Lone Starflower, or through my website at careerbloomsolutions.com, and I read every single one of them. Sometimes there's a lot, and I'm up till 2 a.m. looking at them myself, but y'all keep them coming. And actually, now that I'm thinking about it, her story brings up something really important. And it's the thing I want to spend the next chunk of this episode talking about. Because what happened to Kay wasn't a personality flaw. It wasn't a lack of intelligence and it wasn't a lack of prep, specifically the kind of prep that nobody teaches you. What most people do when they're getting ready for an interview is Google, you know, top 20 interview questions and then memorize answers, which on its like very surface level sounds productive. It feels productive because you're like actively doing things. You're sitting at your kitchen table with your laptop and a highlighter, and you feel like you're really doing the work. But here's the problem: interviews are not scripted, they're conversations, or they should be. And the second someone asks you something you didn't rehearse, your brain's gonna go blank and you're gonna start telling a story about reply all emails. Sorry, Kay. I I love you, I promise. The real goal of interview prep is not to predict every question, it's to know your own story so well that you can pivot and adapt no matter what gets thrown at you. And the framework I teach every single one of my coaching clients is the SAR method. You've probably heard of it: situation, task, action, result. But hearing about it and actually doing it are two very different things. So I'm gonna walk you through it the way I walk my clients through it because this is where it actually clicks. Situation. I need you to set the scene. I need you to tell me in two sentences what was happening. That's it. I don't need the whole backstory, I don't need your villain origin story. I need where were you and what was happening? That's all. It sounds something like I was six months into my role as a project lead when our biggest client threatened to pull their contract. Done. Moving on. Then your task, okay? What was your job in the situation? Not the team's job, not the manager's job. What were you specifically responsible for? So it sounds something like my job was to figure out what went wrong and present a corrective action plan within two weeks. Clear, specific, ownership, and then there's action. And this is where most people actually fall apart. A lot of people are actually really good at the first part. They're like what company they were at, what they were doing, that kind of stuff. When they get to the action, a lot of things just start happening, and I never know why. Because they either go super vague, like, I worked really hard to fix it. Okay, but like how? What did you actually do? Or they give credit to the team without explaining their own contribution. The interviewer wants to know what you did. I want to know what you did, not what your team did. I'm not trying to hire the whole team. I want a step by step. I pulled six months of deliverables, identified three recurring quality issues, built a new QA checklist, personally presented the plan to the client. What did you do? Because that's the real answer. That's an answer that makes someone want to hire you. So now that you've gone over your action, this is the next step that you're not going to skip because everyone does. It's the result. This is where you bring it home, everybody. You quantify it if you possibly can. So it would sound something like the client renewed for two more years, and the QA process I built reduced errors by 40%. Numbers, outcomes, impact. If you can't quantify it, describe the outcome in concrete terms, though. Like the client stayed, the manager cited it was a reason for my promotion six months later. I understand, like, not all positions have the ability to set those numbers because you may not have been told them. But give me a concrete result. Like what happened? Did the building set on fire? Did the client like what are we doing? Because a lot of people skip that part, and we don't know that what you actually did did any good, if that makes sense. And you need at least three of these stories prepared before you walk into any interview. Three different stories that show like different strengths, leadership, problem solving, conflict resolution, adaptability, whatever, and I need y'all to hear me on this part, whatever is the most relevant to the role. I need you to write them out, and then this is the part that really matters that a lot of people skip. I need you to practice them out loud. Out loud, not in your head, not typed out out loud. And you can do that to a friend, to your partner, to your dog, to the bathroom mirror. I don't really care who's listening. Your mouth needs to practice forming words before you sit down from a hiring manager with like sweaty palms and a dry throat. The first time you say your star story out loud should not be in the interview. It should be in your living room the night before, probably while you're slightly annoyed that you're having to do it. That's how you know it's working. And one more thing before we move on: research. Everybody says research the company, but nobody tells you what that actually means. It does not, though, mean reading the about page and that's it. Here's what real research looks like. Read the job posting line by line, like it's a legal document, like you're about to commit yourself to something because that's what we're doing. And because every requirement they listed is probably close to a question they're gonna ask you. Look up who's interviewing you also on LinkedIn if you can. You should have their name like a little bit prior to the interview and check their glass door for interview reviews because some people literally will post the questions that they're gonna ask you. I've seen it so many times, and it's free. And it's like right there in the open on the internet. And a lot of candidates don't look at that and it drives me nuts. I'll look up the company after them, and the interview prep was right there in their face. If you do those three things, you will walk in that room more prepared than 90% of the other candidates. And that is not an exaggeration. That's just what I've seen after nearly 12 years of being on the other side of that table. And actually, my blog on Friday goes in deep about all this. It's called the interview prep nobody told you about. It's actually got a full checklist, the star breakdown, the research strategy, the night before routine, everything. So if you're in interview mode right now, Friday's blog is probably the best for you. And all right, now I got a question from one of y'all, and I think a lot of people are gonna relate to it, so I wanted to share it today. This is the part of the show where we go into the listener mailbag because y'all sent in a lot of questions over the last couple weeks, and it's really hard for me to pick one, but we're just gonna work through the one that I picked today. This one actually came in through my DMs, and I as I was going over everything, I thought, yeah, this is the one. And the question is, Lauren, I've been applying for jobs for three months and I've had two interviews and no offers. At what point do I start worrying that something is wrong with me? Okay, first of all, nothing is wrong with you. And I just want to start there because I know that's what your brain is telling you, and your brain is like being dramatic. Three months of job searching with two interviews is not actually unusual, like unusual in this market. The average hiring process is taking about 42 days right now, and that's per role. So if you're applying to multiple roles, the timelines overlap, the ghosting is rampant, and sometimes it can feel a lot worse than it actually is. That said, if you're good at getting like no interviews at all, the problem is almost certainly your resume or your application strategy. I want you to go back and listening to the beginning of this episode, run the ATS check, fix the formatting, and tailor your application. And here's the thing about tailoring your application and your resume is a lot of people get really, really cranky when I say that because I do want you to tailor every resume and application to the job, but that's because I want you to get the job. You can keep sending in your generic resume if you want to. Um, but it is a huge problem I'm seeing right now. And then as soon as I get people to start tailoring it correctly, magic happens. And if you're getting interviews but no offers, the problem is usually one of like three things. One, your answers are super vague. Like the answers you give in the interviews, they just you're not memorable. So you need to go practice your star stories. Two, you're not asking questions at the end or during, which makes you look disengaged, even if you're not. Like, I know a lot of people get nervous and they don't know what questions to ask, but if you're not asking any and it's not feeling very conversational, the interview is kind of like a preview of working with that person, right? So if in the interview I don't feel like we're having a good back and forth and I feel like you genuinely don't care, I'm not picking you. I'm gonna pick the person that was asking questions. Or it could be three. And this is the one most people skip. Um, you're not following up. I have had managers tell me they like somebody, but they didn't hear from them again. So I need you to send a thank you email within 24 hours. Short, specific, and reference like something from the conversation. And it takes five minutes and it makes a huge impact, especially these days when people have forgotten how to communicate in general, but that's a whole nother podcast I could write. And here's the thing I really want you to sit with. Job searching in this market is just hard. It's genuinely, legitimately hard. The labor market added 178,000 jobs in March, which was better than expected. But some people are still calling this a low hire, low fire market. That means companies are being cautious. Positions are taking a little bit longer to fill, and it has nothing to do with you personally. So I need you to keep going, but you need to keep going strategically, not just throwing applications into the void and hoping and hoping. It is quality over quantity right now. Five tailored applications beats 50 generic ones every single time. And y'all keep the questions coming. Y'all can DM me, send it through my email, go on CareerBloom Solutions.com. I promise you I read them all. And also my husband hears them sometimes because I have to read them out loud or I get tired. Moving on. Because before I let you go, I have one thing I want you to do this week. One thing, and it might be the more like most important thing that I say in this whole episode. And that means, yes, we're moving into the tip of the week. I need you to send one networking message this week. Just one, don't panic. Not 10, not 30, just one. Find one person who works at a company that you just might be interested in. Could be someone in your target department, could be someone in a similar role that you actually want. And I want you to send them this message. And I'm about to give you the exact script. So if you need to pause this, write it down, do whatever you need to do, do it. Again, not while you're driving, but I ain't your mom and make your own decisions. Here it is. It says, Hey, I'm exploring roles in insert your field here, and I noticed you work at insert their company here. I'd love to hear what the culture is like and how you ended up there. Would you be open to a quick 15-minute chat? That's it. That's the whole message. It's not weird, it's not pushy, it's one person showing genuine interest in another person's experience. And a lot of people will say yes, because most people enjoy talking about themselves and their work. And that conversation, the casual, no pressure, just two people talking conversation is how referrals happen. It's how you go from being a name in an ATS system to being a name that someone knows walking down the hall, saying to the hiring manager, Oh, hey, you should hire that person. I had a talk with him the other day. One message this week. That is your tip. And speaking of doing the thing that we talked about at the beginning, I'm gonna give you a full list before we wrap up because I'm good like that. So get ready for your homework. Okay. And before you groan, this is the stuff that actually changes things. So I need you to pay attention. I mean, you can be mad if you want to, but we're we're actually making moves. If you recall, that's the whole point of today's episode. So, number one, run your resume through a free ATS checker. Five minutes, do it today. Number two, download the career action plan if you haven't already. It's free all month long on my website, and it kind of will walk you through the audience. It that we talked about in the podcast last week. I need you to open it to week three, though, the breakthrough. And I need you to fill out the application tracker. Pick five roles you actually want, not five roles that kind of exist. Five roles that make you think yes, that one. Number three, I need you to prep star stories. Write them out, practice them out loud at least twice. And then number four, I need you to send that one networking message. Just use the script that I just gave you. And number five, read the blogs this week. Mondays is for business owners and HR folks. It's called the company culture you build now is the one you're stuck with. And it pairs with the free spring HR Health Check, which is also on the website for free. Now, Wednesday is how to get notice when you're applying into the void, and Friday is the interview prep nobody told you about. All three are on my website, careerbloom solutions.com, and they all connect to what we've been talking about all month. And I'd like a quick ask before we go if you liked this episode, share it. Text it, send it. And if you can, leave a review. I'm still growing, still being a smaller podcast. I look forward to every single time someone shares or I see my name being shared out there in the wild. And if you want to go deeper, like into the premium stuff, you can pay for the upgraded blog or we can have a free career chat, resume chat, interview chat. You can book that through my website. And as always, your career is not going to bloom by accident. You have to water it.