How to negotiate the highest salary in the range

If you want to negotiate the highest salary in the range for the jobs you're pursuing, and if you want to be the professional with the $15,000-$30,000 salary increase, this post will show you how to make it happen.

1. Research the companies that are currently offering the highest salaries for your target job titles within your desired industry or niche. Start with Glassdoor to see what salaries are being reported by employees. Dig into company job postings for compensation numbers. Find as much proof as possible that these salaries represent what's being offered by these companies today.

2. Look up the employees of these companies on LinkedIn. Do a search for the job title and company name, and a handful of employees should appear. Some of these employees will have their profiles set to private, but others should have open profiles that you can visit.

3. Ask yourself the first fundamental question of this exercise: What experience, capabilities, or qualifications do these employees have that you are currently lacking? Write all of it down: project scopes, programs, capital management, clientele, accomplishments, awards, high-touch interpersonal skills, exposure to certain circles, etc.

4. Ask yourself the second fundamental question of this exercise: How can you reverse-engineer their experience, capabilities, or qualifications? What do you need to do, or who do you need to become, to sit at the desks of these well-paid employees? Is it possible that you're more qualified for their jobs than you originally thought?

5. Begin the task of positioning your business value in alignment with the narratives you've been researching. This will be a time-consuming, nit-picky task that will teach you more about corporate strategy and org development than you've ever learned. It might even change the way you look at your career.

6. While positioning your business value, look for opportunities to fill in any gaps. Do you need to sign up for specialized training? Do you need to network with a particular group of professionals? Do you need to volunteer for special projects, or introduce initiatives at your company to gain experience, or seek out mentorship?

7. When applying for jobs, make sure that you present yourself as someone to be taken seriously. I've seen individuals with impressive backgrounds miss out on interviews because their applications and resumes looked amateur, like they were lacking in confidence. Fill out your applications with care. Use clean-looking resume templates. Write like you're in control of your destiny.

8. Ask for the highest salary in the range upfront. Don't be coy or apologetic when asking. Don't play any games. Let your recruiter or hiring manager know from the beginning that you are going for the top salary, and don't try to justify the number with long-winded, position-draining explanations. Let your resume and application do the talking for you. If you have communicated your business value in a way that reflects the business values of the top professionals in your sphere, explanations will never be necessary.

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Interviewing with an AI agent

I've seen many posts saying that if a company insists on candidates interviewing with an AI agent, the candidates should either close the tab or mess with the software. What's concerning is how many people in the comments seem to think this is a good idea. 🫠

If you're applying to work for a company, you're applying to work for a company. You are asking the company to consider your application and select you as an employee. And if you want to be an employee, that means playing by the rules they've set for qualifying candidates.

The rules should be reasonable to an average person. The rules should preserve your dignity and self-respect. You should never blindly follow company rules - definitely maintain your critical thinking faculties. But if all feels copacetic, and if a company gives you rules to follow, then follow the rules.

I'm not enthusiastic about AI native organizations, and I'm not a fan of interviews with an AI agent. But if a company is asking you to engage with an AI agent, and if you consent to being recorded and evaluated on the engagement, then do the right thing and answer the bot's questions.

Your task is to put on a professional performance, just like if you were interviewing with a human. Be friendly and confident in your answers. Be thoughtful and take the experience seriously. If the AI agent starts glitching out, handle it with poise.

If you decide to duck out of the AI interview, that's certainly your choice. But messing with the software is the absolute wrong path to take. It's no different than messing with a hiring manager in the middle of an actual interview. What seems like innocent fun to you can come across as disturbing to the human on the other side. Is "getting the bot" really worth compromising your professional reputation?

#listentoyourresumewriter #leavethebotalone 🫠

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beehiiv eliminates internal job titles for its nearly 130 employees

When I heard that beehiiv had eliminated internal titles at its company, I signed up for the company newsletter just long enough to get the details.

The manifesto pretty much mirrored what was being covered in the articles I'd read online. Internally, the new titles reflect each job family (Engineering, Growth, People Operations), along with "Lead" if you manage people.

The external titles were more interesting to me. Pasting what they wrote in the manifesto:

You still own how you present yourself externally. Put whatever (reasonable) title you’d like on your LinkedIn and resume.

Speaking candidly as a hiring manager, I don’t put much weight on titles. A Staff Engineer at a Fortune 500 company and a Staff Engineer at a five-person startup have wildly different experience and scope. Titles are impossible to calibrate across companies, industries, and regions. Hiring managers care about what you contributed and where you did it.

For example, I’d be far more excited about a candidate coming from a company like Anthropic than someone with a sexier title at a failed startup. Having been part of a high-growth company says a lot about your ability to grow and contribute in one. In my experience, the company on your resume opens doors in a hiring process, not the title.

beehiiv being wildly successful is better for you as a future candidate. Being able to speak to your contributions is what sets you apart.

I can understand Tyler Denk's frustration with the added complexity that titles bring to org development, and my heart goes out to the guy. But titles do matter enormously for career advancement today, just as much as the companies you work for and the problems you solve. Titles are search keywords. Titles signal authority and credibility. The level of your title (associate, manager, director) affects the potential ceiling of your compensation, which can then be carried to your next company.

I'm pleased that the company seems to be supportive of employees choosing their own external titles, and I hope they'll offer guidance if an employee asks for input.

In a future post, I'll share my approach on how to choose a title if a company gives you the freedom to pick your own.

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Determining the average salary increase of my clients

I specialize in salary negotiations, and my clients see their salaries increase by an average of $11,500 USD. I updated this metric by shifting the date range, and now my 2025 and 2026 numbers are included.

I've always had a difficult time reconciling the average salary increase with the story it tells, especially when considering different markets, industries, geographic regions, and even the year when the data was gathered.

For a tech professional in San Francisco, an average salary increase can look wildly different from a scientist in Research Triangle Park. And when you take into consideration my Canadian and European job seekers with their compensation landscapes, you can see how difficult it is to create a meaningful metric from the data.

Another layer to this metric is the split taking place among professionals due to the growing gap in our arguably K-shaped economy. For job seekers in professions where AI is democratizing their hard-earned skill set, their salary increases are looking very different from those in increasingly seniorized professions.

If it feels like you're wearing more and more hats in your job due to AI, you could be part of that seniorized group, and if so, your new compensation ceiling might be very surprising.

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Removing the skills section on resumes?

An interesting pattern I'm starting to see with resumes is the removal of the skills section.

I'm not sure if this is a feature of AI-generated resumes that's slowly spilling into human-written resumes. I started noticing that the skills section was missing on some of the resumes I'd been reviewing this past month. Then I was recently asked to remove the skills section from a resume I was working on.

Could this be the start of a new trend in resume writing? Removing the dedicated skills section?

I've always seen the skills section as a nice visual break within the document. The reader gets to rest their eyes on a bank of skills and gets a quick, easily digestible picture of the job seeker's capabilities.

Curious to hear everyone's thoughts.

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The job seekers with the shortest job searches

When I look at every job search I worked on this past year, the job seekers who had the shortest job searches, ranging from 2 weeks to 4 months in length, all did these same 4 things.

1. They connected with employees of their target companies before submitting a job application. Potential supervisors, potential colleagues, HR staff - if they seemed like someone the job seeker might work with if they landed the job, they received a connection request.

2. They wrote posts on the feed to talk about themselves - their skills, their professional history, and lessons learned throughout their career. It didn't matter if the posts received likes or comments. All that mattered was that the posts were visible and accessible to hiring decision-makers.

3. They enlisted the help of their networks, families, friends, and trusted colleagues. They never tried to go at their job search alone. Even when working with me, they leaned on the resources and access points of the people around them. The shortest among the short job searches were all due to networking.

4. They used human-written resumes, cover letters, and application responses. AI-generated content never performed as well as human-written content, even when taking into consideration the seniority, industry, achievements, and expertise of the job seeker. When AI content was used, job searches almost always extended past the 6-month mark.

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FAQs are now live

FAQs are live on the website! You can find them listed underneath each resume package in the store.

After years and years of (lovingly) answering similar questions from clients, I've collected the most common questions into an FAQ for each resume package.

As I worked on these new sections, I thought about how I didn't have a website during my first 4 years of writing resumes. I used to speak with job seekers almost exclusively via email.

It's interesting how much has changed since that time.

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Hiring guides for NVIDIA, Google, and Salesforce

Before applying to your target companies, check whether they've shared a hiring guide for interested job seekers. Many of your favorite Fortune 500 companies have been sharing tips and resources on how to get hired for at least 10 years.

Below, I have links to hiring guides from NVIDIA, Google, and Salesforce:

NVIDIA: Guide Link

Google: Guide Link

Salesforce: Guide Link

Pro-Tip: You can often find blogs, posts, dedicated websites, Glassdoor reviews, and even Reddit threads from employees that share insider tips on getting hired. If a company doesn't share a hiring guide, check if other helpful resources can be found online.

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7 mistakes you’re making with your job search

7 (easily fixable) mistakes you're making with your job search:

1. You're only applying to jobs via Easy Apply
2. You're skipping jobs that link to Workday or Greenhouse
3. You're not tapping into your existing network for leads
4. You're not enlisting the help of your family, friends, or colleagues
5. You're skipping the step of researching your target companies
6. You're using AI to write your resume and cover letter content
7. You're writing "see resume" in your application fields

I'm working with a job seeker who spent an entire year doing all 7 of these. He's been very open about how little effort he puts into his job searches.

Today, he landed his first phone screening since November 2025.

"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work."

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“I’ve never been good at writing about myself”

Another customer has signed an offer letter! Director, Business Analytics (Healthcare), based in Virginia. She's going from $130K to $155K, with benefits and opportunities for bonuses. My one heartache is that relocation wasn't included in the letter, but I think that I'm the only one upset by this. She and her family are thrilled.

She came to me in August with a one-page resume that was partially created with Claude. Her exact words were, "I'm so tired of trying to write this resume. I've never been good at writing about myself."

She gave me her mid-year and annual reviews, a handful of slide decks, the links to her company's blog, and the feedback she's received from her team over several years. I used the material to create a questionnaire that allowed me to go deeper into her expertise and achievements.

Her new resume was two pages, typed in one of my executive templates in Word. On page one, I showed how her analytical work translated into actionable and strategic decision-making at the executive level. Since she was staying in healthcare, it was important to demonstrate a throughline between her work and outcomes within care quality, patient safety, compliance, revenue, and service-line profitability.

My goal for her document was for her future supervisor to immediately see her competence, immediately recognize the value she could bring to their organization, and visually place her within the role she was applying for. I wanted the document to be tactical, but I also wanted to build an emotional response in the reader.

With this project officially closed out, who's going to be the next person to sign up for a resume package? If you're interested in working with me, please feel free to send a message and introduce yourself. Tell me about your job search and your professional goals.

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How to build a richer resume narrative

When writing content for a resume, it's completely natural to focus your energy on the core responsibilities of your job: the functions you oversee, the protocols and processes you own, and the role you play at the leadership table. I'd even say that listing out your responsibilities can be a great starting point for any resume.

But if you want your resume to leave a powerful and lasting impression on your reader, I would place your energies on the deeper, more consequential aspects of your work.

Ask yourself the following to build a richer resume narrative.

1. What is the true scale of the work you do? How many customers or patients or employees does your work impact? Does the scope extend to just your immediate site, or does it include sites around the globe? How does that scope translate into budgets and resources?

2. Where exactly do you sit in the product, customer, and/or project lifecycle? If you were plucked from the machine today, and nobody was hired to replace you, how would the machine fall apart?

3. What aspects of strategy are you responsible for developing or changing? What did you inherit in your role? What did you introduce?

4. Where are the boundaries of your influence? Where are the places where your influence has little to no impact, and why?

5. What is the financial significance of your work? What revenue did your work help to produce? What costs or waste did you eliminate?

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Premium Resume Package is sold out for the remainder of 2026

I'm a little surprised to be writing this, but I want to announce that my Premium Resume Package is officially sold out for the remainder of 2026.

This is the first time that I've met capacity for one of my resume packages. I run my business as a small, two-person operation. On the rare occasion, I might contract another resume writer to assist with larger projects. But for the most part, when a job seeker signs up for a package, they're working exclusively with me.

When I designed the premium version of the package, I wanted to create an opportunity for job seekers to sign up for interview practice on an as-needed basis. I would provide access to a private Google Calendar with pre-assigned time slots available for scheduling. If a job seeker wanted to practice daily, they could do so with a click of a button. No limits would be imposed for scheduling during the life of the project.

The first year I offered the premium package, I sold just one. But what a project it was - I'd found the exact job seeker whom I'd been envisioning for the package, and his success was the source of my greatest professional pride at the time.

When availability opens up for the premium package, I'll create another announcement. In the meantime, the Lite, Standard, and Deluxe Resume Packages are still available for purchase through the end of the year.

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Get advice from me on LinkedIn

Exciting news! LinkedIn has very generously given me access to the "Get advice from me" feature, and it's now available on all of my posts.

What this means for my job seekers? If you want to hop on a call, you can now go through the "Get advice from me" link directly on my profile or at the top of my posts.

You can expect the same 60-minute sessions I've always provided, designed to deep-dive into your job search and career journey. You can ask me anything about resume/CV optimization, LinkedIn optimization, salary negotiations, alternatives to a traditional job search, etc. The sky is truly the limit.

I wanted to be brought into the beta program ever since I learned about the rollout, and it's a privilege to be given access. I decided to celebrate by giving my profile a complete refresh, with a new banner and profile pic. I've also given my website a refresh to make it easier for job seekers to navigate.

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Putting college graduation dates on a resume

Putting college graduation dates on a resume is more of a judgment call than something you should do or shouldn't do.

When I'm debating whether I want to add a graduation date, I ask myself the following:

1. Has the job seeker been out of school for 10 years or less? If yes, it might make sense to include the date. I might want to show continuity in the timeline from graduation to starting a first job. Or maybe I want to show that the education was recent enough that the skills/training/learning acquired would provide competitiveness or modern-day applicability to the job seeker.

2. Has the job seeker been out of school for longer than 10 years? If yes, then I might want to exclude the date and place my focus on the school itself, the degree, and any special distinctions that might draw the eye of the reader.

3. What if the application requires a date to be included? In situations like these, my philosophy is to always be truthful and type the correct date. You can continue to leave the date off the resume; doing so can subtly signal to the hiring decision-maker that you don't want the date taken into consideration during their qualification process.

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Reach out to your network

A job search only lasting two weeks? Seems like a divine miracle in today's job market, but it's exactly what happened to one of my job seekers.

My job seeker was a project coordinator in the biotech and pharmaceutical industries, and he'd been part of a layoff that affected 15 employees at his company. The evening he was laid off, he signed up for my standard resume package. He opted to swap out the cover letter for the LinkedIn profile rewrite. Seven days later, his resume and profile were ready to go.

His original plan was to start applying to jobs right away. He was aiming for New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. I checked his network, and I noticed he had a lot of connections concentrated in these areas.

"Are you planning to tell your network about your job search?" I asked him. "You have a lot of people here who work at the companies you're aiming for."

"Yeah, but I don't really know any of them," he replied. "They're connections, but we've never actually spoken."

But he was open to my suggestion that we reach out to these people. I created several templates for him to copy/paste into a DM, to introduce himself to his network and let them know he was job hunting. Out of what he estimates to be 100 messages, roughly 40 people responded. Many asked for his resume, and a few invited him to jump on the phone.

Exactly 14 days after he was laid off, he signed an offer letter with a company located in the Boston outskirts.

He told me he was blown away by the generosity of the people in his network. He couldn't believe how helpful and friendly everyone had been towards him. And that's why I wanted to share this post today: you never know who's already in your corner, ready to give you a hand in your job search. Don't be afraid to reach out to your network.

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What actually helped my job seekers land their desired interviews this past quarter

What actually helped my job seekers land their desired interviews this past quarter:

1. Applying to job and internship postings via the company website. I already heavily discourage my job seekers from using Easy Apply. But it's worth noting that the job seekers who did use Easy Apply shared that they didn't land a single callback from the feature.

2. Typing out detailed, human-written responses on their applications. What also worked well was copying and pasting from a Word doc, such as snippets from a resume. Copying and pasting responses from Claude or ChatGPT wasn't effective. Writing "see resume" in the application fields wasn't effective.

3. Networking with the employees of their target company before applying to the job or internship. Some of my job seekers had already done the hard work of building their network before we started working together. With others, I coached them on how to locate potential future colleagues and connect with them online. The job seekers who took this step received callbacks with more regularity than the ones who didn't.

4. Messaging their existing network before beginning the job search. With a few of my job seekers, I helped them type personalized messages to their former colleagues and supervisors, letting them know that they were on the market. For one job seeker in particular, this approach was so effective that his job search only lasted two weeks. (I'm planning to tell the story in an upcoming post!)

5. Creating a new email address to use for the job search. I made this recommendation to just one job seeker last quarter. He was interested in reapplying to companies that he'd applied to in the past, but had been rejected. My concern was that if he applied to these jobs using his existing email address, he might get flagged. My concern turned out to be founded when he received a callback from a nationwide wireless communications company he'd been targeting for years.

What my job seekers all had in common:

They applied for jobs and internships using a resume that I custom-created and tailored for their goals. Many would also check in and ask for advice throughout their job search.

Among my oldest guarantees for every customer:
- I offer unlimited resume revisions for 30 calendar days.
- I provide guidance for interviews and salary negotiations.
- I stay with my customer (every customer!) until they receive their offer letter.

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The best starting material for creating questionnaires and mapping first drafts

It's going to be an especially busy week for writing resumes! This morning, I onboarded a VP of medical device sales, an associate director of pharmacovigilance, and three project managers from the automotive, aviation, and pharmaceutical industries. Four new sign-ups, and the fifth is a returning customer.

What's so interesting about this group of job seekers is the starting material they've all given me. No AI-generated resumes, no outlines, no voice memos. Instead, they've given me human-written, content-rich resumes to work off of.

Not that there's anything wrong with giving me the other types of material. During the information-gathering stage, any material is fair game. I'll use what's provided to create questionnaires for my customers and start mapping first drafts.

But my best, deepest work emerges when the material is detailed. It helps me visualize sitting at my customer's desk and going through their day-to-day activities, attending meetings, putting out fires, troubleshooting trickier issues, and engaging with strategy.

Performance reviews, customer feedback, slide decks, earnings reports, presentations, press releases, company blogs - all of this is welcome material. The more material a job seeker provides, the richer our time together will be.

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Being hands-off is absolutely okay

I've been working with a project manager on his job search, and we're entering our second week of building his resume and cover letter. When we first started working together, he told me he wanted to be as hands-off as possible in creating the two documents.

He gave me an older version of his resume, a PDF of his most recent annual review, and sent me a voice message with a quick summary of his current career achievements. Then he told me to go to town on the first draft.

I love writing resumes, and I especially love building out career stories. It never bothers me if the starting information just covers the essentials. I took the material he gave me and brainstormed possible content to fill in the gaps. I wrote out additional achievements based on what I saw on his employers' blogs. I even researched his past and present colleagues for inspiration on other achievements he might have missed.

This morning, I submitted Draft 1 for his review, and he almost immediately responded with the words "WOW!!!" in the email. 😁 Now that he has the first draft in his hands, he's been adding comment after comment, expanding on the achievements that I researched.

I asked him if I could write this post today, and he gave me his blessing. The takeaway from this post: when we work together, you never need to worry about giving me your full career story or being an especially active collaborator. Being hands-off is absolutely okay.

You can trust me to take the source material and expand upon it with my own research. I know how to turn over stones. I know what questions need to be asked to write the best possible content. And I'm not afraid to do the work required to get you the exact results you're after.

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Is job hopping still a strategy worth pursuing?

Is job hopping still a strategy worth pursuing in 2026 and beyond? This was an interesting conversation I had with a job seeker today.

As a scientist, I benefited tremendously from job hopping. Between 2015 and 2019, I worked at 4 different pharmaceutical companies and doubled my salary from $32K to $64K.

I remember talking to a colleague who worked in the lab adjacent to mine, who had been employed with the company for over 10 years. At the time, she hadn't cleared $30K. I can still see her exact facial expression when she told me that she hadn't received a pay raise in years.

If job hopping is something you're interested in to ensure your salary grows over time, it's a path that's still available to pursue. But my recommendations on how to do this have shifted a bit in our post-AI world.

1. If you're planning to leave for a company or industry that's investing in generative or agentic AI, it's worthwhile to find people who are using AI in the workplace to learn from them. If your company has programs available to develop AI literacy, or if there's a dedicated team that's integrating AI into operations, I would find ways to get involved.

2. If you're planning to pursue a role that's being democratized by AI, where human expertise is being traded for AI outputs, (i.e. junior developers, entry-level HR, accounting), understand that your salary increases will likely be on the smaller side going forward. This is what I'm currently experiencing with my job seekers, and I don't see this trend changing.

3. If you're pursuing a role that's becoming more seniorized by AI, where human expertise is becoming more premium, (i.e. engineers, customer success managers, consultants), your challenge will be to show that you can essentially perform two or more jobs at the same time. You'll be part AI specialist, part senior manager/strategist in some cases, and you'll be expected to absorb more responsibilities as you continue in your role. But the good news: you should be able to chase bigger salary increases over time, as long as our macros remain relatively stable.

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Why hiring decision-makers are now rejecting AI use in job applications

Among the many difficult conversations I have with my job seekers, AI tends to sit near the top.

And understandably so: job seekers are heavily discouraged from using AI to create their resumes and cover letters. More and more employers are putting out notices that applications will be rejected if AI use is detected in any part of the application.

Yet once that job seeker is employed, AI tools are not only back on the menu, but they're often required to be used. If you don't document your AI use, you could easily get written up by your employer. I've spoken with managers who missed out on career advancement opportunities because they didn't feel comfortable pushing AI onto their teams.

Why does this discrepancy exist? Why are job seekers being penalized for using AI in their job searches but are forced to use it after they land the job? After speaking with a couple dozen hiring decision-makers on the subject, I feel comfortable saying that the discrepancy only exists because of the number of fake applicants that flood the market each day.

Bots, spam applications, underqualified candidates submitting dishonest resumes - the list goes on, and all of it is made worse by the AI tools that exist today. There's not enough hiring support staff to parse through an application pile that's nearly four times larger than what we saw prior to 2022.

The natural response to this was going back to human-written material. Human-written resumes and cover letters take time. The work, the investment, and the little details that go into human-written resumes are difficult to replicate at scale. The human voice that comes out in a cover letter is difficult for a bot to mimic.

This is why I suspect that we'll continue to see the trend of employers rejecting AI on job applications. Even though it might feel like an unfair or backwards approach, this is the solution that seems to be making the biggest difference for our hiring decision-makers.

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