A client told me they wanted to keep a bullet point on their resume that was nineteen years old. Not because it was relevant to the job they were applying for. Because they were proud of it.
I understood the pride. It just didn’t matter to the hiring team reading that resume. To them, that line was extraneous — not relevant to the job description in front of them. It made the candidate look confused about what the role needed, not accomplished.
This Isn’t Really About Resumes
It’s a rule from sales and marketing that’s older than software. Donald Miller’s StoryBrand framework, which shapes a lot of how we write pages on this site, puts it plainly: you speak to the buyer about their problem, in their language — not about yourself, in your language. A good salesperson doesn’t walk in and pitch features and benefits nobody asked for — that’s confusing, not persuasive, and buyers tune it out fast. A job search runs on the same rule. The hiring team is the buyer. The job description is their stated list of concerns. Your resume, your LinkedIn profile, your interview answers — all of it is a pitch, whether you think of it that way or not.
A Resume Isn’t a Trophy Case
Most people write their resume the way they’d tell their own story: in their own words, using the language their old team used, highlighting what mattered most to their former employer, their former manager, their former team, or to them personally. That’s a natural way to talk about a career. It’s the wrong job for this document, for the same reason a pitch built around what the seller is proud of falls flat — the buyer isn’t asking about the seller. They’re asking about themselves.
A resume has one job: help the hiring team recognize, fast, that you can do the specific role in front of them. Increasingly, that hiring team is software before it’s a person. Research reported by Harvard Business Review found that most employers say their applicant tracking systems screen out qualified candidates whose resumes don’t precisely match the job description’s language[1]. A resume isn’t a memoir. It’s a translation of your experience into the language the reader — human or software — is already using.
Buzzword Bingo Through the IT Age
I’ve watched this play out for decades, first as a recruiter placing technical talent in Silicon Valley, later inside IT teams myself. The vocabulary turns over every few years. What’s underneath it barely does.
Early in my career, moving a file from one computer to another meant copying it to a floppy disk and carrying it across the office — “sneakernet.” Then it was ARCNET, a proprietary networking system out of Datapoint Corporation that ran a lot of early office networks before “Ethernet” became the name everyone settled on[3]. Then it was Ethernet cable strung under the floor. Then fiber optic lines, then wireless. The industry called all of it “networking,” then “connectivity,” then “infrastructure,” then eventually “the cloud.” Storing and searching information became “big data.” Replacing old software with new software became “digital transformation.” Today it’s “AI-first.” Every one of those terms describes some version of the same handful of jobs: move data, store it, process it, get it in front of the person who needs it. Memory, storage, processing, integration. The name changes. The work underneath barely does.
I’ve made a version of this point before: chasing every new tool as it hits the hype cycle is often a distraction from doing the work that actually wins. This is the flip side of that same coin. Building your skills around whatever’s trendy this quarter is a bad strategy. But when you’re job hunting, you don’t get to opt out of the vocabulary the market is currently using. You have to speak it — even when the work underneath hasn’t changed at all.
Not sure if your resume is speaking your language or theirs?
That’s a conversation, not a rewrite you should have to guess your way through. Book a free Strategy Call and we’ll look at what’s actually on the page — not what you meant by it.
The Five-Year Java Expert Who Couldn’t Exist
I saw the absurd version of this firsthand. In 1997 or 1998, working as a recruiter in Silicon Valley, I got a request for a Java developer with five years of experience. Java didn’t exist five years before that request. Sun Microsystems announced it publicly in May 1995 and shipped the first real release, JDK 1.0, in January 1996[2]. Whoever wrote that requisition wanted more Java experience than Java had been alive.
That request wasn’t unusual. It’s what happens at the start of every hype cycle: the market asks for the buzzword by name, on a timeline that doesn’t match reality, before almost anyone could legitimately have deep experience in it. Nobody who actually got hired into those early Java roles had five years of Java. They had years of C++ or Smalltalk or systems programming, and the ability to say, convincingly, that it translated. The person who got the job wasn’t the most experienced. They were the best translator.
That’s the skill this whole thing rewards, on a resume and in every hiring conversation. Not fluency in the newest term. The ability to take real experience — earned somewhere else, sometimes under a completely different name — and say it back in the language the person across the table is using right now.
Study the Job Description Like It’s the Answer Key
It basically is. The job description in front of you was written by the team that will decide whether you get an interview. It already tells you which words they’ll be scanning for. Read three or four postings for the role you actually want — not the role you used to have — and notice the words that repeat: the verbs, the tools, the way they describe the outcome they need. That’s the vocabulary your resume needs to speak back to them, in language that’s still true to what you actually did.
This isn’t about faking anything. It’s translation, not invention. If you led a “stakeholder alignment” effort and the posting says “cross-functional coordination,” both phrases can be true. Only one of them gets recognized by the person — or the system — reading it right now.
What to Do With the Nineteen-Year-Old Bullet Point
Keep the pride. Cut the line. If an accomplishment doesn’t speak to the job in front of you, in the language that job is asking for, it isn’t evidence anymore — it’s a distraction that makes a hiring team wonder if you understand what they’re looking for. Save it for the interview, where you get to add the context. On the resume, every line has to earn its place by matching the conversation the hiring team is already having about this role.
Your resume isn’t wrong because you changed jobs, or because the market changed, or because you’re somehow behind. It’s speaking a dialect that made sense somewhere you don’t work anymore. Translate it, and the same experience reads as exactly what the next team needs.
If you want a second set of eyes on whether your resume is speaking their language or yours, book a free Strategy Call and we’ll go through it together.
RESOURCES
[1] Harvard Business School research, as reported by CIO. “Applicant tracking system: The secret to beating a resume-filtering ATS.” CIO, accessed August 2026. cio.com/article/284414/applicant-tracking-system.html
[2] Sun Microsystems’ January 23, 1996 press release announcing Java 1.0, as reported by InfoQ. “Java 1.0 Turns 25.” InfoQ, accessed August 2026. infoq.com/news/2021/01/java-turns-25
[3] Datapoint Corporation’s ARCNET, announced 1977, as documented by Computerworld. “The LAN turns 30, but will it reach 40?” accessed August 2026. computerworld.com/article/1581089/the-lan-turns-30-but-will-it-reach-40.html
