Career advice, served fresh.

Online salary ranges blend countries, company sizes and industries into one number. Here is why the top end misleads, and how to set your number instead.

A recruiter reviewing your video submission is checking three things: that you are the real person behind the application, that the knowledge in your answer is your own, and that your spoken language fits what the role needs. Camera quality is almost never one of them. The content and the delivery decide it, not the resolution. And most candidates put their effort into exactly the wrong part. Why do companies ask for a video at all? The first reason is security. A video confi

Ask them, but ask them earlier. A question raised at offer stage very rarely gets an offer pulled, and I want to say that plainly because the internet suggests otherwise. What it does instead is quieter and more expensive: it reopens a decision the employer had already closed. What follows is not a discussion about your question. It is a discussion about you. What happens after your email lands? A late request does not sit with one person. It travels: recruiter to HR, HR to t

Sometimes you were not rejected at all. The role was shut down, filled by someone already inside the business, frozen when a budget was cut, overtaken by a more urgent hire, or left waiting on an approval that never arrived. You still receive something that looks exactly like a rejection, because that is the easiest message to send. So how do you tell the difference between "we chose someone else" and "there was never going to be anyone"? Mostly you cannot. That is the part w

Recruiters do not browse LinkedIn looking for interesting people. We run a filtered search, and the results of that search are the only candidates who exist for that role. If your profile does not contain the words the search was built from, you were not rejected. You were simply not there. That distinction matters more than anything else you will ever write on your profile. So what does a real search look like? A search starts with a role, never with a candidate. The role co

Because confidence gets tested. Most interviews are not lost on the first answer but one or two follow up questions later, at the moment a claim cannot be backed with evidence. The letter tells you they went with someone with more relevant hands-on background. What it usually means is that your answer did not survive being opened up. Let's face it, that is a harder thing to hear than a skills gap. What actually happens after one or two follow ups? The collapse follows a patte

If you were rejected at CV or screening stage and you genuinely believe the decision was wrong, reply and say so. It works often enough to be worth the ten minutes it costs you. If you were rejected after a full interview, it almost never works. Those two rejections look identical in your inbox. They are not the same decision at all. Why does a screening rejection ever get reopened? Screening rejections get reversed because screening is done fast, in volume, by someone who ma

Neither route is safer. They fail in opposite ways. Through an agency you get somebody whose income depends on you succeeding, and you land on a shortlist of about three people who are all genuinely relevant. Direct, nobody argues your case, and your CV joins several hundred others where being missed by accident is a real mathematical possibility. Most candidates pick a route without knowing they are choosing between those two failures. What does an agency recruiter actually

Your CV has one job, and it is not getting you the job. It opens a door, nothing more and nothing less. Most CVs fail at that door not because the person is unqualified, but because whoever reads it does not know the field well enough to work out that they are. And that reader is a generalist far more often than candidates imagine. What is your CV actually for? A CV buys you a conversation. That is the entire return on it. The interview is where you get hired, so everything t