01 · STAND-UP
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
I’ve been thinking about this one differently lately.
It’s not just about speed or distance. It’s about information.
Recruiters go fast — alone, with proprietary playbooks, behind closed doors. Engineers and EMs run the same broken job search loop a thousand times over. Nobody goes far. Nobody shares the map.
That changes when the map is public; this Friday.
02 · SPRINT
Ten years in. I’ve reviewed thousands of engineering resumes.
And I’m still getting them in every format imaginable.
Google Docs exports with broken margins. PDFs designed in Canva. Word files with tracked changes still on. Two-column layouts that fall apart the moment an ATS touches them.
Resumes that read like LinkedIn profiles. Resumes that read like academic CVs. Resumes four pages long with 20 bullet points per role.
Nobody agreed on a standard. And nobody told engineers that.
Think about how we solved this on the technical side. Frontend teams don’t argue from scratch about folder structure every time they start a project — they reach for Next.js or Remix and make decisions inside a framework.
Backend teams don’t reinvent API conventions — they adopt REST or GraphQL and move on. The framework doesn’t make all the decisions. It gives you a foundation so you can focus on the decisions that actually matter.
Engineering resumes have no equivalent. Every candidate is starting from zero. Every format is a guess. Every revision is a shot in the dark.
That’s not a candidate problem. Or a Recruiter problem. That’s a missing standard that has us all arguing with each other.
And honestly?
We’re all wasting precious time playing the guessing game.
Most Recruiters have the playbooks.
We know what to scan for in the first eight seconds. We know what a compensation band looks like before the offer is ever extended. We know how to write a LinkedIn summary that surfaces in the right searches.
We know these things because we live inside the machine every day.
And almost none of us share it.
There’s a version of the tech industry that treats that knowledge like a competitive advantage. Keep it close. Create dependency. Make the candidate need you.
But, what if we could open source resume writing? That would certainly create efficiencies for recruiters, engineers, and founders, right?
The first time I handed a candidate one of my actual resume prompts — the one I use when I’m reformatting a resume for a client — we updated her resume in real time, and used that same information to update her LinkedIn, downstream.
We turned it around in nine minutes. Not nine hours. Not three versions. Nine minutes, one prompt, one format, done.
And I realized: the information asymmetry in this industry is enormous.
And it’s mostly artificial.
I’m not talking about giving away the work. I’m talking about giving away the thinking. The frameworks.
The exact prompts I use to reformat a resume in under ten minutes. The structure I follow to rewrite a LinkedIn profile. The way I actually read a compensation data set to tell someone what their role pays.
None of that requires me to do less work. It requires engineers to do less guessing.
That’s a better assembly line, for all of us, recruiters and engineers alike.
So this week, I’m opening the vault. The prompts I use for clients — resume reformatting, LinkedIn rewrite, market rate research — are going public.
Not as a watered-down version. The real ones.
Because if we want engineers and EMs and founders to solve hiring together, we have to stop treating the tools as secrets.
The machine doesn’t fix itself.
But it can be reverse engineered.
Follow me on GitHub. I'll release the prompts this Friday.
03 · RETROSPECTIVE
✅ What went well
The first time I shared a working prompt with a candidate instead of just telling them “your resume needs work,” the conversation changed completely. It became a collaboration. That’s the version of this job I like best. Did we just become best friends?
🔧 What could be improved
I’ve been sitting on these prompts for months, testing them privately. Should have released them sooner but I just wasn’t sure. The instinct to refine indefinitely is real, and if you know me well, I tend to iterate until the sun comes up, ha!
⚡ One action item before next week
Pull up your current resume. Run it through the prompt I’m releasing this Friday. Don’t edit it manually first. Let the prompt do the first pass and see what changes. That delta is the gap between how you present yourself and how the market reads you.
❓ Open question for readers
When you’ve asked a recruiter to explain their process — how they’re reading your resume, how they’re evaluating fit, what the comp range actually looks like — did they tell you? Or did you get a version of “I’ll circle back once I’ve talked to the team”?
Hit reply. Send me what you’re thinking and we’ll solve it in the next sprint.
