A job description can tell you a lot about a position, but it can’t tell you whether everyone inside the company agrees on what they need, whether the hiring manager has preferences that never made it into the posting, or whether the company’s priorities will change halfway through the search.

Candidates are trying to understand a hiring process using the information available to them, while employers are making decisions with considerably more information behind the scenes.

In Part 2 of my conversation with Francis “Tank” Rhodes, we look at some of the assumptions job seekers make about hiring and what may actually be happening inside the organization.

Tailoring your resume can improve your chances of getting an interview, but tailoring doesn’t mean handing a job description to AI and accepting whatever it gives you.

AI can be useful, and I use it myself and have no problem with clients using it, but your resume still needs context, evidence, and enough specificity to distinguish your experience from someone else with the same job title.

You also need to be careful about how far you go when tailoring your experience. If your internal job title makes no sense outside your company, clarifying it may help an employer understand what you actually did, but that’s very different from changing your experience or credentials to better match the job.

One of the assumptions I raise with Tank is that companies know exactly who they want to hire, and his response is immediate: no, they don’t always know.

An organization may understand the problem it needs someone to solve without having a perfectly defined candidate in mind, and the hiring manager and recruiter may have different ideas about what matters most. What the company needs can also change after the search has already started.

That’s why I wouldn’t put all your money on the job description. Some are vague, while others contain everything anyone could possibly want from one person, and recruiters are often trying to figure out which requirements actually matter most.

We also discuss the assumption that companies hire the most qualified candidate, which gets complicated pretty quickly because employers still have to decide which qualifications matter most.

Two hiring managers can look at the same candidates and prioritize completely different things. One may care more about industry experience while another values a particular skill, career path, degree, or referral, and bias can influence those decisions too.

Degree requirements are a good example. Harvard Business School’s Dismissed by Degrees research examined the growth of four-year degree requirements for jobs that historically didn’t require them, and I watched a version of this happen while working in higher education.

Experienced administrative professionals without degrees retired from jobs they had successfully performed for years, only for some of those positions to reopen with bachelor’s degree requirements.

The question is whether the degree is actually necessary to do the job or whether someone decided somewhere along the way that it was what a qualified candidate should have.

Tank and I agree that networking matters, but telling someone to “network more” leaves out a lot of what actually makes networking useful.

Research has found that moderately weak ties, people outside your closest circle but not complete strangers, can be particularly valuable for job mobility. Your next opportunity may come from a former colleague, acquaintance, or someone on the edge of your network rather than your closest friend.

But networking doesn’t work the same way for everyone because people start with different levels of access, and we also make individual decisions about who we connect with, respond to, refer, or help. Tank raises an interesting point in the episode about the biases that can show up in networking, which I think gets left out of a lot of “just network more” advice.

Ghost jobs were one of the reasons I wanted to bring Tank back for this conversation.

If you see a job posted online, it’s reasonable to assume the company is actively trying to fill that exact position, but a company may be collecting candidates for a future need, hiring without much urgency, or changing its plans after a position has already been posted.

Jobs can also feed from applicant tracking systems to external job boards and remain visible after the employer’s process has changed, and Tank has heard directly from recruiters who say they’ve been instructed to post positions even when they aren’t actively interviewing candidates.

We also discuss the recent Texas investigation involving allegations about fake or misleading job opportunities on LinkedIn. While that plays out, there’s something simple job seekers can do now: check the employer’s careers page before applying.

If the position is on LinkedIn or Indeed but no longer appears on the company’s website, it may be outdated or closed. There are exceptions, particularly with smaller employers that rely on third-party platforms, but an extra check can save you some time.

One of the challenges of job searching is that you’re trying to interpret decisions without having access to most of the information behind them.

You can evaluate your resume, target positions, networking strategy, and interview performance, but you won’t necessarily know whether the hiring manager changed priorities, an internal candidate emerged, a credential suddenly mattered more than expected, the budget changed, or the company decided it wasn’t in a hurry to hire.

You should still evaluate your strategy and make changes when something isn’t working, but remember that you won’t always have enough information to know why you didn’t get an interview or offer, and another resume rewrite isn’t automatically the answer.

The HBS research examined degree inflation, including employers requiring four-year degrees for jobs that historically did not require them and the resulting barriers for workers without those credentials.

The 2022 study analyzed experiments involving more than 20 million LinkedIn users and found that moderately weak professional ties can increase job mobility, although the effect varies by tie strength and industry.

 https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/news/releases/attorney-general-ken-paxton-investigates-linkedin-advertising-fake-and-misleading-job-opportunities

The Texas Attorney General announced an investigation in July 2026 into allegations involving fake or misleading job opportunities and LinkedIn Premium. These remain allegations under investigation, not findings of wrongdoing.