Notes from the hiring side.
I spend less than 30 seconds on a resume. In those 30 seconds I'm sorting. Which box does this person go in?
That's worth knowing if you're the one sending the resume. Because before your resume ever arrives, someone has already drawn the boxes.
Anthropologists have an old idea. How people classify the world shapes how they act in it.
Gillian Tett, who did her PhD fieldwork on village weddings in Central Asia before becoming a senior editor at the Financial Times, applied that idea to companies. Her opening case is Sony. In 1999, two Sony divisions unveiled two digital music players at the same trade show. The formats didn't work with each other. Two years later, Apple shipped the iPod.
Each Sony division was doing its job. The way the company was divided made them compete.
She has other cases. At UBS, risk teams each watched their own slice of the mortgage exposure, and nobody saw the whole thing. Cleveland Clinic went the other way. It reorganized around organs and diseases instead of medical specialties, and put cardiologists and heart surgeons in the same unit.
Who draws these lines? Usually a founder, an executive or a consulting firm. They cut the world the way they know it. That's why "operations" means one job at a logistics company, another at a game studio and a third at a payments firm.
A job description is the spec for a box. The hiring team usually has one question. Can this person drop straight in?
So your title line does most of the work. The same experience written as "project manager" or as "implementation lead" lands in two different piles.
Spend half an hour learning how the company cuts itself before you apply. Look at their other openings, their team pages, who the role reports to. Know which box you're applying for, then choose the words that put you in it.
I once met a very sharp person who had moved through several kinds of roles and done well in each. His resume almost never got past screening. Every team saw someone who wasn't quite what they were looking for.
He went on to become a top game designer.
Every detour turned out to be useful for that job. No screening box had been built for that combination.
My own first job change looked similar. I had a background in software engineering and information security. The market's boxes were obvious: keep coding, or go into security. I didn't enjoy software engineering. I ended up in HR more or less by accident, and found out it was what I was meant to do.
Hard-to-classify people do pay a price at screening. It can cost months. Tett's point is that people who move between boxes can see what sits between them, and that's exactly who a Cleveland Clinic style redesign needs.
My practical advice: don't expect the reader to translate you. Thirty seconds isn't enough for that. Pick one box, get in, and then show that you can see outside it.
As someone who hires, I keep going back and forth on one thing. Should we build a separate door for people who don't fit the boxes? It would slow us down. Without it, some of the most interesting people stay outside.
Which box are you in right now? Did you choose it?
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