Category: Job Search

Different Doesn’t Mean Wrong

Paul Wagenaar

I’ve hesitated to write about resumes for a long time.

Not because I don’t have opinions, but because my opinions challenge almost everything we’ve traditionally been taught.

Were told to fit our lives into rigid templates, keep it to one page, and strictly follow chronological order.

But what if your path wasnt perfectly linear? Your resume shouldnt just be a passive record of where youve been.

It should be a precision tool, carefully tailored to show an employer how your skills, strengths and experience can address their needs and solve their problems.

But heres something we often overlook. Before your resume can help an employer recognize your value, sometimes it needs to help you recognize that value yourself. The goal isnt to become the person you think an employer wants.

Its to understand what that employer needs and demonstrate, with confidence and evidence, how the person you already are can make a meaningful contribution.

Nobody Tells You This Stuff – The Things That Matter Most Aren’t Always the Things We Chase.

Paul Wagenaar

Some of life’s most important lessons aren’t taught in classrooms or found in leadership books.

They’re learned through mistakes, missed opportunities, difficult conversations, and the people who change how we see the world.

Looking back, I’ve realized that success isn’t simply about what we achieve. It’s about who we become along the way and the difference we make in other people’s lives.

Here are some lessons I wish I’d understood sooner. Perhaps a few will resonate with you.

OWNING MY OWN NARRATIVE – A tool for Disclosure, Confidence & Workplace Success

Paul Wagenaar

Disclosure can be frightening.

What if an employer judges you differently, focuses on your disability instead of your abilities, or decides not to hire you?
Owning My Own Narrative isn’t about telling people they should disclose. It’s about making an informed choice instead of allowing fear to make the choice for you.

If you decide to disclose, have a plan. Explain what you want an employer to understand, how you work best, and, most importantly, what you bring to their workplace.

Own your narrative. Know your value. Then show them what you can do.

Choosing a Different Way

Paul Wagenaar

We move at the speed of trust.

I may be one of the few career advisors who regularly encourage job seekers to break the rules.

Not because I don’t understand them.

Because sometimes what we call conventional wisdom is simply something we’ve repeated so often that we stopped questioning it.

I tell people to stand out: Contact employers before jobs are posted. Build relationships. Challenge assumptions. Stop making their résumé look like everyone else’s.

But there’s a catch: You can’t ask someone to take an unconventional path without first giving them a reason to trust you.

Resistance isn’t always stubbornness. Sometimes it’s fear, self-protection, or the weight of years of rejection and being told what they should do.

My job isn’t to convince people that I’m right.
It’s to help them become confident enough to question advice, including mine.

Because the goal isn’t to create followers. It’s to help people trust themselves enough to find their own way forward.

And that’s why: We move at the speed of trust.

The Opportunity Pyramid – Stop Searching for Jobs. Start Searching for Opportunity.

Paul Wagenaar

We spend an enormous amount of time talking about how to find a job. But what if we’ve been looking in the wrong places?

Most job seekers begin with the jobs everyone can see, the ones posted online. It makes perfect sense. It’s easy, accessible, and feels like the obvious place to start.

But when almost everyone is looking in the same place, competition becomes fierce, and a surprisingly large part of the opportunity landscape remains invisible.

This is a longer piece than I normally write, but I didn’t want to reduce an important idea to a few quick tips. There is more to finding opportunity than searching harder. Sometimes, the real advantage comes from changing where, and how, we look.

I hope you’ll take the time to explore it with me.

Does AI make hiring better or just faster? – What are we missing?

Paul Wagenaar

AI can make hiring faster. But faster doesn’t necessarily mean better.

As employers and job seekers increasingly use AI to navigate the hiring process, we may be creating an unintended arms race, one where both sides become better at optimizing for the system rather than discovering genuine compatibility.

The real opportunity isn’t to use AI to replace human thinking. It is to use it to challenge our assumptions, expose our blind spots, and help us recognize people the traditional hiring system might overlook.

The question isn’t whether we will use AI in hiring. We already are. How do we use it better.

When your fear is greater than your desire to succeed

Paul Wagenaar

Nothing moves forward when fear outweighs what we stand to gain. We stall, we overthink, we wait; but waiting never builds a future.

Change begins the moment your desire becomes stronger than your fear, even through the fear is still there.

Rethinking Job Descriptions: Who Are You Really Excluding?

Paul Wagenaar

A job description is more than a list of tasks. It is the foundation of how we hire, onboard, evaluate, and include people.

When it is unclear, inflated, or shaped by assumption, it quietly filters out capable candidates before they ever apply. Not through obvious exclusion, but through language that narrows access in ways most organizations never examine.

When it is clear, structured, and intentional, it does the opposite. It expands access, improves hiring decisions, and helps more people understand where they might fit and contribute.

This is not just a question of wording.

It is a question of design, and of who gets seen in the first place.

What Employers Miss in Job Ads

Paul Wagenaar

Some people will read every word of this guide.

Some will skim it and take away only one idea.

Both are enough to make a difference.

I didn’t write this to create another checklist or another compliance document. I wrote it because I believe one simple truth:
Job advertisements are not administrative documents; they are human invitations.

Every word we choose tells someone whether they belong, whether they will be valued, and whether they can picture themselves succeeding before they ever walk through the door.

If this feels longer than most hiring advice, that’s intentional.

Hiring shapes organizations, careers, families, and futures. It deserves more than a template copied from ten years ago.

Take one idea. Take ten. Come back to the rest later.

Because sometimes changing a single sentence in a job advertisement changes the person who decides to apply, and that one decision can change the future of an entire team.