#TBCDiagnosis: When the process improvement expert can’t fix his own process
These are from Career Clarity Move sessions, where the goal is to answer a career question you have in 1 hour. Usually it's "why am I not getting offers". All names and details are anonymized here. So if you have recommendations for names for the next ones, just send them over. I'm using list of UK baby names that I never hear in my real life.
#TBCDiagnosis: When the process improvement expert can’t fix his own process
Toby has spent the past 7 years in process improvement for the same company, been promoted within the role more than once, and got certified in Lean Six Sigma. His whole job is centered on him finding the root cause of what’s broken and making it run better. And he’s great at it. But now he wants a change, so he’s looking to switch employers.
He’d applied to 12 hyper-specialized roles that should have been a perfect fit and got 0 callbacks. Every single one either rejected him right away or never even contacted him.
He had his theory: Process improvement just isn’t in demand, so there aren’t many openings, and that’s why they’re not calling him for interviews. And maybe his resume needed some work.
So he booked a Career Clarity Move, a 1-time call where we figure out what exactly the problem in your job hunt is. He wanted to know what was going wrong with his entire search.
He was half right. The resume was a problem.
He put it on screen, and it took seconds.
“This is very bad, Toby.”
“The first page of your resume is full of nonsensical jargon. Professional summary is 7 lines long, key achievements repeating same thing is 12 lines long, and no work experience on page 1 of a 3 page resume. That tells me right away you’re not thinking about how hiring managers will read your resume.”
And then I went into all the other details that looked wrong from the first glance plus explained the reader’s perspective to him. Once he looked at it from the hiring manager’s side, he saw it too:
“Now that you say it... nobody’s going to read this. It’s so paragraph heavy.”
But here’s the thing. If the resume were the whole problem, he’d just need a resume writer.
The resume was a symptom. The real problem was his whole job hunt strategy.
And Toby knows this better than anyone, because it’s literally his job. When the output is bad, you don’t polish 1 step. You map the whole process and find where it actually breaks.
So we mapped his.
He was only applying to a super narrow keyword list, because he assumed no one was hiring so that was all he could go for. Which is a wrong mindset to take. Process improvement is one of the most sought-after skill sets in manufacturing and operations. It just doesn’t usually come as a standalone job title, so he wasn’t seeing it in all the other potential roles.
His LinkedIn was another symptom. It was telling everyone he was available immediately, would start anytime, and would move anywhere. After I pointed that out, he got it right away with no explanation from me:
“...it’s showing that you can lowball me.”
And his own head was telling him he wasn’t qualified. When we talked about widening his search, he hesitated:
“I would love to apply, but I don’t think I have the skills for it.”
3 different symptoms, all telling the same wrong story affecting his job hunt.
And the worst part is that none of it was true. He’s 7 years in, promoted again and again for picking things up fast, and certified in the exact thing companies want. He just couldn’t see it from any other perspective.
That’s the irony. A root-cause expert who misdiagnosed his own job hunt. First he blamed the market. Then his skills. The real cause was neither.
And that’s completely normal.
Being great at your job and being great at getting hired are 2 different skills. You use one every day. You use the other once every few years, usually under pressure, usually alone. Even the best doctors don’t diagnose themselves.
We found all of this in the first 20 minutes.
Which brought us to the last broken step in his process: he’d been doing this whole job hunt alone. Sending applications into silence, and not asking anyone for help. Not the leaders who know his work. Not the people already in the roles he wants.
Fixing that means reaching out, following up, and being a little bit annoying.
So I asked him: would you rather be annoying, or stay where you are?
“Okay, you’re right. I need to be annoying. I can’t afford to stay here anymore.”
Booking this call was the first “annoying” thing he did. Good.
Here’s what I keep seeing: people who are great at their job and stuck in their job hunt. Usually it’s the ones whose work is invisible when it’s done right, in process, operations, and supply chain. They’ve spent years making things run smoothly, so nobody’s ever asked them to explain what they actually did.
So when the job hunt stalls, they diagnose it the way anyone would from the inside. It’s the market. It’s my field. It’s my skills. Maybe it’s just my resume.
It’s rarely any of those on its own. It’s the gap between the work they’ve done and the story everyone else is reading.
You can’t proofread your way out of that. The things that feel obvious to you, because you lived them, are exactly what a stranger will never know unless someone shows you where the story breaks. You need a reader who wasn’t there.
That’s the job. Not rewriting your resume, but telling you where the story you think you’re telling doesn’t match the one people are reading: on paper, on LinkedIn, and in the room.
If you've read this far, here's the rest of what we got through in that one hour. Consider it a thank-you for your attention and a sneak peek of what we could talk about as well.
Is your field really not hiring: where his skill set actually shows up in job listings, and why he wasn’t finding it.
“We’ll keep you on file”: what recruitment agencies actually mean by it, and how much weight to give it.
The top half of page 1: what HR and the hiring manager needs to see before deciding whether to keep reading.
What LinkedIn thinks you are: the open-to-work banner, the keywords that best fit his profile, and why nobody could find him.
Reading his own job hunt data: when to stop applying and review what’s not working.
The timeline reality check: how long a job hunt actually takes, and what that means for when he can realistically leave.
Interview prep before the first callback: because when it comes, there’s no time to start from zero.
Reaching out to leaders: who to contact, and how to be “annoying” without being creepy.
This is who I coach. People whose experience is the strongest out of all the applicants, but whose resume and story just haven't caught up to it yet.
And it's why I offer these calls. You're not paying for an hour of listening. You're paying for an expert eye that has seen this mismatch dozens of times and can name it fast, so you stop burning months on final rounds that were never going to convert.
If that sounds a little too familiar, Career Clarity Move is a 60-minute session built for exactly this: your resume and your target roles on the table, with someone who isn't too close to your story to see what's actually there.
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The Bumpy Career's Career Clarity Move is for the high achiever who isn't getting offers, and maybe even interviews.
It’s to diagnose, audit, and prescribe what to change to hit that ideal goal. Meaning: whether you've got 5 years of experience or 15, the fix is the same. You need someone who knows how to read a resume and clock what vibe you’re giving off in 2 minutes flat. And then can diagnose what’s the actual story you lived and how it’s mismatching with the story on the page.
That's where I come in.
In 60 minutes, I tell you exactly where the mismatch is: on paper, on LinkedIn, in your interview answers, and in the interviewer’s perception. So you leave knowing what to fix and why, instead of another few months of applications into silence.
If that sounds like where you are right now, you can book your own Career Clarity Move here and let's figure out what's actually been getting in your way.