• Jamie Jackson worked in HR for over 20 years and is now a podcaster and consultant.
• Jackson said when you're no longer engaged or growing at work, it could be time for a new role.
• Updating skills and preparing a job search toolkit can aid in career transitions.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Jamie Jackson, a 43-year-old podcaster and consultant in Nashville. It has been edited for length and clarity.

As someone who has worked in HR for over 20 years, I've had this conversation countless times. People often confide in me, saying, "Jamie, I don't know what to do next."

They feel stuck in their roles, want to advance, or are considering a new job — but that can be just as scary because it means stepping outside their comfort zones. I've been there, too, wondering whether it's time to quit my job for something new.

If this is you, here are four key signs you've been in your role too long and what you can do next if you need to make a change.

1. You no longer feel motivated

Your engagement level is a good indicator of whether you've been in your role for too long.

For example, you may have previously felt engaged in meetings but now find it harder to do so because you no longer feel motivated.

Or, perhaps you once enjoyed conversations with coworkers at the watercooler or over coffee — asking about their weekends or holiday plans — but now you simply do what you need to do and move on.

2. There's no room for growth

Another sign is feeling stagnant in your growth.

For example, I once worked at a company for five years and kept being promised a promotion. Over time, it became clear it wasn't going to happen — they didn't see me moving up.

For a long time, I believed their promise was coming, but it never did. To advance, I realized I'd need to change companies because the growth I wanted wasn't going to happen there.

Sometimes, there simply isn't room for growth, and when that's the case, it's a clear sign that it's time to make your next move.

3. Your feedback has plateaued

Or, you might find yourself hitting a feedback plateau.

For instance, you may consistently receive the same performance reviews, with your manager saying that you're meeting expectations but not exceeding them — suggesting you've reached a stopping point.

If you're thinking to yourself, "I don't have anything else to offer. I'm doing the same job I was doing three years ago without additional constructive feedback or recognition," it might be time to switch roles.

4. You're burned out

Another sign is burnout. In the past, I had a job where I felt physically sick going into work.

I remember one time needing to pull over to the side of the road to puke because I was so stressed.

As I sat in a parking lot trying to compose myself, I thought, I have to find another job. I knew my mental health was more important — but as I didn't have the luxury of quitting on the spot, I found another job first.

For others, there are times when environments are insanely toxic, and they need to get out immediately — and they should, but when possible, it's important to have a plan in place.

Either way, burnout or feeling physically sick from work might be a sign that it's time for a change.

If you realize you're no longer happy in your role, you need to do some self-reflection

Ask yourself, what are my goals? Where do I want to be? In your mind, try to understand where you want to be in six months, a year, or even further into the future.

Do you need a new title or a promotion, and if so, how do you get there? Before doing anything, it's really important to understand what you want. Then it's time to take aligned action.

Brush up on your skills

Maybe you're perfectly content with your current role; you just need to be challenged more. By learning new skills, you can push for more responsibilities.

You can use resources like LinkedIn or YouTube to brush up on skills like Excel or explore additional training or certifications offered by your current company. New skills can help you stand out in your current role or make you more appealing to potential employers.

Get your tool kit ready

If you're looking to land a new job, you need to learn new skills and prepare your toolkit.

This includes updating your résumé, refreshing your LinkedIn profile, and researching the salary you should be making.

When you start looking for a new job, knowing your market value is key — especially if you've been in your current role for a while and aren't sure what the going rate is. From there, talk to your mentors, colleagues, and friends, and let them know you're looking for something new.

You might say something like, "Hey, I think by March, I'm really going to start looking for another job — so can you keep your eyes and ears open?"

That can really help.

December isn't the easiest month to get a new job, with the holidays and people taking time off. However, January can be a better time as companies enter the new fiscal year — new budgets and new positions are being rolled out. But you can always be passively looking.

Some of us are content where we're at, but if you're no longer interested in stepping up or taking on new challenges, it might be time to reassess your role.

If you're an HR professional with unique career advice you would like to share, please email Manseen Logan at [email protected].

• Morning interviews may yield higher scores due to interviewer bias, research shows.
• Bias in hiring can be influenced by the time of day, affecting candidate evaluations.
• AI tools could reduce this, offering fairer assessments than manual methods.

If you get to choose when to schedule a job interview, you might want to grab a coffee and go for a morning slot.

That's because some people conducting interviews tend to give higher scores to candidates they meet with earlier in the day compared with the afternoon, a startup's review of thousands of interviews found.

It's not an absolute, of course, and candidates can still kill it well after lunchtime. Yet, in a job market where employers in fields like tech have been slow to hire, even a modest advantage could make a difference, Shiran Danoch, an organizational psychologist, told Business Insider.

"Specific interviewers have a consistent tendency to be harsher or more lenient in their scores depending on the time of day," she said.

It's possible that in the morning, interviewers haven't yet been beaten down by back-to-back meetings — or are perhaps still enjoying their own first coffee, she said.

Danoch and her team noticed the morning-afternoon discrepancy while reviewing datasets on thousands of job interviews. Danoch is the CEO and founder of Informed Decisions, an artificial intelligence startup focused on helping organizations reduce bias and improve their interviewing processes.

She said the inferences on the time-of-day bias are drawn from the datasets of interviewers who use Informed Decisions tools to score candidates. The data reflected those who've done at least 20 interviews using the company's system. Danoch said that in her company's review of candidates' scores, those interviewed in the morning often get statistically significant higher marks.

The good news, she said, is that when interviewers are made aware that they might be more harsh in the afternoon, they often take steps to counteract that tendency.

"In many cases, happily, we're actually seeing that the feedback that we're providing helps to reduce the bias and eventually eliminate the bias," Danoch said.

However, she said, interviewers often don't get feedback about their hiring practices, even though finding the right talent is "such a crucial part" of what hiring managers and recruiters do.

She said other researchers have identified how the time of day — and whether someone might be a morning person or an evening person — can affect decision-making processes.

An examination of more than 1,000 parole decisions in Israel found that judges were likelier to show leniency at the start of the day and after breaks. However, that favorability decreased as judges made more decisions, according to the 2011 research.

Tech could help

It's possible that if tools like artificial intelligence take on more responsibility for hiring, job seekers won't have to worry about the time of day they interview.

For all of the concerns about biases in AI, partiality involved in more "manual" hiring where interviewers ask open-ended questions often leads to more bias than does AI, said Kiki Leutner, cofounder of SeeTalent.ai, a startup creating tests run by AI to simulate tasks associated with a job. She has researched AI ethics and that of assessments in general.

Leutner told BI that it's likely that in a video interview conducted by AI, for example, a candidate might have a fairer shot at landing a job.

"You don't just have people do unstructured interviews, ask whatever questions, make whatever decisions," she said.

And, because everything is recorded, Leutner said, there is documentation of what decisions were made and on what basis. Ultimately, she said, it's then possible to take that information and correct algorithms.

"Any structured process is better in recruitment than not structuring it," Leutner said.

Humans are 'hopelessly biased'

Eric Mosley, cofounder and CEO of Workhuman, which makes tools for recognizing employee achievements, told BI that data created by humans will be biased — because humans are "hopelessly biased."

He pointed to 2016 research indicating that juvenile court judges in Louisiana doled out tougher punishments — particularly to Black youths — after the Louisiana State University football team suffered a surprise defeat.

Mosley said, however, that AI can be trained to ignore certain biases and look for others to eliminate them.

Taking that approach can help humans guard against some of their natural tendencies. To get it right, however, it's important to have safeguards around the use of AI, he said. These might include ethics teams with representatives from legal departments and HR to focus on issues of data hygiene and algorithm hygiene.

Not taking those precautions and solely relying on AI can even risk scaling humans' biases, Mosley said.

"If you basically just unleash it in a very simplistic way, it'll just replicate them. But if you go in knowing that these biases exist, then you can get through it," he said.

Danoch, from Informed Decisions, said that if people conducting interviews suspect they might be less forgiving after the morning has passed, they can take steps to counteract that.

"Before you interview in the afternoons, take a little bit longer to prepare, have a cup of coffee, refresh yourself," she said.

• Companies are cracking down on job applicants trying to use AI to boost their prospects.
• 72% of leaders said they were raising their standards for hiring a candidate, a Workday report found.
• Recruiters say standards will tighten further as firms themselves use AI to weed out candidates.

AI was supposed to make the job hunt easier, but job seekers should expect landing a new gig harder in the coming years, thanks to companies growing increasingly suspicious of candidates using bots to get their foot in the door.

Hiring managers, keen to sniff out picture-perfect candidates that have used AI to augment their applications, are beginning to tighten their standards to interview and ultimately hire new employees, labor market sources told Business Insider.

Recruiters said that has already made the job market more competitive — and the selection will get even tighter as more companies adopt their own AI tools to sift through applicants.

In the first half of the year, 72% of business leaders said they were raising their standards for hiring applicants, according to a report from Workday. Meanwhile, 77% of companies said they intended to scale their use of AI in the recruiting process over the next year.

63% of recruiters and hiring decision makers said they already used AI as part of the recruiting process, up from 58% last year, a separate survey by Employ found.

Jeff Hyman, a veteran recruiter and the CEO of Recruit Rockstars, says AI software is growing more popular among hiring managers to weed through stacks of seemingly ideal candidates.

"Ironically, big companies are using AI to go through that stack, that AI has brought first place, and it's becoming this ridiculous tit-for-tat battle," Hyman told BI in an interview. "I would say human judgment … is what rules the day, but certainly, we use a lot of software to reduce a stack from 500 to 50, because you got to start somewhere," he later added.

Tim Sackett, the president of the tech staffing firm HRU Technical Resources, says some firms are beta-testing AI software that can allow companies to detect fraud on résumés — a development he thinks will make the job market significantly more competitive. That technology could become mainstream as soon as mid-2025, he speculated, given how fast AI tech is accelerating.

"It's just going to get worse," Sackett said of companies being more selective of new hires. "I mean, if more candidates become really used to utilizing AI to help them match a job better, to network better, it's just going to happen."

The interview-to-offer ratio at enterprise companies declined to 64% in July of this year, according to Employ's survey, which indicates companies are interviewing fewer candidates before making a hiring decision.

"Recruiters are scrutinizing candidates more closely," Hyman adds. "My candidate interviews have become longer and more in-depth, designed to truly test a candidate's abilities beyond a polished résumé."

Inundated by AI

Employers aren't big fans of AI as a tool for candidates to get a leg up. That's partly because it's led to hiring systems being flooded with applications sent using AI, Sackett and Hyman said, which has made hiring decisions way harder.

Workday found that job applications grew at four times the pace of job openings in the first half of this year, with recruiters processing 173 million applications, while there were just 19 million job requisitions.

Having too many candidates for a position was the third most common problem recruiters faced in 2024, Employ added.

Hyman estimates the number of applications he reviews has doubled over the last year. Some of the more lucrative job postings are seeing close to 1,000 applications, he said, whereas they would have attracted 100-200 applications before the pandemic.

"I mean, a stack so big, that you can't even go through it, it's just not even possible to spend that kind of time," he said.

Candidates sending in applications spruced up with AI has also made it harder to determine who can actually do the job.

Sackett says he's seen an increase in "false positive" hiring, where a worker is hired and is quickly let go of their position when it becomes clear they're unable to do the job.

"I think what hiring managers are concerned about: Is this CV real when I'm talking to this person? Am I talking to the real person or are they using AI in the background?" Sackett said. He recalled one client he worked with who realized multiple candidates responded to interview questions in the same way, likely because they were using AI to write their responses. "So I think people just want to know that I'm getting what I think I'm getting."

• Computer science graduates are struggling to secure jobs and internships amid increased competition from tech layoffs.
• Recent graduates told BI they have sent hundreds of job applications with little response.
• Some are choosing to pursue a "panic master's" degree to delay their job search.

A computer science degree has become an increasingly popular choice for students seeking a six-figure job in Big Tech out of college.

However, as the tech industry took a sharp turn from the hiring sprees during the pandemic to mass layoffs, conversations with over a dozen CS majors revealed many are struggling to find full-time roles and internships despite sending out hundreds of applications — sometimes as many as 700.

Now, some are opting for a "panic master's" instead, delaying their search by getting a graduate degree in the hopes the job market will improve in a year or two.

Samhita Parvatini, who graduated from Penn State University in May, told Business Insider that she entered college during the hiring frenzies of 2021 when computer science degrees were "highly sought out."

"Every industry needed engineers," she said. "Everybody said, 'Oh, it's one of the most valuable degrees you can get. You can earn so much money, you get a lot of success and career growth.'"

After roughly 250 to 300 applications since her graduation and little success, Parvatini said that the Big Tech landscape felt like it was "becoming the opposite" of what it was five years ago.

Software developer employment largely declined between late 2019 and early 2024, according to data from ADP Research Institute, with some spikes in the second half of 2021 and winter 2022 amid the pandemic hiring spree. Data from Indeed indicates job postings in the software development sector have largely dropped back to pre-pandemic levels.

Meanwhile, videos showing swarms of candidates at job fairs have become an increasingly common sight on social media.

Yahya Bashir, a recent CS graduate from Gustavus Adolphus College, said that his job-hunting experience in the last year has become more arduous.

During his last application cycle in the summer of 2023, Bashir said he often heard back quickly from companies and was invited to several interviews. However, the majority of the roles he applied to this year, which he estimates to be around a hundred, didn't reply.

"Most of them, you don't even hear back from them," Bashir said. "You submit your application, and there's just nothing."

Competing against laid-off coders with more experience

Facing low response rates and, in some cases, "ghost job" postings, software engineers fresh out of school are also having to compete with their more experienced peers.

With companies continuing to trim their staff, the tech sector has also faced two years of brutal layoffs. In 2022, over 165,000 employees were cut from a thousand tech companies, according to Layoffs.fyi, a website tracking tech layoffs. In 2023, the number of layoffs increased to over 264,000. So far in 2024, nearly 150,000 employees have been cut from over 520 tech companies.

With hundreds of thousands of already established tech workers cut loose into the job market, new graduates are facing increased competition for fewer openings.

Emos Ker, a recent graduate from New York University, said that although sub-industries within computer science, like AI and LLMs, are booming as Big Tech invests heavily, these fields often require a higher level of training.

Although more universities like Carnegie Mellon and Columbia are starting to offer AI degrees and programs, Ker said that many institutions are not yet able to provide the specific education needed for more specialized fields like AI.

Looking through a stack of résumés, companies may choose to hire a seasoned Big Tech veteran over a CS graduate who would likely require more guidance.

"With all the tech firings, they're looking for people who are like midlevel, senior engineers," Ker said. "And unfortunately, for people like us who want to come out and work in AI, it's not really easy to get into because you kind of need to train us from the ground up."

Punting the hunt with a 'panic' master's

Instead of risking being hung out to dry in the job market, several recent computer science graduates told BI that they or their peers have opted to return to the classroom to delay the search.

"The funny thing is, when I started my undergrad, I was very stubborn and was like, 'Oh, I don't need a master's,'" Parvatini said. "'It's a CS degree, you know, it's so valuable."

A month out from graduation and without a job lined up, Parvatini said she applied for her master's as a "last-minute decision."

"I knew that I wasn't going to go anywhere after graduation," she said. "So I thought, might as well apply, and we'll take a couple of classes, you know, do something better with my time during this period."

Professor David Garlan, the associate dean for Carnegie Mellon's computer science master's program, said that while the university hasn't seen a notable increase in CS grad enrollment, other schools with less selective and extensive programs may experience otherwise.

"It's definitely true that when the economy has a downturn, people go back to education because they're not able to find jobs so quickly," he said. "So there is definitely that trend, overall."

Enrollment in MIT's EECS Master of Engineering program increased from 241 students for the 2023-2024 academic year to 303 this academic year — a spike compared to previous years when enrollment stayed relatively consistent in the mid-200s.

A report by the Council of Graduate Schools said that computer science was the "only field to increase in first-time enrollment (5.4%) between Fall 2021 and Fall 2022."

Ian Hurrel, who is finishing his last semester at Georgia Institute of Technology, said enrolling in the university's one-year master's program was largely due to the worsening job market.

"A lot of people, including me, wanted to stay in college one more year to get an internship," Hurrel said. "It was very much a 'panic masters' sort of thing."

Although computer and information sciences often have lower numbers of graduate enrollment compared to other fields, a report by Burning Glass Institute indicated that 7% of those who earned graduate degrees in CS remained unemployed.

The extra schooling, while costly, can not only buy students time, it can potentially lead to a more employable résumé and higher salary. According to data from PayScale published last year, employees with a master of science degree make an average base salary of $112,000, compared to $72,000 for those with a bachelor's degree in computer science.

'Perseverance and a little bit of luck'

Despite lower morale among some CS majors, others believe that the tech sector is not as dire as social media portrays it.

Sydney Bishop, a senior at UC Irvine, said despite being unable to land an internship this past summer after over 180 applications, she remains optimistic about the job market.

"I haven't lost faith that I'll get a job somewhere," Bishop said. "It just might not be a cushy tech job that all of us have been raised to think about."

While tech giants like Google and Microsoft may not be handing out as many opportunities as they did during their hiring peaks, Bishop said that the technical skills of programming are still — and will continue to be — needed within companies.

Hurrel, who was able to land an internship with Amazon this past summer, said that he disagrees with the "fear-mongering" from people online saying computer science is a dying degree.

"I don't think it's oversaturated to the point where it will become extremely devalued and not be a worthwhile career anymore," he said. "I think it's just going to be harder than it was at the peak to break into it."

Hurrel added that there are "clearly still jobs" and that several of his peers have also been able to land internships and full-time roles. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that employment of software developers will increase by 18% by 2033.

Samuel Onabolu is one of these newly minted engineers. After what he estimated to be over a thousand applications, he was finally able to land a full time software engineering role four months after graduating from Brock University in May.

"I'm kind of surprised I even got a job so early because there are 2023 grads, 2022 grads that are still looking," he said. "So I would say it's just a lot about perseverance and a little bit of luck."

Onabolu said that while he had been "feeling really depressed" during his unsuccessful job search, he advised other new and incoming grads to prioritize internships and networking events to hopefully get their foot in the door.

"I feel like every CS major is going through the exact process I went through," he said. "I feel like it just takes that one acceptance, that one offer, to kind of break into that career."

• Job seekers with prestigious schools or employers on their résumés can benefit from a "halo" effect.
• Yet education and experience are not reliable indicators of job performance, an expert told BI.
• Some employers are shifting focus to skills and behaviors to improve hiring outcomes.

Job seekers who are attractive, who went to the right school, or who worked at the right company can enjoy a so-called "halo effect" that outweighs other factors that often are better predictors of how well someone will perform in a role.

While they look good on paper, that's a problem for employers and many job seekers, executives told Business Insider.

Shiran Danoch saw firsthand how bias can affect hiring. Early in her career, she thought she'd found the perfect candidate for a role she was trying to fill.

Yet after Danoch's boss interviewed the woman, he called Danoch into his office.

"He said, 'Why did you bring her here? She isn't one of us,'" Danoch told BI.

It slowly occurred to Danoch that her boss's problem was with the candidate's ethnicity despite what Danoch saw as her obvious fit for the role.

There's a lot of work to do to reduce bias that unfairly hurts — and helps — candidates, said Danoch, an organizational psychologist who's the CEO and founder of Informed Decisions, an artificial intelligence startup that aims to help organizations reduce bias and improve their interviewing processes.

Danoch estimates that perhaps as many as nine in 10 hires either suffer or benefit from a bias that shapes the interviewer's perceptions of the candidate's aptitude for the role.

She said this means people who aren't a great fit could end up landing the role, and candidates who would do the job better might be sidelined.

Education and experience aren't sure bets

Danoch said analysis of thousands of interviews on the Informed Decisions interview platform, combined with findings from broader academic research, highlights that "dominant-skill" bias is a prominent risk.

"When you're interviewing a candidate, there might be one specific skill that paints your overall impression," she said. Often, Danoch said, that is "effective communication." That can mean job seekers who are strong communicators can talk their way past their weaknesses.

Another risk is being wowed by grads from top schools or those who worked at high-profile companies. Substantial bodies of research have shown that education and experience aren't good predictors of how successful someone will be in a job, she said.

Meantime, it's easy to see why a hiring manager might assume someone who'd worked at one big-name tech firm might be a good fit for another. That's not always the case, according to Alan Price, the global head of talent acquisition at Deel, a global HR company that helps employers hire abroad.

He told BI that in past roles at other companies, there was often a push to focus on Ivy League grads or people who'd worked at certain tech firms. That made it hard for candidates coming from small startups, for example, to get hired, he said.

"You'd work at Facebook. You'd work at Google. You'd go to LinkedIn. There's a merry-go-round," Price said.

Yet he said those in sales, for example, who had halo résumés by virtue of having been at top companies, weren't always the strongest contributors when it came to basic metrics like how much revenue they brought in.

"The top people weren't only coming from the big, established organizations," Price said.

Hiring for skills

To improve the quality of its hires, Price said, Deel reformatted its interviewing process to focus on behaviors and less on factors like education and experience. That's led managers to report being more satisfied with the work they were getting from new hires, he said.

Price said it's not that experience doesn't count. Instead, it's evaluated alongside factors like functional skills for doing the job, behaviors, and motivation. To gain insight into skills, Deel will often have job seekers complete assessments.

That can help root out candidates who might toss around industry buzzwords, though they might lack some abilities.

"Because you've worked here and you've worked on this problem type, my assumption is, from a halo CV perspective, you're going to be really good," he said.

Price said that because some job seekers might stay at an organization for two to three years, hiring managers could take that to mean the candidates are good at what they do.

Yet "that is a big assumption," he said.

Some employers have announced efforts to look more at abilities rather than pedigree. In some cases, this can mean waiving degree requirements.

However, David Deming, a professor of political economy at Harvard's Kennedy School, previously told BI that even as some employers do away with prerequisites that candidates for some roles have a bachelor's degree, those doing the hiring might still consider whether a candidate has one.

"Firms are wanting credit for removing a requirement, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're changing their hiring at the end of the day," he said.

Strong communicators can win out

Danoch, from Informed Decisions, said one reason strong communicators can benefit from a halo effect in interviews relates to those doing the hiring.

"Because a lot of interviewers are inexperienced in interviewing, that's what grabs them," she said, referring to a candidate's communication chops.

While such abilities are often among the soft skills many employers say they value, Danoch said being able to communicate well isn't likely to be the only attribute needed for a role. Even if communication is important, she said, it shouldn't be the sole factor for hiring.

Danoch said the halo effect can be problematic if it leads employers to hire candidates who might not be the best fit. Conversely, she said, a "shadow effect" can result in capable job seekers being discounted.

"The candidate is either all good or either all bad," Danoch said.

Do you have something to share about what you're seeing in your job search? Business Insider would like to hear from you. Email our workplace team from a nonwork device at [email protected] with your story, or ask for one of our reporter's Signal numbers.

• Job seekers are bulking up their résumés with extra details to stand out in a competitive market.
• Experts warn that overly detailed résumés can be hard to navigate and may hinder job prospects.
• AI tools and keyword stuffing contribute to longer CVs, but concise formats are still best.

It might be time to put your résumé on a diet.

In recent years, a competitive job market has ramped up the temptation to trick out résumés with added details about our skills and professional accomplishments, several career experts told Business Insider.

Yet a swole document can also be harder to navigate.

"You want to make your résumé a sales page, not a Wikipedia page," Madeline Mann, a career coach and CEO of Self Made Millennial, told BI.

Many job seekers believe that including extra detail will help show off their qualifications to employers. But, Mann said, employers have specifics they're seeking on a résumé — often what's outlined in the job description.

"You do not want it to be a treasure hunt for them to find those things," she said.

A year-end résumé cleanup

With the end of the year approaching, it might be a good time to take a fresh look at what's on your résumé as many employers tend to advertise new roles in January. Plus, an uptick in job postings for recruiters in some industries indicates that stepped-up hiring might soon follow.

Doing some trimming for the new year can help because as word counts on CVs creep higher, more employers might have to search for what they need.

A review by LiveCareer of some 50,000 résumés in its database found that, on average, they had nearly doubled in length from 2018 to 2023 as more job seekers did things like adding a section highlighting their skills.

LiveCareer also found that the number of people devoting résumé real estate to certificates, languages, and other accomplishments had about doubled.

James Neave, the head of data science at the job site Adzuna, told BI that he'd also seen CVs balloon. On average, the word count of the US résumés in its database has increased by about 40% since August 2021, he said.

Stay relevant

Neave said one culprit behind résumé creep could be the inclination to inject our professional calling cards with all of the keywords from a job description.

So-called keyword stuffing, where you add the operative words or phrases that appear in a job posting to your résumé, is nothing new. Yet more people hunting down jobs might be focusing on that in an attempt to shoulder their way past the applicant-tracking systems that most large employers use to sort résumés.

Jasmine Escalera, a career expert with LiveCareer, told BI that many job seekers feel the need to include more keywords, skills, and components like accomplishments in their résumés simply to stay afloat in a competitive job market.

But it's easy to overdo it, she said. Adding too much risks having a recruiter overlook what's most important.

Escalera recommends job seekers use distinct sections to help make their résumé easy to read. She suggests working from the top down by starting with a professional summary. Unlike the "objective" that once took the top spot, the professional summary should focus on how the candidate can contribute to what the employer is seeking, Escalera said.

But, unlike an objective that once might have been a sentence or two, professional summaries often get loaded up with how long we've worked, various skills, and the value we'd bring to a job, she said.

"There's much more going into this thing to be able to stand out," Escalera said.

Next up is a skills section. For people applying for roles with quantifiable results — like sales or marketing — it can be wise to then include a section on career accomplishments. Following that would be experience and, last, education.

AI doesn't always help

While using AI to write or revamp résumés hasn't been a thing for very long, Mann said that the technology could explain at least some CVs' newfound heft. That's because while the tech can help draft and proof résumés, AI can also bring its own risks, she said.

"It's the average of all the resources that are out there, so it creates these incredibly generic résumés," Mann said.

The reason, she said, is because many people have been writing résumés in rather generic ways for a long time so that's the bulk of what AI has been trained on.

Stick to two pages — maximum

For years, the advice has broadly been that newbie workers should keep their résumé to about a page. More seasoned workers, the thinking often goes, should cap their CVs around two pages and not go beyond three.

That advice still holds, Adzuna's Neave said.

"If I get a CV and it's like four or five pages, I'm inwardly groaning already," he said. That's because it's just harder to work with, Neave said.

He recommends people with five years or less of work experience cap a résumé at a page. For longer-tenure workers, two pages should suffice in most cases.

Focus on your most recent experience

Mann, from Self Made Millennial, said that because employers tend to care about your most recent work, it's best to focus the experience section on the past decade or about the last four roles.

For most experience beyond that, she said, it's often sufficient to drop in a bullet for that role or just name the jobs. It's still important that the résumé be an accurate portrayal of your career path, Mann said, but going into detail on the old stuff often isn't useful for employers.

"If a company is interviewing you and you're constantly going back 10-plus years to answer their questions, that is going to probably hurt you," she said. "They are more interested in what have you been up to lately."

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An earlier version of this story appeared on September 8, 2024.

• Workers can start taking steps now to help boost their careers into next year.
• People should enhance their AI skills to stay competitive, one executive told BI.
• Volunteering and side hustles can boost skills, empowerment, and career opportunities.

It's almost that time again: a new year and new opportunities to improve our work and ourselves.

Alongside starting a gym routine or giving up ultra-processed foods, you might consider taking steps now that might help you begin to boost your career.

Here are three ways you can start to level up your career — even before the end of 2024, according to workplace experts.

Get better with AI

Sean Barry, the vice president of talent acquisition at Allstate, told Business Insider that workers should try to become more proficient in artificial intelligence.

He said it's essential to realize that the technology will put a premium on a new set of skills for many people — like how to create an appropriate prompt for generative AI.

"That is not a skill that anybody talked about two years ago, and it's critically important now," Barry said, adding that people who are better at this will likely do better in their careers.

One way to improve your AI skills is simply to use it. Start by trying out chatbots and seeing what works.

It's become a cliché to say that AI won't replace you, but someone who knows how to use it will. Yet there are areas where AI might replace humans, which is why a better understanding of how AI works can be beneficial.

Kiki Leutner is cofounder of SeeTalent.ai, which is developing tests run by AI that would simulate tasks associated with a job to help the hiring process. She told BI that, traditionally, employers tended to use such tests for more senior roles only where it was worth the money and effort. Or, a company might give a software developer a coding task as a way of measuring proficiency.

Leutner said Generative AI can let employers test far more job seekers and across a broader range of roles than would otherwise be practical. Plus, she said, AI-run assessments can collect insights that previously were difficult to capture, such as how someone might interact with others.

Success in such areas often involves the soft skills employers say they're seeking and many bosses contend too many workers lack.

Share your skills by volunteering

You might feel too busy at work, yet carving out some time to help others can help you. A recent study from the University of Oxford found that volunteering proved more effective in boosting worker well-being than other interventions.

It's especially beneficial if it involves using your skills to assist others, according to Leila Saad, CEO of Common Impact, a nonprofit that connects companies and their workers with other nonprofits.

Saad told BI that many nonprofits lack the resources to meet all of their operational needs. So, when workers with that expertise can help, it benefits both the organization and the worker, she said.

"It feels good to give back skills you've honed over your entire career," she said.

That often trumps something like showing up for a one-off event like painting a school or planting trees, Saad said.

Beyond that, she said, workers — and their employers — can benefit if the employee might develop additional skills through volunteering.

Jennifer Schielke, the CEO of the staffing firm Summit Group Solutions and the author of "Leading for Impact," previously told BI that volunteering — even after something traumatic like losing a job — can help those newly out of work get a sense of perspective.

"If you have time to volunteer, go do it," she said. "Go get some encouragement by sitting alongside someone who has it worse than you do."

Consider starting a side hustle

Side hustles get a lot of attention when they're lucrative, yet there can be other benefits. They can be limited to weekend jobs, so workers' weekdays aren't too full. In other cases, side hustles might relieve burnout.

They can also make workers feel empowered.

Daniel Zhao, the lead economist at Glassdoor, told BI that workers in some industries feel stuck in their 9-to-5 roles because of lackluster hiring. That might be one reason more workers are picking up side hustles.

Zhao pointed to data gathered by Glassdoor and the Harris Poll. In a February survey of some 1,100 US adults, 39% reported having a side gig. The share was higher among younger workers: Fifty-seven percent of Gen Zers and 48% of millennials reported doing work in addition to their primary roles.

"Workers are much more willing to experiment nowadays," Zhao said. He pointed to rates of entrepreneurship, which he said "skyrocketed" during the pandemic.

Zhao said it's good news that entrepreneurship rates remain elevated following a "fairly weak" 2010s and said it indicates America's entrepreneurial spirit has recovered.

New business applications in the US have jumped to 431,000 a month in 2024, up 47% from 293,000 a month in 2019, Zhao said.

"Not only is that an opportunity for people to supplement their income on the side, but it also opens up new opportunities, new ideas, new technologies that can potentially boost the economy in the long run," he said.