Frequently Asked Questions

Anyone can write a resume. Very few people understand how hiring decisions are actually made.

Adam is a nationally recognized expert on hiring and workplace trends, but what truly sets him apart is that he’s been a recruiter since 2003 and remains actively involved in recruiting today.

He’s reviewed applications, screened candidates, partnered with hiring managers, and used applicant tracking systems in real hiring environments. He understands how decisions are made from the recruiter’s side of the table, not just how the process is explained to jobseekers.

Many resume writers and career coaches have limited exposure to recruiting, or their experience is narrow, outdated, or no longer reflective of how hiring works today. Adam’s experience spans decades, industries, roles, and hiring models, and it’s informed by ongoing, hands-on work in the current market.

His guidance is grounded in real hiring behavior and current market dynamics, not recycled advice or outdated playbooks. He helps jobseekers make their value obvious to decision-makers who don’t have time to interpret or infer what a resume is trying to say.

Yes. Adam personally completes all core resume services at Karpiak Consulting, including Comprehensive Resume Reviews and resume edits.

That matters because this isn’t template-based writing or surface-level feedback. Adam approaches every resume the same way he would as a recruiter reviewing it for a real role. He evaluates how your background reads to a hiring manager, how quickly your relevance shows up, where doubt might creep in, and what would cause someone to move on after a quick scan.

Every recommendation is shaped by your specific background, industry, seniority level, and career goals. There’s no one-size-fits-all formula here. A resume for a senior leader, a career switcher, or someone returning after time away all require different judgment calls. Adam makes those calls using the same instincts he’s built over decades of hiring and recruiting.

When Adam works on your resume, he’s not just improving wording or layout. He’s deciding what to emphasize, what to downplay, what context needs to be added, and what would resonate most with the people who are actually making hiring decisions. The goal is to make your value immediately obvious, credible, and easy to understand in the way recruiters and hiring managers really read resumes.

Mini Resume Reviews are handled by trained, in-house team members and are never outsourced to freelancers or offshore partners. Everything stays within Karpiak Consulting, and every reviewer is aligned with Adam’s standards and approach.

This hands-on model does mean turnaround times could be longer and pricing could be higher than mass-market alternatives. You’re investing in focused, recruiter-level judgment and personalized strategy, applied directly to your resume by someone who understands why people get hired and why they don’t.

That’s the difference with Karpiak Consulting.

That’s what a lot of tools, commercials, and posts would have you believe. Drop in your resume, get instant suggestions, and you’re good to go. But if it were really that easy, people wouldn’t still be struggling to get interviews.

What we’re seeing behind the scenes tells a different story.

A lot of the resumes we fix are clearly AI-generated. And from a recruiting perspective, they’re a problem. They all sound the same. They’re packed with vague buzzwords, recycled phrasing, and fake confidence that doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. Recruiting is more than just keywords.

Once recruiters start to recognize that pattern, the next question becomes, “Is any of this even true?” That doubt is enough to make someone pass. A resume’s supposed to build trust. AI tends to break it.

AI can be useful in small ways, like helping you generate a rough draft. But the idea that it can fully optimize your resume without any human input just isn’t realistic. Context matters. Targeting matters. And if your resume doesn’t clearly communicate your value in a way that hiring managers actually care about, you’re going to keep getting ignored.

That’s where real recruiting experience makes a difference. We’ve been on the other side of the hiring process. We know how recruiters skim. We know what gets ignored, what raises red flags, and what actually gets a callback. We've seen thousands of resumes, across all industries, and worked directly with hiring managers making real decisions. That perspective is hard to fake...and AI doesn’t have it.

AI-generated resumes often miss the mark because they’re built on guesswork. They know what sounds professional, but not what actually works. They can mimic structure, but they can’t assess whether your bullet points reflect what hiring managers want to see at your level, in your industry, for your goal. They don’t understand nuance, gaps, pivots, or how to strategically position someone moving from, say, federal government to the private sector, or from people ops to generalist leadership.

And the truth is, recruiters are catching on. When they see that templated, overly confident, buzzword-heavy tone, the first reaction is usually, “Did this person write this?” The second is, “Can I trust it?” That’s not how you want to start.

In fact, Adam’s been interviewed in news articles about the rise of AI-generated resumes and why recruiters aren’t buying them (see: https://qz.com/ai-job-searches-careers).

If you’ve been relying on AI and still getting no traction, your resume might not be as “optimized” as you think.