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Chameleon Resumes Resume Writing & Job Search Consultancy | www.chameleonresumes.com
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To use color or not to use color? That is the resume question..I get asked more than you'd think.I'm all for color. You ...
10/13/2026

To use color or not to use color? That is the resume question..

I get asked more than you'd think.

I'm all for color. You don't HAVE to use it, but I'm typically a fan.

My one condition is that you use it for the reader.

I believe there is too much ego bleeding into color choices on executive resumes. Job seekers (and some resume writers) forget the why behind the resume, which is to get the reader to the most desirable parts of your background fast.

So if you use color, pick one or two places for it and let it do that job.

Use it to draw the eye to what someone would most want to hire you for.

Using every color trick at once is too much, and it starts to compete with your accomplishments.

The color you choose changes what the reader sees first. So make sure it's the thing you want them to see. 🌈

A client asked me recently, "Are you seeing a lot of changes these days with AI screening candidates?"Here's what I told...
10/11/2026

A client asked me recently, "Are you seeing a lot of changes these days with AI screening candidates?"

Here's what I told him:

I'm on a board of an agentic AI company who creates agents for recruiters. And it's not as big of a 'bogeyman/clickbait' topic as it's made out to be. AI agents screening candidates are created by the people who recruit and need help screening the high volumes of candidates applying (and mostly using AI to apply LOL).

So if you write like a human using achievements, outcomes, and impact in your bullets, you can get recognized by human-created AI … or a human using semantic search techniques (search like we talk) wanting certain outcomes.

Then there's this candidate.

They tell me they're going to use AI to write their resume and send it out to job postings.

Same candidate, a few months later tells me the hiring system is broken, and they can't get a human being to pay attention to them.

Really?

If you don't put your humanness into your marketing collateral, and you don't engage humans in your job search, why are you complaining that humans aren't responding?

And why are you bitching that you are getting filtered out by AI bots, but you used AI to try to game the 'AI bots'?

If you are playing the AI game, well, your results will be AI generated, too.

If you want people to reply, you gotta play the people game.

"Stop listening to my random friends who are successful and have good jobs, but haven't looked for one in years."That an...
10/09/2026

"Stop listening to my random friends who are successful and have good jobs, but haven't looked for one in years."

That answer came back from Stacey Staaterman when my email went out, asking what advice you wish you'd taken sooner.

The people around you mean well. They'll tell you what worked the last time they looked, and for a lot of them that was years ago.

When a client gives me feedback from a well-intentioned friend, I typically ask, “when was the last time they did a job search?”

Because recent success matters when giving advice…

Advice ages and someone who landed a role back when their network still picked up the phone is describing a door that has since closed.

Stacey is a management coach, so she has watched this play out from both sides.

So before you take advice on your search, ask when that person last ran one themselves. If it has been years, take the encouragement and leave the tactics.

Whose advice are you actually running on right now, and what is it telling you?

After I wrote about long tenure in August, a reader wrote back with the opposite worry.Several employers over roughly ei...
10/06/2026

After I wrote about long tenure in August, a reader wrote back with the opposite worry.

Several employers over roughly eighteen years, the last few ending in company-wide layoffs, and a fear that it reads as job hopping, or worse, as a performance problem.

I hear both versions of this all the time, so let me be straight with you.

Long tenure gets read as "can't deal with change." Short stints get read as "chose poorly" or "something is wrong with performance." Both are wrong assumptions, and both are also real.

Every interviewer walks in with a bias about your history. You can't stop that. What you CAN do is prepare for it.

I'd put your prep efforts in two main places:

Interview prep for the bias you expect. Build achievement, outcome and impact stories that fit the job you want, and have them ready before anyone asks.
A resume and profile built on results. Seniority doesn't qualify you for anything. Everyone over forty has fifteen-plus years of experience, so that's not a differentiator. What made you great in those fifteen years, is.

When your bullets show how well you did each job, the job-hopping read loses most of its power.

Prepare for the bias you expect, and let the results do the arguing.

You made it to the final round four times this year. Four times you were one of two or three people left. And you are st...
10/04/2026

You made it to the final round four times this year. Four times you were one of two or three people left. And you are still looking.

Nobody gets to a final round at your level without the qualifications.

From the hiring side of the table, the last round is about who the committee can already picture running the thing six months from now. The candidate who wins is the one who has been specific.

They know the problem the company is solving, and someone in that process has already repeated their name in a meeting they were not in.

If you have been a finalist more than twice this year and want to know what is costing you the offer, come talk to us. Link in comments.

10/02/2026

Executives who haven't looked for a job in a decade will often come back to LinkedIn and find it's a different place.

Some of that is cosmetic, with a new layout and everyone suddenly posting like a columnist.

The tough part is usually the network you spent twenty years building, which doesn't answer or engage the way it used to.

A connection you haven't spoken to since 2016 is just a name on a list. Or at least that's all it is until you reopen it.

The good news is that it's repairable, and faster than you'd think. One genuine message with no ask attached, tends to reopen more doors than any polished post you could write.

So, pick one person this week you haven't spoken to in years and send them something that has nothing to do with your search. Congratulate them on the move you saw. Tell them what you remembered about working with them. Then leave it there.

Maybe something like:

"Saw you moved to [company]. Congratulations, that's a great fit for you. I still think about the [project] we did together in [year]. Hope you're well."

Leave out the "let's catch up" and the calendar link for the first message.

You're reopening a door and letting them walk through it when they're ready.

You'll be surprised who writes back and what it can set in motion!

A healthcare lawyer landed a role after one conversation. A VP of Marketing landed hers with resume, interview coaching,...
09/29/2026

A healthcare lawyer landed a role after one conversation. A VP of Marketing landed hers with resume, interview coaching, and search strategy from our team. None of them were getting callbacks before they called us.

Michael Schwartz is a Healthcare Lawyer and Chief Strategy Officer. He made one connection through our Outreach Amplifier that he would not have made on his own. That connection referred him to a company where he got the job after the first conversation.

Mike Corridon is a CFO who came to us at 60. He had not searched in almost 20 years and assumed he could dust off his old resume and be fine. After the positioning work, age never came up again.

Julia Steele is a VP of Marketing. She worked with us on her resume, interview coaching, and search strategy. In her words: “I ended up landing a dream role in no small part to Lisa. Thank you, team.”

Nathalie Oestmann had been at one company for 15 years and did not know where to start. It took 12 months. But when the right role appeared, she was ready. Her words: "When it appeared, I was ready!"

Don Drehoff was 50+, forced out of his role, and thought he could handle it on his own. His words afterward: "You don't think you want to invest in this type of help... but you need this type of help."
Every one of them started in the same place you might be right now: qualified, experienced, and invisible to the people making the decisions.
If your search has been running for months and you cannot figure out what is holding it back, one conversation is usually enough to see it.
chatwithuslive.com

How long should an executive job search take?...Longer than most executives expect. And it almost always takes longer th...
09/27/2026

How long should an executive job search take?...

Longer than most executives expect. And it almost always takes longer than it needs to.

Most of the time it is not the market slowing things down. It is the approach. When the approach is right, the timeline changes.

One of our bundle clients, Karen G., a Marketing Director, put it this way:

"After applying your 'Get Hired Fast Bundle' to my resume and LinkedIn profile, I had an immediate uptick in interviews. I start my new job in 2 weeks, and I was able to negotiate a higher starting salary than what was initially offered."

Karen worked through the material, applied it in order, and the results followed. Resume, interviews, negotiation. Each stage built on the one before it.

Your resume, LinkedIn, outreach, interviews, follow-up, and negotiation...each one matters.

But most executive job seekers are working on whichever one feels urgent that week and skipping the ones that feel uncomfortable, never connecting them into a single system.

That is how a four-month search becomes a nine-month search.

We built the Get Hired Fast Bundle for exactly this. $127, thirteen trainings, ebooks, and templates that walk you through the whole search in order so you stop bouncing between pieces and wondering which one is broken.

Here is what you get:

📍 The Job Landing Mindset [eBook]
📍6 Figure Resume [eBook]
📍The Modern Executive Resume Formula [Recorded Training]
📍Three Easy-Plug-In-Info Resume Templates [Most Popular]
📍Cover Letter eNotes [eManual]
📍How To Use Your LinkedIn Profile To Land Executive Job Interviews Faster [Recorded Training]
📍7 Job Landing Steps [eManual]
📍Interview Powerfully [eBook]
📍Interview Powerfully & Get Hired [Recorded Training]
📍Writing Effective Interview Thank You Letters [Templates]
📍The Art of Maximizing Your Compensation [eBook]
📍The "Pretend You're Fired Today" Podcast [Directory]
📍6 Deadly Job Search Mistakes [Recorded Training]

You can work through it at your own pace. Apply it as you go. The search gets shorter when the system is right.

Buy your bundle at GetHiredFastBundle.com

Fill in the blank...For most executives who have not looked for a job in a decade, the surprise has nothing to do with n...
09/25/2026

Fill in the blank...

For most executives who have not looked for a job in a decade, the surprise has nothing to do with new features.

Maybe the network you spent twenty years building does not respond the way you assumed it would.

Maybe the connections from 2016 are names in a list, not relationships.

Maybe the recruiter who placed you once has not called in eight months.

Whatever yours is, drop it in the comments. I have a feeling you are not the only one.

Working with senior leaders, I hear this often...There’s a question they carry into every conversation:“Is it my age?”Le...
09/22/2026

Working with senior leaders, I hear this often...

There’s a question they carry into every conversation:

“Is it my age?”

Let me be straight. Pretending otherwise won’t help you.

Age bias exists. Anyone who tells you it doesn’t hasn’t sat in the rooms I have.

But here’s what I’ve learned from dozens of executive searches that stalled:

It wasn’t age that stopped them.

It was their resume.

Too often, those resumes listed responsibilities without evidence the executive could deliver results worth the package they’d command: remote flexibility, equity, stock options, a salary north of $300K.

Employers will pay all of that. But only when the resume makes the case you’ve produced outcomes at that level before.

Nobody gets hired at a premium for seniority alone.

It happens because someone on the hiring committee looked at the resume and said:

“This person has done the thing we need done, at the scale we need it done.”

And yet most executives hold on to their old roles like precious memories.

Those early jobs don’t matter the way you think they do.

Too many profiles say what you have *been* rather than what you *do*.

Too much outreach is so generic that nobody could explain it to a third party.

What matters is what you’ve produced recently.

And whether someone can look at your resume and see proof you’re worth what you’ll cost.

You can’t change your age. But you can change your profile and your outreach. And right now, those are doing more damage than your graduation year ever will.

If you want a clear, outside-eye read on whether your resume is making the case for the compensation you want, or just listing the jobs you’ve held, let’s talk it through.

Book a call with us at chatwithuslive.com

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Rutherford, NJ
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