positioning sprint starts now.

four moves. four days. read each drop, act on it.

on day four, we’ll have a clear value

prop that the market understands.

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please note: this sprint isn't about faking skills or fooling recruiters. if you want tricks, close this article. if you want to find where your actual experience meets actual demand, keep reading.

</aside>

<aside>

about the 4 day positioning sprint

</aside>

you have 7 seconds. that's it.

you're polishing your resume for the 17th time. adjusting bullet points. tweaking action verbs. trying different resume tempaltes. meanwhile the hiring manager just spent 7 seconds on your last application.

that's not laziness.

that's pattern matching. and once you understand how their brain actually works, you'll stop wasting time on shit that doesn't matter.

yes, resume needs a narrative

but even the best story fails if it doesn't match the pattern they're hunting for. today we decode what actually happens in those 7 seconds.

the neuroscience.

hiring managers aren't reading resumes. they're running facial recognition software. except instead of faces, they're scanning for patterns that match their mental model of "person who will succeed here."

google's people operations team studied their own recruiters in 2018. found they spend 6.25 seconds on initial resume scan. not skimming. pattern matching against five specific things:

1/ company logos (where you worked)

2/ role progression (your trajectory)

3/ specific keywords (their problem language)

4/ tenure patterns (how long you stay)

5/ quantified impact (numbers that matter)

everything else? kinda invisible.

your carefully crafted personal summary? skipped. those soft skills? ignored. the creative format that "shows personality"? actively hurts you because it breaks the pattern they're scanning for.

why?

because human brains under time pressure default to system 1 thinking. fast, automatic, pattern based. the same system that helps you recognize faces in a crowd. except now it's recognizing "startup product manager who can scale" or "enterprise sales leader who closes 7 figures."

and it’s not evil. it's human.

you do it too when you're overwhelmed with options.

how patterns become market truth

here's where it gets weird. these patterns aren't objective truth. they're collective beliefs that become real through repetition.