What I'm Actually Looking For When I Reject Your Resume

I've gone through more than 40 resumes this year for a senior associate opening on my team, and lately I've rejected almost every single one of them. The applicant pool hasn't been weak. The role has a narrower fit than most people applying for it realize, and I want to walk through exactly what that fit looks like from my side of the desk.

I'm part of a small team, about 15 people, and I'm still client-facing myself, with hiring as one of several things I handle. I'll get to why that matters in a bit.

Here's the part that trips people up most. My firm works with companies in the 0 to 60 million revenue range, and we don't touch insurance companies, banks, or other financial institutions. Those two facts alone eliminate a huge chunk of otherwise strong candidates. I've had people apply straight out of Big Four audit or from a large regional bank's finance function, and on paper they look excellent. Then I think about what they'd actually be doing on day one, walking a client through a transaction from origination to close, understanding how a business with 20 employees actually operates, and I realize the skill set doesn't transfer the way the resume suggests it should. A person who spent three years auditing a bank's loan portfolio has real technical chops, and those chops just don't map onto what my clients need.

I want to be clear about something, because I think it gets lost when people are staring at another rejection: this usually isn't about capability. It's about fit. A person who's great at what they do can still be the wrong candidate for a specific seat, and that's a harder thing to explain in a form rejection email than “we went another direction.”

A few months ago, I had a candidate I was ready to make an offer to, based on a strong resume and a referral I trusted. At the time I was hiring for a role that leaned financial analyst, heavy on tools like Power BI, and this person fit that need well. But we didn't have the headcount to bring on a second person right then, so the opportunity closed. A few months later I'm hiring again, and the priority has shifted toward someone with public accounting experience specifically. That candidate hasn't gotten a callback. Nothing about them changed. What changed was what my team needed.

I'll say this too, because it's part of why I lean so heavily on background over polish. I know of someone at a similar level who interviewed beautifully, confident, well spoken, said all the right things, and was fired within 90 days because the actual skill on the job didn't come close to matching the impression they'd made in the room. That experience makes me trust a documented track record in the right kind of work more than I trust a strong interview alone. It's part of why the public accounting background carries so much weight for me right now, even when the job posting doesn't spell that out.

That's the part I think students and early career people underestimate. You're not just being measured against some fixed bar of quality. You're being measured against what a specific team needs in a specific window of time, and that window moves.

Seniority matters here too, more than people expect for a role one step above entry level. If I don't see a track record of promotion, ideally someone who spent real time as an associate before moving up, I start questioning whether this person is actually ready to operate at the senior level or whether the title just came with tenure. I'm not looking for perfection. I'm looking for evidence that someone has already shown they can grow into more responsibility, because that's exactly what I'll be asking them to do again.

There's a version of this that has nothing to do with the candidate at all, and it's worth saying plainly because silence can feel a lot more personal than it is. Recruiting isn't my only job. When something more urgent comes up, and it usually does, the search gets pushed to the back burner, and a resume that would have gotten a callback two weeks ago just sits there. I've also seen firms, mine included at times, prioritize filling leadership level roles before backfilling the associate or senior associate seats underneath them, purely because that's the order that makes sense for building out a team. None of that reflects on the quality of your resume. It reflects on the fact that hiring at a small firm is run by people who are also doing their actual jobs, and priorities shift constantly.

I've been on the other end of this exact dynamic. Years ago, as a manager at a public accounting firm, I tried to move into an industry accounting manager role and got passed over more than once because I didn't have industry experience, despite having led 20 or more financial statement audits a year and understanding those companies' books better than most people sitting inside them. It stung, and at the time it felt arbitrary. Looking back, I understand it the same way I'm asking you to understand my own process now. It wasn't a judgment on my ability. It was a mismatch between what I'd done and what a specific seat needed at a specific moment.

None of this means the process is fair, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise to my students. There genuinely aren't enough roles for the number of qualified people looking for them right now, and a lot of what happens to your resume is out of your hands. But there's still a real difference between being persistent and being smart about where you point that persistence. Understand what a role actually needs, not just what the title implies, and be honest with yourself about how your background lines up before you apply.

One more thing, since it comes up constantly as we go through these piles. Keep your resume to one page. I don't have time to read more, and neither does almost anyone else screening these. I'll give you a pass on one small error, a stray formatting inconsistency or a typo. The second one I find, I start wondering whether you'd bring that same carelessness to my clients' books, the ones I need accurate down to the penny.

I tell my students something I believe applies well beyond accounting: whoever is looking at your resume, or sitting across from you in an interview, can say no for any reason they want, and probably some illegal ones too, whether or not you ever find out. Your job isn't to control that. It's to not give them extra reasons to reach for the no, which starts with the resume.