THE EDIT Issue 15
Over the weekend, I was speaking to a group of students at Georgetown University when someone asked me a question I hear constantly from students, recent graduates and early-career professionals:
“I keep applying to jobs. Why is nothing happening?”
It’s one of the most frustrating parts of a job search because, from your side, it can feel like you’re doing everything you’re supposed to do. You’re searching for openings, finding jobs that seem relevant to your experience, updating your resume, filling out applications and waiting for something to happen.
Maybe you’ve applied to 10 jobs. Maybe it’s 50. Maybe you stopped counting somewhere around 100.
When all of that effort results in very few interviews, or none at all, the natural conclusion is that you need to apply to more jobs. Sometimes that may be true. But before you spend another night opening 17 tabs and submitting applications until you can no longer remember which company you just applied to, it’s worth figuring out whether the number of applications is actually the problem.
Because “I’m not getting interviews” tells us the outcome. It doesn’t tell us where the job search is breaking down.
Why am I applying for jobs and not getting interviews?
There are multiple points between finding a fashion job posting and getting invited to an interview where your search can stall.
You could be applying to roles that aren’t as closely aligned with your experience as you think. You may have relevant experience, but your resume isn’t communicating it clearly enough. You could be finding opportunities after a company has already started reviewing candidates, or relying on one version of your resume for jobs that require very different skills.
Your search itself could also be limiting you. Fashion job titles are far less standardized than people realize, so searching for one specific title can mean missing adjacent opportunities that use many of the same skills. And even when you find the right opportunity, there’s still the question of whether your application makes your fit for that particular role easy to understand.
These are different problems, and sending more applications doesn’t automatically solve any of them.
If your issue is targeting, changing a few words on your resume probably isn’t the answer. If you’re applying to well-matched roles but your experience is difficult to understand from your resume, doubling your application count is unlikely to fix that either.
This is why I don’t particularly like application counts as a measure of a strong job search. Applying to 100 jobs may sound productive, but it doesn’t tell me whether those were the right 100 jobs, whether your application made sense for them or what happened after you submitted it.
Before you apply to another 100, it helps to understand what can actually happen to the applications you’re already sending.
What is an Applicant Tracking System (ATS)?
An Applicant Tracking System, commonly called an ATS, is software employers use to collect, organize and manage candidates and job applications throughout the hiring process.
If you’ve applied for a fashion internship or job through an online careers portal, there’s a good chance you’ve interacted with one, even if you didn’t realize it.
ATS has also become one of those career terms that gets repeated so often online that the explanation sometimes becomes more frightening than useful. You’ll hear that you need to “beat the ATS,” as though there is one universal system sitting between you and every recruiter in fashion, scanning resumes and tossing most of them into a digital trash can.
That’s an oversimplification.
Different employers use different systems (some, like Bloomingdale’s, don’t use any at all!), companies configure them differently, and recruiting teams have their own processes. Depending on the employer and technology being used, recruiters may be able to search applications, filter candidates, review information captured from resumes and applications, and manage candidates as they move through the hiring process.
Instead of thinking about ATS as something you need to trick, I want you to think about a much more useful question: How easy is it to understand that your experience is relevant to this particular job?
Whether your application is being processed by software, reviewed by a recruiter, passed along to a hiring manager or moving through some combination of all three, the relevance of your experience needs to be easy to understand.
Your resume may make sense to you. Does it make sense for this job?
This is one of the biggest disconnects I see with job seekers.
You know what you did at your internship. You know that the event you helped execute required project management, even if “project management” was never technically in your title. You know that running your student organization’s Instagram meant creating content calendars, reviewing performance and coordinating with other people. You know that working in retail taught you about clients, sales goals, product, inventory and consumer behavior.
The employer only knows what you put on the page.
Fortunately, employers also tell you a surprising amount about what they care about in the job description.
A fashion marketing role that repeatedly mentions campaign execution, cross-functional collaboration, reporting and social media is giving you information about how that company defines the job.
A merchandising role emphasizing assortment, competitive research, sales performance and Excel is telling you something different. An e-commerce role that keeps returning to site merchandising, analytics, product launches and customer experience is doing the same.
This does not mean taking phrases from the posting and sprinkling them throughout your resume because someone on TikTok told you that’s how you “beat” an ATS. Your experience still has to be true, specific and yours.
What the job description gives you is context. It shows you how that employer describes the work, what appears to be important to them and what they are asking the person in this position to be able to do.
Try this before your next application
Choose one fashion job you genuinely want and put the complete job description on one side of your screen and your current resume on the other.
Don’t edit anything yet.
Read the job description as if you were trying to understand the position rather than trying to get hired for it. Pay attention to the responsibilities that seem to carry the most weight, the skills that appear more than once, what is required versus preferred, and how the company describes the work.
Then read your resume from the perspective of someone who knows nothing else about you.
They don’t know that your internship involved much more than your title suggests. They don’t know about the project you worked on unless you tell them. They don’t know that something you described broadly on your resume actually gave you experience in one of the skills they are specifically looking for.
Based only on what is on the page, how easy would it be for someone to understand why your experience makes sense for this particular role?
If that connection is difficult to see, it doesn’t automatically mean you aren’t qualified. It may mean you aren’t communicating your qualifications as clearly as you think you are, which gives you something much more useful to work with than assuming you simply need to apply to more jobs.
Your application is only one part of the job search
A stronger resume can improve the way you present your experience, but there is still a larger question I want you to consider.
What are you doing with the opportunities you care about most?
There is a big difference between submitting an application and building a strategy around a job you genuinely want. The latter requires you to think about the entire process, including choices you make before you apply and what happens once the application is out of your hands.
You certainly don’t need to turn every application into a research project. I would actually like you to have a life outside of refreshing LinkedIn. But treating every opportunity exactly the same can mean missing relatively simple ways to make a stronger application or become more than another name in a very large applicant pool.
So, let’s say you find a fashion job tomorrow that you really want. You have the experience, the role makes sense for you, and you know this is one you don’t want to approach the same way as every other application.
Here’s what I would do.