In late November of 2025, I got a call I wasn't expecting. After four years at my company, I was laid off. Thirty days before Christmas.
There was no warning. No "we should talk next week." Just a meeting invite, a short conversation, and a suddenly empty calendar.
The market wasn't kind
The timing couldn't have been worse. Major tech companies had just finished their own layoff rounds, flooding the market with incredibly talented engineers. People with Ivy League degrees and FAANG pedigrees were competing for the same roles I was eyeing.
I don't have that kind of resume. What I did have was range: over a decade of building things across mobile apps, augmented reality, firmware for medical devices, web applications, and more. I'd led teams, mentored junior developers, and architected systems from the ground up.
But range is only an asset if you can communicate it clearly. And that's where things fell apart.
The resume grind
I started applying to everything that looked like a fit. Mobile roles, web roles, firmware roles. The problem was that each one needed a different version of me on paper.
If a job called for a web developer, I couldn't lead with my mobile experience. If it was a firmware role, nobody cared about the AR apps I'd shipped. Every application meant opening my resume, gutting half of it, rewriting the rest to emphasize the relevant parts, and hoping I didn't accidentally leave in a bullet point about the wrong tech stack.
An hour per application. Sometimes two. And that was before the cover letter.
The memory problem
Here's the part nobody talks about: I had been at one company for roughly nine years and another for about four. That's a lot of projects. A lot of wins. And I couldn't remember half of them.
I could tell you the languages I'd used and what the products looked like, but the specifics? The metrics? Every resume guide tells you to include real numbers: "Improved battery life by 50% by optimizing the firmware." Great advice. But how are you supposed to remember that after four years of working on other things?
My best work was buried in old Jira tickets, archived Slack channels, and performance reviews I hadn't looked at in years. I was sitting on a goldmine of experience and couldn't access any of it when it mattered most.
So I built something
I kept coming back to the same thought: my career hadn't changed between applications. Only the lens had. Why was I rewriting my entire story every time someone wanted to see a different angle?
So I started building what would become ResumeNexus.
The core idea is simple: you tell your career story once. Every project, every role, every accomplishment you can remember goes into a single, structured archive. Then, when you find a role worth applying to, you paste in the job posting. ResumeNexus reads what the role is actually asking for, pulls the most relevant pieces from your archive, and generates a tailored resume for that specific position.
Not a generic resume with a few words swapped out. A genuinely targeted one that puts your most relevant experience front and center, so recruiters don't have to connect the dots themselves.
And importantly: everything on the resume is real. ResumeNexus doesn't fabricate accomplishments or invent skills you don't have. Your career archive is the source of truth, and nothing makes it onto the page that you didn't put there first. If you want help rewording a bullet point to sound stronger, it can help with that — but it's your experience, in your words, telling your story. No AI slop. No made-up metrics. Just the right parts of your real career, surfaced at the right time.
What it meant for my search
I used ResumeNexus throughout my own job search. Instead of spending an hour per application wrestling with formatting and trying to remember what I'd done in 2019, I'd paste a job posting and have a solid first draft in minutes. I could review it, tweak a few lines, and move on.
It meant I could apply to more roles without cutting corners. It meant I stopped forgetting about that one project from three years ago that happened to be a perfect match. And it meant I could spend my limited energy on preparing for interviews instead of agonizing over bullet points.
I'm proud to say that the process worked. After some searching, I found my dream job.
Why I'm sharing this
I know what it feels like to be in that spot. The stress of an unexpected layoff, compounded by a hiring market that feels stacked against you, compounded again by a resume process that's somehow still stuck in the dark ages. It's exhausting.
I built ResumeNexus to fix that for myself. But the problem isn't unique to me. Whether you're a senior engineer with a decade of experience or someone early in your career trying to figure out how to stand out, the resume grind is the same for everyone.
That's why there's a free tier. If you're in a tough spot financially, you can build your career archive and track your applications without paying anything. I've been in that position. I know that when you're between jobs, every dollar matters.
I sincerely hope ResumeNexus helps you land somewhere great. And if you have feedback, ideas, or just want to share your story, I'd genuinely love to hear from you.
Good luck out there.
-- Mike