The first question is, “Can this person do the job?”
The second question is, “Does their resume make that case?”
What you may not realize is that these two questions don't always have the same answer.
These two questions are critical to separate because the fix is completely different depending on which one is actually the problem. If someone genuinely lacks a skill but has the desire to earn a specific job, then the answer is to build that skill. If someone has the skill but the resume doesn't show it, the answer is much easier: rewrite the resume! Confusing the two questions frequently leads people toward the wrong fix, or worse, dissuades them from a path entirely.
Two things that look similar but aren't
Capability. Capability refers to what you can competently perform. This includes skills, domain knowledge, and a track record of delivering outcomes. Capability is established through patience, hard work, and experience. It becomes immediately evident in what someone can demonstrate or speak to in depth when asked.
Signal is narrower: does one’s resume, read cold by a stranger in a short window, communicate that capability clearly? A recruiter scanning a stack of applications and an applicant tracking system extracting a text layer are both, in different ways, judging signal instead of capability.
These two qualities typically move together. Someone with a decade of strong, relevant experience typically has a resume that reflects it. But this is not always the case, and the gap between them is worth identifying when it shows up because it points to a different problem than a genuine lack of necessary skills and experiences.
Where the gap tends to show up
A few patterns come up often enough to be worth checking for directly:
- The work is described by duty, not outcome. “Responsible for managing client accounts” establishes that a task existed. It says nothing about whether it was done well, and a reader has no way to tell the difference between someone who managed accounts adequately and someone who managed them exceptionally.
- Results aren't quantified, even when they could be. It is important to recognize that not every achievement has an obvious number attached, but more often than people expect, a number does exist and simply never made it onto the page. These numbers include things such as team size, time saved, volume handled, or before-and-after.
- The resume undersells a lateral or unconventional path. Career changes, internal transfers, and cross-functional work often build real, transferable capability that doesn't map cleanly onto a single job title, and a resume built around job titles can end up hiding exactly the experience that would be most compelling.
- The language doesn't overlap with how the target role describes the work. Different industries and even different companies often describe the same underlying work differently. A resume written for a different context isn’t irrelevant, but it may lack the necessary context for the right person to value it properly. Certain language may not resonate with a reader unfamiliar with the original context's vocabulary.
A rough way to check
One useful exercise: read your own resume as if you'd never met the person it describes, and ask what a stranger could reasonably conclude about what you're capable of. If the honest answer to that is noticeably more modest than what you know to be true, then it’s worth following this thread. There may be evidence of a signal problem, though not proof, since it's hard to read your own resume with a real objective lens.
The gap can run the other way, too. A resume can oversell, claiming more than the underlying experience supports. Note that this is a different problem with a different fix. Scale back the claims to what's defensible in an interview.
Why the distinction matters
If the real issue is a skills gap, the fix takes time. You need to identify the real gaps and determine the best way to build relevant experience. This path requires more meaningful work, but it’s worth it. If the real issue is a signal gap, the fix can be comparatively fast! Your underlying capability was already there, and it just needed to be written down clearly. Treating a signal problem as if it were a skills problem can send someone chasing a lengthy plan to fix something that was never actually missing.
How I use this
This is why the Michaud Method scores skills and experience signal as two separate dimensions instead of one. When these dimensions diverge by a meaningful margin, that divergence gets called out explicitly on the Career Fit Scorecard rather than averaged away into a single number that would hide it.