The Other Side of the Table

When I was looking for my first job, I sent out more resumes than I can count. Most disappeared. The interviews that came back were awkward, scattered, forgettable, on both sides probably. Nothing worked until someone offered an internal referral, and by that point I would have taken anything. I did. I started as an intern, did whatever was asked, and was grateful for it.

Then one day, HR needed extra hands for campus recruiting. I went along. Suddenly I was on the other side of the table, the side I had been trying so hard to reach.

We saw hundreds of people a day. Talked until our voices gave out. And within the first few hours, something shifted. You start to see patterns. Someone walks up and you already have a read before they speak: the posture, the handshake, the way they hold their resume. It sounds unfair. It is unfair. But it's also fast, and when you're processing hundreds of candidates, fast is all you have.

Some resumes were barely put together: wrong formatting, typos, no structure. Some were obviously rewritten by a campus career center: clean, correct, and completely generic. You could swap the names and not notice. The "good students" blended together. High GPA, relevant coursework, a club presidency. Fine. But fine doesn't stick.

One thing you learn fast: people aren't as clever as they think. The padded resumes, the inflated titles, the "led a team of twelve" that was really a group project — two follow-up questions and it falls apart. You can see the hesitation, the vague answers, the moment they realize you're not buying it. We weren't looking to catch people. The gaps are just obvious from the other side. What feels like a safe embellishment from your chair looks like a red flag from mine.

And then there were the surprises going the other way. Someone whose resume was nothing special, no big names, no flashy internships, but when they talked, you could tell they'd actually done the work. They had opinions. They'd thought about things. On paper, they were weaker than half the stack. In person, they were the ones you remembered. The other side of the table sees things that don't fit on a resume, and misses things that only exist on one.

But those surprises were rare. By the end of the day, I could remember maybe five faces. Not because the rest were bad. Most were solid. But solid is invisible when everyone is solid.

The uncomfortable part was recognizing myself. A year earlier, I had been one of those candidates. I had thought my GPA mattered: 4.0, surely that means something. From the other side, a 4.0 is a line on a page. Half the people in line had one. It's not an advantage when everyone has it. It tells me you can do the work. It doesn't tell me why I should remember you.

I had thought I was different. I wasn't. I was exactly as ordinary as everyone else who thought they were different. The only reason I got my job was a referral and timing. Not because I stood out, but because someone vouched for me at the right moment.

There's a reflex that's hard to shake: if they don't pick me, they're wrong. The GPA is right there. The experience is right there. What more do they want? But that's still thinking from your own chair. From the other side, nobody owes you anything. If you blend in, that's not their failure of perception. It's yours. Knowing how to stand out is a skill. Not having it is a gap, same as any other.

Sitting on the other side didn't make me cynical. It made me honest. And the lesson went far beyond hiring.

Years later, working with clients, I noticed the same pattern. Most of our competitors thought from their own side of the table: how to close the deal, how to maximize the contract, how to upsell. We started doing the opposite. Sit in the client's chair. What are they actually worried about? Where should they save money? Where does it genuinely make sense to spend? Sometimes the honest answer was: you don't need what we're selling.

That sounds like bad business. It wasn't. Clients remember when you solve their problem instead of yours. They come back. They refer others. In a market full of people optimizing for their own side, actually caring about the other side turned out to be the edge. Not because it was a strategy, but because we meant it.

The table has two sides in every room. Job interviews, client meetings, negotiations, even arguments with people you love. The default is to sit in your own chair and assume the other person should see things your way. The shift is small but hard: stop asking "why don't they get it?" and start asking "what does this look like from over there?"

Whatever you think is special about you, assume the person across the table has seen it fifty times today. Then figure out what's left.