Jeff Gillis is the co-founder and Chief Technical Officer of The Interview Guys, the career-advice site he and Mike Simpson launched in 2013. Over the last 13 years, Jeff has been the strategic mind behind how the site connects with job seekers, helping reach more than 100 million people worldwide through content, tools, and product development.
His background is in IT and digital strategy, which shapes how he approaches the modern job search: ATS systems, resume optimization, the mechanics of how recruiters and platforms actually filter candidates, and the tactics that work when applying through online portals. Jeff has published more than 50 in-depth career resources including case studies, comprehensive guides, and video courses, and his work has appeared in INC, MSN, and ZDNet.
Articles credited to Jeff on The Interview Guys are reviewed and edited by him personally, with a focus on resume strategy, job-search tactics, and how to actually get past the digital gatekeepers most candidates struggle with.
Here’s what actually runs through a hiring manager’s head when a DevOps resume hits their inbox: can this person ship code to production without setting the building on fire? That’s the question hiding behind every entry-level posting. The IBM DevOps and Software Engineering Professional Certificate, which carries a 4.6 rating (sourced from Class Central aggregation,…
In 2024, employers received an average of 180 applicants for every single hire they made. That comes from CareerPlug’s analysis of more than 10 million job applications across 60,000-plus small businesses, which makes it one of the most robust U.S. samples you’ll find. Now do the math on what that means for the person reading…
Here’s what runs through a hiring manager’s head when a deep learning resume lands in their inbox: can this person actually build and train a model, or did they just watch some videos? That gap between course-trained candidates and people who can ship is the number one thing that gets applicants screened out. IBM built…
Here’s a number that should make a lot of career coaches uncomfortable. When researchers handed tech job seekers nothing but plain data about how normal negotiating is and how often it actually works, women’s negotiating attempts and successful raises rose 16.8%, according to the UCLA Anderson Review. No role-play. No confidence boot camp. Just facts…
Here’s what runs through a hiring manager’s head when your resume lands and it says Meta Front-End Developer Professional Certificate. First reaction: this person learned React from the company that invented React, so the content is probably legit. Second reaction, a beat later: but what have they actually built? That gap between those two thoughts…
Here’s a number that should make you side-eye every “we love to promote from within” line in a job posting. 95% of companies say they have a culture of promoting from within. Only 25% actually fill more than half their open roles internally. That gap between what companies say and what they do isn’t a…
Here’s what runs through a hiring manager’s head when a cloud support resume lands in the pile: can this person actually navigate the Azure portal, or did they just watch some YouTube videos? That gap between knowing about the cloud and being able to support it is where most entry-level candidates get filtered out. The…
Referred candidates are 4x more likely to be offered a job than people who apply through a company website, according to Zippia’s compiled analysis updated in January 2026. That number gets quoted constantly, usually right before someone tells you to go ask your network for a referral. Here’s the part nobody says out loud: the…
Here’s what runs through a hiring manager’s head when a junior data resume hits their inbox: can this person actually open a dataset, clean it, and pull something useful out of it, or did they just watch videos? That’s the whole game for entry-level data roles. You’re not competing on years of experience, you’re competing…
Here’s the stat that should end the loyalty debate before it starts. In January 2024, the median tenure for workers ages 25-34 was 2.7 years, while workers ages 55-64 sat at 9.6 years, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Everyone looks at that gap and screams “kids today have no loyalty.” That’s the…
