Careers in project delivery run on evidence: budgets held, releases shipped, vendors managed, stakeholders kept onside. CVs are where that evidence goes missing. The shortlist gets built with care but at speed, against a brief you never see, and when the document doesn't make the case, the interview doesn't happen. The market rarely explains why the phone stayed quiet.
That shortlist is my trade. I recruit business analysts, project and program managers, architects, PMO and coordination roles, iteration managers. On the technical side, that means developers, test analysts and test managers, cloud engineers. The common thread isn't the title. It's the environment. All of it sits in delivery-focused settings, at every phase from business case to go-live: projects and programs, capability uplifts, changes to ways of working. Mostly in Australia, with a stint in the UAE, across everything from small commissioners' offices to global multinational programs.
The mechanics rarely change: take the brief from the hiring manager, screen, qualify, requalify, put the right people forward, prep them for interview. And agency recruitment pays on placement. No placement, no fee. So interview prep was never a courtesy. It was the business model. Every CV I put forward carried my income with it.
That seat teaches two things. What a shortlist rewards: specific claims, scoped delivery, evidence that survives a follow-up question. And how completely a strong record can disappear inside a vague document.
targetState Resumes exists because the same gap kept appearing – strong operators, weak documents. Writing the CV from the screening side closes it. That's the whole service, and it's founder-delivered: the person who takes your brief is the person who writes your document.
Claims should survive checking. The full work history is on LinkedIn.
How the work runs
Brief. We talk through your record the way a role gets briefed: scope, targets, and the roles you're actually chasing. If those roles sit further out than the record currently supports, I'll say so before any writing starts, along with the positioning it would take to close the distance.
Draft. I write the document as a set of claims a hiring manager can test.
Challenge. You push back on anything. Every line either survives or gets rewritten, and the CV is done when it convinces both of us.
What it costs
A CV here is $720, GST included. Cheaper options exist, including free ones. The Bench holds the playbooks if you'd rather build the document yourself. What the price buys is the writer: the same person who has spent the years since 2018 deciding what goes forward, working on one document at a time. Backed by the 45-day interview guarantee.
One more thing
There's a deferred law degree behind this business. A few weeks in, targetState won the argument, for now at least. The instinct that picked law is the same one that runs the work here: build the case, test every claim. Every line on a CV is a claim, and claims get tested somewhere. Better with me than in a screening pile.