YoStella: Build a Better Business - Inspiration for Improving Your Brand, Marketing & People
Each year on Fat Tuesday, New Orleans throws a “Stella and Stanley” party. This annual event honors local boy and world-famous author Tennessee Williams and his masterpiece, A Streetcar Named Desire.
The movie version is notorious for the scene where Stanley, Marlon Brando in a tight white vest, yells “Stella-a-a-a-a-!” up the tenement stairs to his wife. “Stella” might be the most repeated movie line ever and Brando never needed to act again except, he said, for the money. Like a legendary actor, businesses need to cultivate their craft: building an amazing brand, elevating creativity, and growing authentic connections.
At StellaPop, we believe every business has a masterpiece in them.
YoStella: Build a Better Business - Inspiration for Improving Your Brand, Marketing & People
Cracking The GovCon Job Hunt
The GovCon market feels punishing right now, but buried in that pressure is an edge most candidates overlook. We unpack how to translate federal experience into commercial impact so hiring managers immediately see budget leadership, compliance fluency, and operational trust—not just acronyms and agency names. If you’ve managed multi-million dollar programs under the FAR, navigated surprise directives, or held scope after a non-negotiable cut, we’ll show you how to turn those moments into metrics that speak the language of risk, cost, and delivery.
We also get tactical about the silent first gatekeeper: the ATS. From simple file-naming that makes you discoverable months later, to clean, predictable formatting that machines can parse, you’ll learn how to avoid the traps that bury qualified resumes. We explain why PDFs usually win, how to mirror job-description keywords without fluff, and which visual choices cause parsing failures that lead to instant rejections.
Then we move to the human layer where initiative beats passive waiting. Right after you apply, craft a brief, specific LinkedIn note to the hiring manager or recruiter that ties your experience to one clear requirement. A few days later, send one concise follow-up that adds value, not noise—cite a relevant regulation shift, a product update, or a quantifiable result from your work. This two-pronged approach—technical precision plus targeted outreach—creates multiple paths for your profile to be seen.
Whether you’re pivoting from GovCon to tech, finance, or healthcare, or staying near federal work in the private sector, this playbook helps you surface the strengths you already have: disciplined execution, regulatory awareness, and trusted handling of sensitive environments. Subscribe, share with a colleague who needs the boost, and leave a review with the one detail you’ll fix first—file name, formatting, or outreach.
Welcome back to the deep dive. Today we're tackling something tough. We're doing a granular look at well, what feels like one of the most challenging job markets right now, government contracting or govcon.
SPEAKER_00:Aaron Powell It really is tough out there.
SPEAKER_01:Aaron Ross Powell Yeah. Our sources are pretty clear. Whether you're maybe looking at new fields or dealing with a recent layoff, people are calling this market brutal. And it seems like just having solid experience, years of it even, it's just not enough anymore to guarantee that callback. You could be like perfectly qualified and still just crickets.
SPEAKER_00:Total silence. It's frustrating.
SPEAKER_01:So we've dug into a stack of research looking at successful transitions, getting feedback from hiring managers, really trying to answer that key question. Why do some candidates get noticed, get that call, while others just seem to vanish? Our mission today is to show you how to really translate that unique GovCon background effectively, and crucially how to handle the technical side, the art of submitting your resume so it actually gets seen by a human.
SPEAKER_00:It really is a two-part strategy. Yeah. And a lot of very talented GovCon folks get tripped up because they know the work inside out, but maybe not the self-marketing piece. Right. They often really undervalue this massive toolkit of skills they've built up under, frankly, intense federal pressure.
SPEAKER_01:We need to shift the thinking from just doing government work to seeing it as like premium specialized training for the private sector. Okay, let's unpack that. This value proposition. GovCon skills are gold, you're saying, but maybe they're hidden behind jargon acronyms. Aaron Powell. So if I'm trying to move from GovCon to, let's say, a big tech company or finance, what are maybe the top three transferable skills that should make hiring managers sit up and take notice?
SPEAKER_00:Aaron Powell Well, what's interesting is the very things that probably made your GovCon job stressful. All the complexity, the strict protocols, the budget headaches, those are exactly what private industry often wants. They see discipline, rigor.
SPEAKER_01:Ah.
SPEAKER_00:Okay. So the first big one is budget and project management. But, and this is important, it's with a twist. We're not just talking about having a PMP cert, though that helps. We're talking about managing, say, multi-million dollar projects while sticking to really strict rules, like the Federal Acquisition Regulation, the FAR.
SPEAKER_01:Aaron Powell That's a huge difference, isn't it? A typical private sector budget might flex with the market, but a GovCon budget that often has the force of federal law behind it.
SPEAKER_00:Aaron Powell Precisely. So when you tell a commercial hiring manager you managed a project under these tight, legally defined budget rules, you're not just saying you tracked expenses. You're signaling serious financial stewardship, risk mitigation. Think about a time maybe you got hit with a surprise government directive or a sudden, like non-negotiable budget cut. Oh, yeah. And you had to totally rework the project plan, the deliverables, without letting the mission fail. That takes instant strategic thinking, resource juggling under pressure. That is resilience. That's adaptability gold. And you have to spell that out on your resume.
SPEAKER_01:That totally reframes it. Instead of just managed budget, it's more like executed project funding under stringent federal regulatory frameworks, demonstrating agility during unscheduled fiscal adjustments, something like that.
SPEAKER_00:Aaron Powell Exactly like that. Much stronger. And that flows right into the second area. Knowledge of compliance and regulations.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:GoCon Pros, you basically live and breathe acronyms, DFARS, FISMA, maybe HIPAA. Depends on the agency, right? Guess what? Private sectors, particularly finance, healthcare, advanced tech, they are swimming, maybe drowning in complex regulations. True. So if you can walk into a commercial company and kind of intuitively grasp their compliance environment, you're potentially saving them hundreds of thousands in consulting fees, maybe avoiding massive legal risks down the line. You already have that institutional mindset for protecting sensitive data, meeting rigid reporting rules. That's pretty rare outside this GovCon world.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, that makes sense. Now the third one sounds like the big one security clearance and protocol experience. You called this hiring gold.
SPEAKER_00:It often is.
SPEAKER_01:But it also sounds tricky. How do you market that value without, you know, crossing lines or violating the very protocols you mastered?
SPEAKER_00:Aaron Powell That's the critical balance. You have to emphasize the protocol experience, not the classified specifics of the projects or the clearance itself.
SPEAKER_01:Okay.
SPEAKER_00:But yes, this is absolute hiring gold for any company that has or wants government contracts, or even big private firms doing sensitive RD. So instead of detailing classified work, which you obviously can't do, you focused on the operational standards you upheld. You could state you possess a clearance, if it's active and relevant, and then describe the experience. Oversaw information security protocols for sensitive federal assets, or maybe managed physical and digital compliance measures mandated by multi-agency requirements.
SPEAKER_01:Ah, I see.
SPEAKER_00:It signals trustworthiness, integrity, advanced operational security know-how, and frankly, it saves the employer the huge headache and cost of sponsoring and vetting someone from scratch.
SPEAKER_01:That translation piece is just so vital. Okay, so let's say the candidates done this. They've identified their value, articulated it really well. Now comes that next big hurdle, the mechanical gatekeeper, the submission process itself.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Let's shift gears to this frustrating bit where a perfect resume might just get ignored because of like tiny technical errors during submission.
SPEAKER_00:It's fascinating and kind of infuriating for candidates. They often forget, or maybe don't realize, that their first interview is actually with a machine, the applicant tracking system, or ATS.
SPEAKER_01:Right, the infamous ATS.
SPEAKER_00:And the problems can start even before the ATS reads the content. Simple things like database handling errors.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, let's start with something that sounds incredibly small, but you say causes major problems.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:The file name, the name of the actual resume file. Why does that matter so much if the recruiter is just going to open it anyway?
SPEAKER_00:Aaron Powell Because they need to find it again, maybe weeks or months later. Once you upload it, it goes into this massive database, the original file name metadata often stripped out. Ah So if they want to search for Jake Smith next month for another role and your file was called like resume2025.pdf or my favorite JSCv final v3.duckass.
SPEAKER_01:It's just lost. Gone. The critical detail is super simple. Always include your full name in the file name. You know, Jake Smith-resume.pdf. Clear, searchable. A recruiter actually told our sources they waste hours trying to match nameless files to candidates. It seems trivial, but it can mean the difference between being found and being that needle in a haystack.
SPEAKER_00:Wow. Okay, file name noted. What about the format itself? PDF, Word doc. I know people like visually creative resumes sometimes.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, those creative ones can look great. But the safe tactic, the standard advice, is save as a PDF. Unless the job portal specifically asks for Word, stick with PDF.
SPEAKER_00:Why PDF primarily?
SPEAKER_01:Two main reasons. PDFs are generally preferred by most applicant tracking systems, the ATS. And maybe just as importantly, they lock the formatting. So when that recruiter finally opens it on their computer, phone, or tablet, you don't want the layout all messed up, the bullets shifted, the font garbled. A PDF keeps it looking how you intended. Nothing gets wonked, as they say.
SPEAKER_00:Aaron Powell Okay, so PDF is usually the way to go. But let's dig into the ATS optimization itself, the machine reading part. Yes, this is crucial.
SPEAKER_01:We always hear avoid tables, custom fonts. But why? For this audience, why does this supposedly advanced software choke on something visually complex?
SPEAKER_00:Aaron Powell It's really about how the software reads. It's not seeing it visually like we do. It's parsing the underlying text layer. It breaks everything down into little pieces, tokens they call them, and tries to match those tokens to required fields, experience, skills, and critically keywords from the actual job description.
SPEAKER_01:Okay.
SPEAKER_00:So when you use unusual fonts or complex graphics or columns or tables, the ATS often sees blocks of text that don't make sense together. Or it interprets table lines as just weird symbols. It can't tokenize the information properly.
SPEAKER_01:So it scrambles the data.
SPEAKER_00:Exactly. Your beautiful custom resume, which might have the perfect keywords, gets interpreted as gibberish, and boom, you're screened out automatically. No human ever sees it.
SPEAKER_01:So the aim isn't just readable, it's predictable for the machine. Use standard headings like work experience, skills, weave in those keywords from the job description. Keep the formatting clean and simple. Forget the fancy logo, the ATS doesn't care.
SPEAKER_00:Precisely. If the machine can't read it, no human will ever find out about that adaptability gold we were talking about earlier.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. Makes total sense. We've tamed the machine, submitted a clean, well-named, ATS-friendly PDF. Now we need to talk about the human side. Our sources really stress that standing out takes both, doing the formal stuff right, and showing some personal initiative. You can't just hit submit and wait by the phone.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely not. The formal submission, that's just table stakes. That's the minimum. The human connection, that's where you show strategic drive, real enthusiasm. You need to signal that you're actively going after this specific role, not just, you know, blasting resumes everywhere.
SPEAKER_01:So what's the first step there?
SPEAKER_00:Immediately after applying formally, the first crucial step is connect on LinkedIn. Go find the hiring manager for the role or the specific recruiter handling it.
SPEAKER_01:Now, I know some people worry about that. Sending a cold connection request. Does it feel pushy? How do you do it right?
SPEAKER_00:You do it right with hyperpersonalization. Don't just hit connect. Send a brief personalized note with the request. Mention the specific role you just applied for.
SPEAKER_01:Like what?
SPEAKER_00:Something simple, like, hi name, I just submitted my application for the program manager position you posted. I was particularly interested in the part about mention something specific from the description. It boosts your visibility immediately. You've created a personal touch point. Compare that to the generic message, the one we're telling you not to send, like, hi, I'm interested in jobs at your company.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, yeah. Those are awful.
SPEAKER_00:Shows zero specific effort, straight to the bin.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. Personalized LinkedIn connection. Got it. But you said after applying formally, so the LinkedIn message isn't the application itself, right? We need to be really clear on that.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, absolutely. This is a critical rule everyone needs to burn into their brain. A LinkedIn message or even an email is not a formal application. It doesn't count. You must make sure your resume went through the company's official channel, their website, career portal, whatever system they use. That ensures it's actually in their system, processed by the ATS, visible to HR properly. If you only rely on that LinkedIn message, you're counting on one busy recruiter to manually download your resume, figure which job it's for, and upload it correctly into a system that might not even like manual entries. Don't skip the official process. Ever.
SPEAKER_01:Right. The formal submission creates the official record. The LinkedIn contact raises awareness.
SPEAKER_00:Got it. So once you've done both clean submission, personalized connection, is there a final step, a follow-up?
SPEAKER_01:Yes, one final strategic follow-up. Okay. And emphasize one, don't badger them.
SPEAKER_00:Okay.
SPEAKER_01:A brief professional follow-up email or message sent maybe a few days after your formal application is in. And definitely don't just ask, did you get my resume?
SPEAKER_00:Aaron Powell So what should it say? Keep it short, professional, and again, specific. Briefly reiterate your interest. Maybe mention something relevant you saw about the company recently, or tie back to a unique requirement in the job description again. Show you're engaged and you've done your homework. It's a small thing, but it helps keep you top of mind. It bridges that gap between the machine sorting and the human review starting. Your name pops up again, but right when they might be starting to actually read resumes.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, so putting it all together for the GovCon professional listening, the big message here seems to be your background is incredibly valuable, more than you might think. Definitely. But getting noticed in today's market takes this two-pronged attack. You have to nail the formal process, the file name, the ATS-friendly format, all that technical stuff. And you have to show that personal, proactive drive through smart, personalized connection and follow-up.
SPEAKER_00:Exactly right. You take those unique GovCon skills, you translate them so private industry sees the value, and you pay almost obsessive attention to all these details, the technical ones and the personal ones. By doing that, you're basically creating multiple ways for them to see you and find you.
SPEAKER_01:Makes sense.
SPEAKER_00:Look, it might not be rocket science, right? But when hundreds of applications are pouring in for one job, as the saying goes, the devil really is in the details. So we'd encourage you, maybe take a look at the last couple of applications you sent out. Which of these small but essential details, the file name, the PDF format, the personalized LinkedIn note, that specific follow up, which ones might you have overlooked? Because mastering those little steps, that could be the difference between getting that call or just hearing more crickets.
