One-nucleon transfer reactions, in particular (d,p) reactions, have played a central role in nuclear structure studies for many decades. Present theoretical descriptions of the underlying reaction mechanisms are insufficient for addressing the challenges and opportunities that are opening up with new radioactive beam facilities. We investigate a theoretical approach that was proposed recently to address shortcomings in the description of transfers to resonance states. The method builds on ideas from the very successful R-matrix theory; in particular, it uses a similar separation of the coordinate space into interior and exterior regions and introduces a parametrization that can be related to physical observables, which, in principle, makes it possible to extract meaningful spectroscopic information from experiments. We carry out calculations, for a selection of isotopes and energies, to test the usefulness of the new approach.