Why I built this

I led the team that built and ran the Career Transition Services business at one of the top five search firms. We helped thousands of people find jobs: students, professionals, journeymen, and even C-suite executives at the world’s biggest companies. My team did amazing work, finding virtually everyone not just a job, but a better job with better pay, faster than other people were finding them. This was true even during the summer of 2020 in the height of the pandemic -- the majority of job seekers they were supporting were getting pay increases, not just finding a job.

I’ve also had the privilege to run many large teams and several companies, personally hiring hundreds of people and thousands indirectly. I really can’t imagine how many resumes I’ve read and interviews I’ve conducted along the way.

As a result, I receive a lot of requests from family, friends, and former colleagues looking for advice in their job searches and career deliberations. About half of the requests are for their friends, children, or grandchildren. Some aren’t really looking for advice -- they are hoping I have a position they could fill and quickly lose interest in the conversation if I don’t. Most, however, are very earnest and take the advice I offer seriously.

The people I have ended up advising, usually across multiple calls and some back-and-forth emails, consistently follow two pieces of advice well:

They draft a new “forward-looking” (or Da Vinci) resume that helps them stand out from other candidates
They identify and refine 2–3 parables that they can tell in their interviews that make them much more memorable

Almost everyone who has done these two things have shared with me that interviewers and search professionals have told them that they have a differentiated profile in the job application process that sets them apart and all of them have credited these changes in their approach with landing jobs they wouldn’t have otherwise.

At the same time, almost no one is able to start, much less sustain, the five practices described on the home page that really give someone a leg up in their career:

Continuously deliver value to your network
Capture career experiences while they are still fresh
Verify claims while someone can still confirm them
Keep a library of parables
Target everything to the person and role

It’s never been that they don’t see the value in these activities; rather, it’s that they find them unfamiliar and they take a lot of work and discipline.

I had the bright idea of leveraging the newest AI tools to build an application that would make it easy for people to perform those five activities (and others). Selfishly, I also figured it would save me a lot of time providing support to the friends who come calling for advice, advice that usually transitions into more active support such as resume editing. I figured it would take me two days, three at most. Capabilities describes what the application does, including importing resumes, career documents, and LinkedIn contacts.

I underestimated the effort. Several months later, I had VisibleCareer.com. It achieves everything I had hoped and more. For example, I added the ability:

for a professional coach (or a parent, grandparent, or friends) to provide direct support
to set up proactive job searches
to send in career experiences, achievements, tasks, and other information via an email without opening the application

Unfortunately, it takes me more time to maintain and improve the site than it did to support friends and family looking for help, and it costs money to run it.

So, I put the relatively static career management information and tools on the public part of the site for anyone to use. The resources that require me to pay people and services for support are available to those who are willing to pay to support them. I’ve separately broken out the costs associated with using AI features so that light users aren’t subsidizing heavy users, and I don’t mark up the AI.