Why I built this

I’ve created two resources to help the people who have asked me for support in their job searches and in exploring potential career changes, including parents, grandparents, and coaches who are in turn supporting a child or a client. The first provides self-guided support and is free. The second is a virtual career manager application -- a virtual advisor, co-author, and task manager. I charge a fee to cover the costs of maintaining the application, and users cover their own AI token costs.

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 Da Vinci-style (future-first) 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 six disciplines to maximize employability described on the home page that really give someone a leg up in their career:

  1. Continuously deliver value to your network
  2. Capture career experiences while they are still vivid
  3. Verify claims while someone can still confirm them
  4. Keep a library of parables
  5. Target everything to the person and role
  6. Practice Judgment Craft — bring evidence, reasoning, sensory and emotional experience, diverse perspectives, and values to consequential work

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

Judgment Craft is the sixth because a widely shared view now says judgment is how people stay valuable as AI does more of the work. People are capable of it, and they can bring experience, values, and responsibility that an AI draft does not supply on its own. Almost no one practices it consistently, even though most believe they do. Two performance engines, Apply and Reflect, will help people exercise Judgment Craft on real decisions and learn from them. They arrive later this fall, as part of a premium subscription. Charter participants who subscribe in October and still have an active membership at launch receive them without that charge.

I built an application to make it easier for people to practice those disciplines. Capabilities describes what it does, including importing resumes, career documents, and LinkedIn contacts.

VisibleCareer.com does what I hoped and more. To make the disciplines easier to start and keep, I also added things like:

  • coach access so a professional coach (or a parent, grandparent, or friend) can provide direct support
  • proactive job searches
  • sending career experiences, achievements, tasks, and other information by email without opening the application

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