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I'm looking for a job, so I built a machine

job searchbuilding

Some housekeeping first. Three Pillars, the company I spent the last couple of years on, has wound down. Parrot Postage, the other one, is alive and well, but it’s a nights-and-weekends project now, not a full-time job. Add those up and you get the obvious conclusion: it’s time for me to find a job.

Which raises a question I find genuinely funny. How does someone who spends all his time building things go about looking for work? If you guessed “he opened a job board and started filling out forms,” you haven’t been paying attention. I built a machine.

Here’s the belief underneath it, and the reason the machine exists at all: you don’t get hired through portals, you get hired through people. The online application is the worst, lowest-yield part of the entire process. Your résumé lands in a pile with four hundred others and some filter decides your future. The jobs that actually happen come through a warm intro, a former coworker, someone willing to walk your name into the room.

So I built a tool to run that side of it on purpose instead of by accident. It is, in other words, a small CRM for the least fun part of being a person. Here’s what it actually does.

It finds the warm path to a stranger

Pick the person you need to reach, and the tool traces the route to them through people you already know, grading how warm each hop is. Weak ties turn out to be the best bridges and the easiest ones to forget you have.

The warm path to a strangerPick who you want to reach at Northwind Aero. The tool finds the route through people you already know and grades how warm each hop is. Illustrative example, not real contacts.
YouMLMarcusyour networkPSPriyayour networkDWDanahiring managerSOSamrecruiter
strong tiemediumweak

Warmest route to Dana: through Marcus, who you worked with (strong), then his Booth classmate (medium). Two hops, weakest link medium. Good enough to ask for the intro.

The point isn’t a prettier contact list. It’s turning “I have no idea who works there” into “ask Marcus, he sat next to the hiring manager’s business school classmate for two years.”

It runs every job on two tracks

Most people collapse a job hunt into one number: how many places you applied. That hides the part that matters. Networking and applying are separate tracks, and you can be deep on one while untouched on the other. So each job gets two rails, a health read, and exactly one next move, with the reasoning attached.

Two tracks, one next moveEvery job runs on two independent rails: the relationship and the application. Flip through the states and watch the health read and the next move recompute. Illustrative.
Finance ManagerNorthwind Aerosteady
Networking
  1. Mapped
  2. Networking
  3. Connected
  4. Sponsored
Application
  1. Applied
  2. Interviewing
NextAsk Marcus for an intro to DanaMarcus is your strongest path, two hops, medium link.

No pursuit gets to stall in silence. If nothing has moved in a week, the health read tells me before I’ve quietly given up on it.

It builds a résumé that answers real questions

The application still has to exist, so the tool handles that side too, but with a twist. Every bullet is tagged to one of the seven things a hiring manager is actually screening for. You stop writing filler and start seeing which questions your résumé doesn’t answer yet.

A résumé that answers the real questionsEvery bullet is tagged to one of the seven things employers actually screen for, so you can see the gaps instead of guessing. Click a dimension. Illustrative bullets.
  • CapabilityBuilt the full financial model for an eight-aircraft program from scratch.
  • OutperformancePlaced 2nd of 65 teams at the New Venture Challenge.
  • InsightSpotted that the real bottleneck was throughput, not physics.
  • AgencyStarted two companies without waiting for a mandate.
  • ResilienceKept a company alive through a long funding winter.
  • TasteCut the pitch from forty slides to the nine that mattered.
  • CredibilityTrusted by senior leadership to size a nine-figure decision.

Put together, that’s the machine: find the person, work the relationship, and show up with a résumé built to answer the real questions instead of the keyword ones.

Is building an entire system to find a job a little unhinged? Probably. But it’s the honest version of how I operate, and it’s already working better than portal-and-pray ever did.

In the meantime, the short version: I’m looking. If you know of a team where someone who builds companies, teams, operations, and the occasional job-hunting machine would be useful, I’d genuinely love to talk. Easiest ways to reach me are email and LinkedIn.