Running the job hunt like a project

I have, at least once, emailed a recruiter an out-of-date CV. I have also sent cover letters so stuffed with keywords they read like a search query with delusions of grandeur. So when the time came to look for my next role in DevOps and platform engineering, I decided the job search itself was the thing to engineer: one AI project workspace holding every conversation, document and decision, instead of the usual scatter of files and half-remembered phone calls.

The setup was less grand than it sounds. The CV became a build script that generates the Word and PDF versions from a single source, so the two can never drift apart again. A spreadsheet tracked every company, role, recruiter and status. And I wrote the standing context down once, properly: what I've actually done with real numbers attached, the roles I wanted, the salary range, and, the uncomfortable part, the skills I don't have. That last file did more work than everything else combined, because the assistant knew not only what I could claim but what I couldn't.

Which mattered, because there was one rule I never let it break: no overclaiming. If a spec asked for a tool I hadn't used, the letter said so plainly and named the equivalent I had used instead. This felt like unilateral disarmament right up until the responses came back, and it turned out honest letters mapped to the actual spec do noticeably better than the keyword-stuffed kind I used to send. An AI will happily polish an exaggeration until it shines, which is exactly why that rule had to be written down before I needed it.

The part I didn't expect to matter was the tracker column where the assistant recorded its own opinion of each company: financial health, recent news, culture signals, red flags. One large employer got quietly flagged for ongoing workforce reductions, which changed how I spent my time in a way no job advert was ever going to. Somewhere along the line the spreadsheet stopped being a record of the search and started steering it.

The bit I tell people first, though, is the interview prep. Before each one I asked for a briefing pack: likely technical questions mapped to my experience, questions worth asking back, a mock interview script. For one role I had the mock formatted as an audio walkthrough and listened to it while driving, a man rehearsing a conversation by eavesdropping on it, which is either very sensible or deeply strange and I have decided not to examine which.

A few months of this produced multiple interviews running in parallel, a tracker that always knew whose turn it was to reply, and eventually an offer. The assistant helped take the package apart, pension, bonus, share options, benefits, and surfaced two questions I would probably have glossed over on my own. I asked them, and then I accepted. Worth saying plainly: the AI never sent an email, never made a call, never sat in an interview. It drafted, I decided. I haven't started the new job yet, and whether the workspace gets archived now or quietly becomes the way I run everything else is a question for a future entry.