Quick thing that changed how I look at job listings: a lot of what you see on LinkedIn and other aggregators was first posted on the company’s own job board. The aggregator is a copy, and sometimes the copy is stale. A boolean search on Google lets you look at those boards directly. Two pieces do most of the work. The first is site:, which tells Google to search only one domain. The second is quotes plus OR, which lets you search for several job titles at once. Here’s what that looks like in practice: site:jobs.lever.co “technical account manager” OR “customer success manager” One line, one job board, two titles. No algorithm deciding which listings you see first. The AI part: if writing strings by hand feels fiddly, you can give Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini your target titles and ask it to build the boolean string for you. Then you read it, adjust it, and run it yourself. That last step matters, because AI can get the syntax slightly wrong, and a quick test search tells you right away. I recorded a full walkthrough of the process. Video is linked below. If you give it a try, I’d love to hear which job board gave you the best results.

Closing out the surge month. Whatever happened this month—an offer, an interview, a single callback, or just showing up consistently when it would have been easier to give up—that’s worth naming. Drop your biggest win of September below. I want to hear everyone’s.

Conference season is here Fall fills up fast with conferences, summits, and meetups. For a lot of us mid-search, they’re also one of the few places where the job hunt happens face to face instead of into a void. So I’m curious: which conferences or events are you going to this season? Virtual counts, and so does “still deciding.” Drop the event name, the city (or virtual), and whether you’re going as an attendee, speaker, or volunteer. If you’ve got a goal for it, even a small one, share that too. Seeing who’s headed where might help someone find an event they hadn’t heard of. I’ll read every reply.

Nobody's pretending the job market is easy right now. But here's the honest reframe: AI doesn't fix a hard market, it just means you can move faster and more precisely inside it than someone doing everything manually. Faster tailoring, faster research, faster iteration on what's not working. That's not a guarantee. It's an edge. And edges compound over a month of consistent use. What's one thing AI helped you do faster this month that you would have skipped or half-done on your own?

We're past the midpoint of the surge. Time to take stock, not just of outcomes but of what you've actually built this month: a sharper resume, a better sense of what roles fit you, a networking habit, a system for tracking applications that doesn't live in your head. None of that shows up as a headline win, but it's the infrastructure that makes the eventual offer possible. What have you built this month that you're proud of, even if it hasn't paid off yet?