You are now tuning in to Discover Your Potential. So listen, participate, be inspired, know that you can discover your potential. Sure. So it's been a tough job market for me and frankly millions of other people. And my journey started in 2022. I was laid off from a consulting position. I was unemployed for over a year and ended up having to sell my house. And it was a very difficult time for me. I was then, I got a new job. It was, I thought it was the job. And then I ended up getting laid off again in February of 2025. So this past February. And with the recent memory of what had happened the first time and losing my house, I knew I needed to do something different. And so in addition to, you know, looking on Indeed and LinkedIn and simply hired and applying for positions, one day I was scrolling my LinkedIn feed and saw someone had posted a tip about how to find jobs on LinkedIn. And it was don't apply to the actual positions that you find. Look for posts that are authored by people who have positions and are announcing to their networks that they have an open position. And so I did that. And I saw that very few people were commenting on these posts and they were getting very few reactions. And so I found a post that was about a position that was pretty relevant to what I was looking for at the time. And I added a comment and about an hour later, the author replied to my comment and said, Hey, let's talk, you have a great background. I spoke with him the following day, had a great conversation with him. He told me to send him his, my resume at that point and to formally apply in, you know, in the ATS system. And a week later, I had an interview with the hiring manager. And while the opportunity didn't work out, it was like, wow, I got an app with someone with the job really quickly. Hundreds, hundreds, if not more, it's definitely, it's definitely a volume game. I mean, I think there are a lot of reasons why people do that. Things like easy apply make it very easy to apply for positions, but you also, you're typically competing against a global workforce, right? So offshoring for technical positions has been going on for a long, long time. And there are, you know, there's just cheaper, cheaper labor everywhere, right? So a lot of people are applying because they understand that they're competing against a lot of other suitably, you know, proficient candidates, that we tend as job seekers to over apply, right? And so jobs aren't great fits, but we apply anyway, right? Well, maybe there's a chance. And what happens on the employment side is that they need to put all these filters in place to try to weed out those people who aren't exactly right. And so you get this collision of a massive amount of applications being submitted, a barrier to prevent you when you are perfectly qualified from getting to the hiring manager. And it's just a mess. And the goal is always to just get to a person and have a chance to present your true authentic self to the person who is hiring and have a conversation. It's very hard to get conversation. He or she is, that's a great way to describe Jr. I think of my Jr. as an AI replica of myself, right? He's almost me. So he does what I had done initially, manually, right? Searches for posts about jobs that are relevant to what I'm looking for. He then responds to the post in a thoughtful manner, advocates for me, Andrew, by referencing skills and experiences from my bio, and then invites the person to book a time on my calendar and then search the calendar. So what he does, in effect, is really turns, he's an inbound marketing machine for me. It took a couple days to develop him for myself. And within a couple days of deploying him on LinkedIn, this was April 11th by the 15th of April, my calendar for the remainder of the month was completely booked. Today's show is sponsored by strawberry.me. 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Get the right coach and make it happen with strawberry.me. Wow. Yeah, it was phenomenal. It was, I mean, it was so effective that it made me realize, wow, I need a job, but a lot of people could benefit from the experience I just had by building this. I'm going to start a company so that everyone can have their own junior. What's interesting is that commenting, by commenting your meeting a person where they already are, you can have bots, and I've seen bots that automatically post things on behalf of someone who's bot, who's bot is doing the posting. That's outbound. By commenting, you are responding to something that someone else is interested in. The hiring manager is interested in, so they're much more likely to respond to a comment. We see a ton of outbound automation on LinkedIn. There are a lot of people who are automating post generation. There are a lot of fake candidates supplying for jobs. That's automated. I don't know what purpose that serves, but to this point, there are no enablement tools for job seekers that are harnessing the power of AI to help them find jobs faster. That is the intent of junior. I agree that LinkedIn can be very transactional, and the idea is that it is a huge collection of interesting people that are just having difficulties connecting in a meaningful way. Recognizing that that is the dynamic, by setting up these meetings in an automated way, you're having real conversations with a lot of those real people, and a lot of interesting things can happen. I've got a couple of business partners for junior. We're secured through his efforts. It's been phenomenal. LinkedIn is both broken and still represents a fantastic opportunity for everyone to find jobs and find them quickly. I'm focused on LinkedIn. It's funny. I'm decidedly an anti-social media person. I'm not on Twitter. I'm not on Facebook anymore. LinkedIn is really the sole platform where I participate. I think that it is, despite its problems, it's maintained its focus on professional network fairly well. I think it will continue to be the place to go for job seekers, although other job sites are making efforts to integrate AI and make it easier to find jobs. The fact is that people don't hang out on simply hired. They don't hang out on Indeed. I think it would be very difficult to erode LinkedIn's dominance in terms of we have these professional people collected here. They just need LinkedIn. Just need some help fostering more meaningful job-related conversations. Yeah. My advice for everyone is keep the end in mind. That end should be solving a pretty acutely felt pain point. Whether it's trying to automate negotiating claims status with your health insurance company or you want a better way to keep up with your personal contact, the end goal for me has always been to have more time outside of technology in a way from a screen and have more interactions with people. That's my own personal credo. AI is a powerful tool, but I want to wield it in a way that I am able to be in the moment in my real space, not in front of a screen more often. I don't know that that's everyone's goal, but in terms of practical building steps, I think there are all the tools needed to build anything. It just takes imagination and a sense of urgency to actually then build something that's available. Now 100%. I think that one of the things that I had to think about very carefully is some of the people who Juniors introduced me to who are now advising me had questions about how much of this process should be automated. For example, right now, if someone replies to the comment, doesn't necessarily book a meeting, I always step in. So, Junior will provide and make the initial comment, but if someone is excited, if they respond or reply to his comment, then I take over. But there is some thinking and I'm on the fence about it, but how much of the conversation would you want to be supported and continued by your Junior versus me taking over and having a human interaction? When I said that my Calendly got fully booked, it wasn't all people who were hiring. I had a lot of people who wanted job advice. There were other entrepreneurs who could see that something interesting was going on with what I was doing, so they booked an appointment. The idea that, well, would you want Junior to then go through your Calendly bookings and identify the most promising ones? I haven't gotten to that point. I really am a humanist and a humanitarian at heart. I feel like the shorter the engagement Junior has to set up the real conversation, the sooner it becomes a real interaction between two people, the better. That's where I'm landing, I think. In terms of creating that digital represent your Junior, no, it's interesting. I've gone through multiple iterations. In early days, I had a lot of fun, including artistic interests that I have. So, Kandinsky and I like Diane Arbus and Ernst Hemingway. I tried to add additional descriptors of myself that went beyond what was in a professional profile. My Junior made really interesting references in context on post. At that time, I wasn't focused exclusively on trying to set up meetings with hiring managers. I was just commenting on posts that were of interest to me. Doing that actually gets a lot of engagement. A lot of people replied to comments that Junior left when I did reference non-strictly professional facts about myself. Kandinsky was a big hit. I love his artwork and so do a lot of other people. Yeah. It's difficult, though. Frankly, when it comes to trying to secure a meeting with a hiring manager, it's much more reference and map whatever is in my profile and set of experiences to the words and the job description as it is authored by the hiring manager and their posts. That seems to be most effective. No, thanks for having me. The struggle is real. I felt it painfully so in recent months and years. It's so profoundly real for many others. I'm happy to do my part to help others that are in the same boat that I was in. They can download them from hayjunior.ai. They can learn all about them and try them out. It's a direct download from the site. There is a minimally populated LinkedIn corporate page Hayjunior. They can reach out to me on LinkedIn as well. This is Cindy Gilman and you're listening to Discover Your Potentials. Until next time, do something nice for yourself, but do something nice for someone else.
