Doron Tsuberi
Available for new engagements

Free resourceUpdated September 2026

The Job Hunting Toolkit

A working toolkit for job seekers — built around Israeli tech and product roles, but most of it travels.

Every link here is something I actually used or read while job hunting. The advice is distilled from recruiters, hiring managers, coaches and people who landed — rewritten in my own words, and pointed at a free source wherever one exists. Nothing is sponsored and nothing is affiliate.

Also in Hebrew

  1. 01The argument
  2. 02The artefacts that represent you
  3. 03Getting in front of people
  4. 04The conversations
  5. 05Staying in it
  6. 06The prompt pack
00

Start where you’re stuck

Find your row, go to that section. If you don't know which row you're in, that's the first problem to fix — see Run it like a funnel.

  1. Barely anything going out
    Targeting. You have no list of places to aim at, so every day starts from zero.
    Where the jobs areCompany research and target lists
  2. Plenty going out, almost no replies
    Your artefacts, or the door you're using. Usually both.
    Your CVGetting found on LinkedInGetting to the right human
  3. Replies, but it stalls after the first call
    Your pitch, or the screen itself. These are preparable, almost completely.
    Your story and your pitchThe phone screen
  4. First interviews, but no second rounds
    Interview performance, not credentials. Your CV already did its job.
    The interview
  5. Final rounds, no offer
    Positioning against the other finalists — the closest and most frustrating place to be stuck.
    The interviewIf you're interviewing to leadOffer and negotiation
  6. You've stopped opening the laptop
    Nothing is broken. This part is genuinely hard and it is not a verdict on you.
    Staying sane
01

The argument

What actually moves the needle

The ten points worth internalising

These came up again and again across recruiter talks, hiring-manager sessions, and the people who actually landed roles.

  1. 01

    Referrals beat applications, by a lot. A referral skips the CV filter entirely and guarantees a human reads you properly. Time spent getting referred beats time spent perfecting application #40.

  2. 02

    A human looks at your CV for 10–30 seconds. The decision is made in the top few lines. Optimize the top of the page, not the bottom.

  3. 03

    Big companies get thousands of applications per role and their recruiting teams have been cut too. You will not stand out by submitting a better CV into the pile. You stand out by arriving through a different door.

  4. 04

    The ATS is not the boss fight. There's a big misconception that ATS ranking can be gamed with AI. In practice, the name of the last company you worked at carries more weight than keyword tricks.

  5. 05

    Recruiters scan for reasons to rule you out — gaps in progression, sloppy self-presentation, inconsistency. Remove reasons before you add flourishes.

  6. 06

    A narrow profile beats a generalist one. A LinkedIn profile that shows five unrelated skills reads as unfocused. Pick one narrative and aim it at the specific roles you want.

  7. 07

    Build your profile to hunt recruiters, not only to be hunted by them.

  8. 08

    Show the work, don't describe it. Words mean nothing, work means everything. Don't tell me you're funny — tell me a joke.

  9. 09

    Own your gap. Sabbatical, reserve duty, layoff, caregiving — state it plainly and say something interesting about what you did with the time. Hiding it reads worse than having it.

  10. 10

    Bank social equity before you need it. Help people, engage with their work, be useful. Then when you ask, you're not a stranger. And always close the loop — tell the people who helped you how it ended, or they won't help you twice.

Two small things with outsized effect. Put a link to your LinkedIn profile on your CV — candidates who do see higher interview rates, and only about half bother. And be careful with the green Open to Work ring: internationally the stigma has largely faded, but Israeli headhunters still report it counting against candidates here, especially at senior levels, because the hiring client wants to feel they are poaching someone who is employed. Use the recruiters-only setting instead — you get the search-ranking benefit without the public badge. For the same reason, keep "Open to work" and "Looking for a new challenge" out of your headline.

Run it like a funnel

Why this section exists

A job search is the only project most of us run with no metrics, no review and no end date — which is exactly why it feels like fog. Four numbers turn it back into something you can diagnose. This is the least enjoyable section on the page and the one that changes the most.

Count four things, once a week

  • Out — applications sent plus people contacted.
  • Replies — anything human that came back.
  • First conversations — screens, coffees, intro calls.
  • Later rounds — anything past the first conversation.

You do not need a tool for this. Four columns in a spreadsheet, updated every Friday, beats every app you will be tempted to pay for. What matters is recording the date, the person, the follow-up date and what you learned — not that it looks nice.

Past ten open applications, memory stops working. Write it down or you will follow up with the same person twice and the right person never.

Then read the ratios. Each gap between two numbers is a different broken thing, and fixing the wrong one is how people spend three months polishing a CV that was never the problem. The table at the top of this page is that diagnosis.

How to operate

  • Consistency beats intensity. A couple of serious applications every day beats a weekend binge that leaves you unable to look at it for a week.
  • Motion beats perfection. Send it at 70%. The last 30% you're polishing is almost never what decides it, and the polishing is usually fear wearing a productivity costume.
  • Keep three to five live conversations going at all times. A pipeline is insurance. The moment it narrows to one, your judgement goes with it — you will negotiate badly and accept things you shouldn't.
  • Do not stop searching because one process looks promising. Processes die quietly, often without anyone telling you.
  • Treat it like a job with hours. A search that runs 24/7 in your head produces less than one that runs 9 to 5 on your calendar.

If you'd rather use a tool

02

The artefacts that represent you

Your CV

What the data says

  • Resumes that include a LinkedIn profile link see higher interview rates — yet only about 48% include one.
  • Candidates include only about 51% of the important keywords and skills for the role, most often missing the soft skills.
  • Measurable metrics improve outcomes, yet only 26% of resumes have five or more.
  • The sweet spot is 475–600 words. About 77% of resumes fall outside it.
  • Buzzwords and clichés actively reduce a resume's value — and 51% of resumes contain them.
  • Most CV tools tell you roughly the same things. Run two, fix what they agree on, and stop. Polishing past that point is procrastination wearing a productivity costume.

The one formula worth memorising

Accomplished [X], as measured by [Y], by doing [Z].

Laszlo Bock's formula, from his years running hiring at Google, and the fastest fix available to most CVs. Almost every weak bullet is a Z with no X and no Y — an activity, with nothing attached to it.

Weak

"Led the redesign of the onboarding flow."

Strong

"Cut first-week drop-off by 22% by rebuilding onboarding around a single activation step."

If you genuinely don't have the number, use direction and scale — "halved", "across 40 stores", "for the first time". Do not invent a metric. Made-up numbers survive the CV and die in the interview, loudly.

How to write it

Getting recruiter callbacks7 rules
  • Optimize for one thing only: getting noticed and getting called. Nothing else.
  • Make it trivially easy to match your CV against the job description.
  • Optimize for top-down scanning. Assume only the top third is read by a human.
  • Keep it clean and scannable — short bullets, 3–7 per role.
  • Give the scanner anchors: companies, achievements, skills.
  • Customize per job, but don't rewrite from scratch each time.
  • State the job you're applying for at the very top of the resume.
Mechanics most people get wrong8 rules
  • One page under ten years of experience. Two only if you've led teams and need the room.
  • Past tense everywhere, including your current job. Mixed tenses read as careless.
  • Most impactful bullet first in each role — not the chronological order in which you did things.
  • Three to seven bullets per role, and fewer as you go further back. Your job from 2011 gets one line.
  • Say what each company does, in one clause. A reader outside your niche has no idea whether that startup was 8 people or 800, and will not go and look it up.
  • Use the job title the market searches for, not your internal HR title — as long as it honestly describes the work you did.
  • Take credit for your part in a company-wide win. Naming your specific contribution to something big is not overclaiming; leaving it out is just losing.
  • Don't repeat the same line under every role. If two roles read identically, one of them is wasted space — use it for what was different, unusual, or yours alone.
Writing an AI Product Manager CV7 steps
  1. Open with a strong objective tied to AI PM specifically — your interest, experience and headline achievement.
    Example: "Award-winning AI Product Manager with 8 years of experience in EdTech and Telecom, leading products generating \$250M in revenue."
  2. Build your generic PM resume first, with the essential keywords to pass ATS screening.
  3. Weave in AI technical keywords naturally and human-readably. Reference: AI PM Resume guide
  4. Cover the AI product life cycle explicitly. Background: The 4 Foundations of AI Product Management Life Cycle
    Example: "End-to-end AI product life cycle: managed and launched a Smart Cities AI product from 0 to 1, including data pipeline development, ML image recognition model training, prompt management, LLM fine-tuning, LLMOps, and cloud platforms."
  5. Write achievements, not responsibilities — revenue impact, organizational improvement, cost saving.
    Example: "Increased user retention by 35% by leading the development and deployment of an AI-powered recommendation engine, personalizing experiences across a platform with 1M monthly active users."
  6. Add your portfolio. For AI PM roles especially, shipped work is the differentiator.
  7. Close with a line on what you're about — what kind of problems you want to be pointed at.

Tools

Free7 tools
Paid8 tools

Prompts for all of this

Tailoring a CV to one ad, rewriting a bullet into the X-Y-Z shape, and drafting your opening paragraph all live in The prompt pack at the bottom of the page.

Getting found on LinkedIn

What this is really about

Recruiters don't browse LinkedIn. They run filtered searches inside a paid product, and you either fall inside the filter or you do not exist. Everything below is about being findable — which is a mechanical problem, and therefore solvable, unlike most of a job search.

One honest caveat: LinkedIn has never published how its ranking works. What follows is inferred from how the product behaves and what it rewards. Treat it as a well-supported bet, not gospel.

Principles

  • Narrow beats broad. A profile showing many unrelated strengths reads as unfocused. Build one narrative aimed at the roles you want.
  • Respect the recruiter's time. Reduce the ping-pong by front-loading the obvious: CV, contact details, a proposed time to talk.
  • Post your work. Being visible as someone who does the thing outperforms describing yourself as someone who does the thing.
  • Optimize for the search, then for the human. The filter decides whether you're seen. The profile decides what happens next. In that order.

The profile pass — six steps

1. Use the dropdown for everythingthe highest-value fix here

Job title, company, school, location, skills — always pick from LinkedIn's own suggestions, never free text.

The search index is built on standardised entities. A hand-typed job title or an unrecognised company name can make you invisible to a filter that should have matched you perfectly.

  • You can tell it worked when a logo appears next to the company or school.
  • If your company isn't in the list, try its legal name, a former name, or the better-known parent brand.
  • Set your location to where you want to work, using a city from the dropdown. If you're relocating, say so explicitly in your About section.
  • Check the privacy settings that control whether recruiters can find and view you at all. People spend months optimising a profile that was quietly set to invisible.
2. Harvest your keywords from real job adsdon't guess them

Collect 20–30 live ads for the roles you actually want. Include the title variants — the same job is advertised as three different things depending on who wrote the ad.

Worth deliberately including:

  • A handful from companies you'd genuinely love to work at.
  • A handful with unusually detailed requirements — they carry the most vocabulary.
  • A few one level above your target, so you show up in searches for people ready to step up.
  • A few one level below, so your earlier experience reads as a logical path.

Strip out the benefits and culture sections, then have a model count how often each term appears across all of them. The prompt is in The prompt pack.

What comes back is the actual vocabulary of your market. You're not inventing your keywords — you're reading them off the wall. Then delete everything you can't honestly claim.

3. Pick five skills to be found forsupply and demand

From your frequency list, shortlist the terms that are genuinely yours and that show up in the job titles themselves, not just in the body text.

Then sanity-check both sides of the market for each one:

  • Search it under People in your region — that's roughly how many others are claiming it.
  • Search it under Jobs — that's roughly how often someone is asking for it.

What you want is high demand with moderate supply. Drop anything with high supply and low demand, which is a skill the market has moved past. Drop anything so niche that no filter ever asks for it.

Two things that quietly waste your five: vague soft skills, because nobody filters on "communication skills", and abbreviations, because recruiters search "Product Manager" and not "PM".

Put the five in your Skills section, and make sure they also appear in your last three roles. A skill claimed in a list but demonstrated nowhere is a weak signal.

4. Rewrite the headlinethe most-read line you own

It appears in every search result, every comment you leave and every message you send. It is the only part of your profile most people will ever read.

The pattern that works:

[target title, or two] | [2-3 specialisms] | [proof]
  • Target title — up to three standardised titles you would actually accept, taken from real postings. Not aspirational, not invented.
  • Specialisms — two or three from your top five.
  • Proof — something a stranger can verify at a glance: a recognisable employer, a number, a credential.

Good: `Product Manager, Senior Product Manager | AI/ML, B2B SaaS | Ex-Google, built a $50M product`

Bad: `Product Ninja | Full-stack PM | Making impact through innovation`

The second one is non-standard, unsearchable, and says nothing a hundred thousand other people couldn't say.

5. Behave like someone worth surfacing4 habits
  • Answer every recruiter message, including the ones you're turning down. Responsiveness is visible, and platforms preferentially surface people who reply.
  • Use the recruiters-only open-to-work setting rather than the public green ring, and list three to five standardised titles you'd take.
  • Search and open jobs occasionally. Being visibly active is part of what recruiter search sorts on.
  • Post something you made. One post a fortnight about the actual work does more than a hundred reshares.
6. Then leave it alone for a monthhow to read the result

Before you change anything, write down your starting numbers: profile views, search appearances, recruiter messages. Without them you will have no way of knowing whether any of this worked, and you will end up rewriting your headline on vibes forever.

Roughly what to expect:

  • Week 1 — re-indexing. Numbers jump around. Change nothing.
  • Weeks 2–4 — your new information starts being used in ranking.
  • Weeks 4–8 — the result stabilises. Now you can judge it.

Change one substantial thing at a time. Rewriting everything every week guarantees you learn nothing from any of it.

Profile and content tools

Your photo

On AI headshotsmy honest take

AI headshots still read as AI headshots to anyone who looks twice. A decent photo taken by a friend near a window, run through Photofeeler for feedback, beats them.

If you want to try anyway: HeadshotPro or Aragon.ai.

Rewriting the words themselves

The three-prompt sequence for benchmarking your profile against the best ones in your field, and rewriting it section by section, is in The prompt pack.

Your story and your pitch

The work nobody wants to do

You are going to describe yourself out loud several hundred times this year. Almost everyone improvises it every single time, gets steadily better at it by accident, and wastes the first twenty conversations learning what they should have written down on day one. Write it down on day one.

Work out what makes you special

Ask former colleagues directly:

  • What do they like about working with you?
  • What are you actually good at?
  • How do they see your successes — what did you deliver?
  • Who do they recommend you talk to?

You will hear things you would never have written about yourself. Those are the things to lead with.

Structure your pitch

One sentence that says what you are. Three data points that support it. Evidence behind each.

That's it. If it takes longer, it isn't ready.

The two sentences you'll say a hundred times

Every screen, every coffee, every event opens the same way. Write it once and stop improvising it.

  • One personal sentence. Where you live, who you live with, two or three things you genuinely do with your time. It exists to make you a person, not to impress anyone. Specific and slightly odd beats polished.
  • One professional sentence. Years in the field, the shape of your experience, and one or two anchors a stranger will recognise — a known company, a scale, a kind of product.

Then stop talking. Everything after that is an answer to a question they haven't asked yet.

A thing worth knowing about how you're judged

Interviewers are, mostly without noticing, asking whether you resemble the people who have succeeded around them. You can work with that rather than against it: find the genuine overlap — a similar kind of company, a shared way of working, a comparable problem — and make it visible early. Where you're different, name it yourself and explain why it's an asset, before anyone privately files it as a risk.

Build a story bankhow many, how long

Write out the handful of situations you'll be drawing on all season. The usual set: a hard problem, a real failure, a conflict with someone, a decision you'd now make differently, a result you're proud of, and something you changed your mind about.

  • Around six to eight is a working set. If you're interviewing to lead a team, plan for more — each story has to carry both what you decided and how you took people with you, and one story can't do both jobs at once.
  • For each one: where you were, what happened, what you decided, what it cost, and what you took from it.
  • Keep each under three minutes out loud. Time one. You will be genuinely shocked.
  • Lead with the decision, not the background. Thirty seconds of setup is plenty. Most people spend two minutes explaining the org chart and then run out of time before the part that would have got them hired.
  • Write them once, reuse them forever. They stop being frightening around the fourth telling.
Explaining a gap or an odd move3 rules
  • Get there first. Explain the gap, the short stint or the sideways move before anyone asks. Volunteered, it's context; extracted, it's a problem.
  • Be plain and unbitter. A neutral specific reason beats a flattering vague one. Layoffs, restructures, a company that ran out of money — these are weather, and everyone knows it.
  • Say something interesting about the time. What you did with six months matters more than the six months.
03

Getting in front of people

Where the jobs are

The best roles are posted as sentences, not as listings

A lot of hiring starts as somebody writing "my team is growing, come work with me" — days or weeks before anything reaches a job board, and with a fraction of the applicants. Search the feed, not the jobs tab. Paste this into LinkedIn search, swap in your own titles, filter to Posts, sort by most recent, and do it once a week.

("we're hiring" OR "join us" OR "open position" OR "looking for" OR "come work with me")
AND ("Product Manager" OR "Senior Product Manager" OR "Head of Product")

The person who wrote that post is also the person who can refer you. You arrive as a reply, not as an application.

Israeli job boards

Global and remote

Communities where jobs post first

Company research and target lists

Why bother

Building a target list beats refreshing job boards. Portfolio pages of active funds are the fastest way to find companies that are hiring but haven't posted yet — and layoff trackers cut both ways: they tell you who to avoid, and they tell you which teams just lost people and will need to backfill.

Israeli VC portfolios15 links
Global VC portfolios7 links
Ecosystem maps and signals3 links

Getting to the right human

Read this section properly

This is the highest-leverage part of the page. Most people skip it because it's uncomfortable. Everything below is something to do, not something to read.

The rest of the page argues that referrals beat applications. This section is the part that tells you where the door actually is.

Leverage your network properly

  • Ask for advice, not for a job. People give advice freely and jobs reluctantly.
  • Work the A→B→C rings. A are people you know. B are people your A's know. C are people your B's know. C is by far the biggest circle, and it's where the unexpected opportunity comes from.
  • Use conversations to sharpen your pitch, not just to collect contacts.
  • Be useful first. Publish thoughts, share things, do favours. Store the equity before you need to spend it.
  • When you ask, show you've done the work already — their help should accelerate the next step, not start it.
  • Close the loop. Tell everyone who helped you how it turned out. People who never hear the ending don't help twice.

Cold outreach that works

  • Cold-message individual contributors, not just recruiters. They can refer you, and their inbox isn't buried.
  • Lead with evidence of work backed by hard numbers, then a short skills pitch. Not a life story.
  • Be original in how you look for a job — the method itself demonstrates the skill.
  • Try the product of the company you're applying to. There is no acceptable excuse for skipping this.
  • End with one small, clear ask. "Would you have fifteen minutes?" gets answered. "I'd love to connect" does not.

The mechanics

How to actually find the person5 steps

You have a target company and no contact. This takes about four minutes.

  1. Open the company page → People. That is a list of everyone who says they work there.
  2. Filter by location, then search inside that list for recruiter, talent, or people — that's the hiring side. Search your own function to find the team you'd actually be joining.
  3. Include people who have left. Someone who left last year will tell you things no current employee will, and owes the company nothing.
  4. Check your university's alumni list at that company. A shared school is a weak tie that opens doors far more reliably than it has any right to.
  5. You now have two names instead of a form: someone who can put you into the system properly, and someone who can tell you what the team is actually struggling with.
Buy yourself information before the interview3 moves
  • Message five to ten people on the team — engineers, designers, whoever — and ask what's hard right now. Most people answer, because most people enjoy talking about their problems.
  • What you learn becomes the thing you say in the interview that no other candidate says. It is the single cheapest source of advantage in the whole process.
  • Ask what the last person in this role found difficult. The answer is often the actual job description.
Following up without becoming a nuisance4 rules
  • Follow up two or three times over a few weeks, and each time bring something rather than a reminder: a relevant piece of news, a thought about their product, a question you'd only ask if you'd genuinely used it.
  • "Just bumping this" tells them you want something. Anything else tells them what you'd be like to work with.
  • Put the follow-up date in your tracker the moment you send the first message, or it will not happen.
  • Silence is rarely personal. Roles get frozen, budgets move, the hiring manager goes on holiday. Assume logistics, not rejection, and keep the pipeline full while you wait.

One reframe

An interview is a networking event that happens to have a job attached. Even the processes you lose should leave you with one more person who knows what you're good at — which is why you close the loop with the interviewer too, not just with the friend who referred you.

04

The conversations

The phone screen

What this call actually is

Twenty minutes with someone who will not be your manager, who is working from a list, and who is deciding exactly one thing: whether to spend the team's time on you. It is not a conversation about your potential. It is a matching exercise — which is good news, because it means you can prepare for it almost completely.

Build the script from the job ads

Take three or four ads for the kind of role you want and copy their requirements into one list. That list is very close to the list the screener is holding.

For each item, know which piece of your experience answers it — and say it in their words, not yours. Spoon-feed the match. It is not the screener's job to work out that your "platform work" is their "infrastructure experience", and they will not do it.

The shape of the call

  1. Two sentences about who you are — the ones you wrote in Your story and your pitch.
  2. Your experience from today backwards. For each role: the title, how long, what the company does, what you did there. Same order as your CV, so they can follow along on the page in front of them.
  3. Stop when the relevant part runs out. Your current role and the one before it carry the call. Go further back only if asked.
  4. Their questions, then yours. Always have yours.
Questions that come up nearly every time6
  • "Tell me about a challenge." They want to know how hard it genuinely was, whether you took it on voluntarily, and what it changed about how you work.
  • "Tell me about a failure." Have one ready that was actually yours. "We ran out of runway" is not a failure, it's weather.
  • "What would your manager say about you?" / "What feedback have you had?" This is the weakness question wearing a hat. Answer it as the weakness question: a real one, what it has cost you, and what you now do about it.
  • "Why did you leave?" Honest, specific, unbitter. A neutral concrete reason beats a flattering vague one every time.
  • "What are you looking for?" Have an answer that is about the work. Not the salary, not the commute, not "a new challenge".
  • "What are your expectations?" Say the number, plainly, and then stop talking. Don't shift in your seat. The silence afterwards is not yours to fill.
Ask these5 questions
  • What would make someone a success in this role in the first year — and what would make them a standout rather than fine?
  • What will be hardest for whoever takes this job?
  • What's the next milestone the company is working towards?
  • In my experience companies rise and fall mostly on the quality of their management. How is it here?
  • What are the next steps, and when should I expect to hear?

The last one is not optional. Knowing the timeline is how you keep your pipeline honest.

The interview

What they're actually scoring

  • Did the candidate tell every interviewer the same stories over and over? Vary your material across the loop — they compare notes, and three anecdotes told five times reads as a thin career.
  • Were they user-centric in their thinking?
  • AI literacy — increasingly non-optional, whatever the role.
  • Can they move fast — connect dots, validate assumptions, prototype, decide?
  • Can they admit failure, learn from it, and show the growth?

And the part where you ask questions is part of the interview. Make it meaningful.

Remember who is on the other side

The person interviewing you is usually a busy employee who had this meeting dropped into their calendar, has a form to fill in, and will write their notes in the ten minutes before their next call. They are not trying to discover you. They are trying to collect enough evidence to complete an assessment.

So make the evidence easy to find. Say what you're about to do before you do it, keep answers in an order someone can follow, and land each one on a result. Being easy to write up is worth more than being impressive — and it is the single most underrated thing in this whole page.

How to answer so it can actually be scored6 habits
  • Announce the structure first. "I'll take this in three parts" buys you thinking time and signals that you're organised before you've said anything of substance.
  • State your assumptions out loud — two or three, enough to make the question tractable without narrowing it so far that you've dodged it.
  • Name what you decided not to do, and why. Clear reasoning for a defensible choice scores better than the "right" answer with no reasoning behind it.
  • Keep coming back to the person with the problem. If you've gone two minutes without mentioning whoever this is actually for, you've drifted.
  • If you contradict yourself, stop and fix it out loud. They noticed. Reconciling it is a point in your favour; hoping they missed it is not.
  • If you're stuck, say so and say what you're weighing up. Visible thinking beats silence, and it beats confident nonsense by an enormous margin.
Run your own retro, every time4 steps
  • Write it down the same day, before the outcome arrives and while you can still be honest: what you were asked, what you fumbled, what you'd say instead.
  • Most people learn nothing from interviews because nothing is ever written down. The loop you're in now is training for the one after it.
  • Practise out loud — mirror, phone camera, a patient friend. It feels ridiculous. It is also the only way to discover that your best story takes six minutes.
  • Rehearse the opening two sentences until they're boring. Nerves eat the first ninety seconds, so that part should be muscle memory.

Practice tools

If you're interviewing to lead

What changes above a certain line

Roles with a team underneath them are scored differently. Nobody is really asking whether you can do the work — they assume that. They're asking whether people will follow you into it, and whether your judgement still holds when it stops being your own hands doing the thing.

The five shifts

  • Every story needs a second layer — what you decided, and how you brought people with you. That's why you need more stories: one anecdote rarely carries both.
  • Say "I don't know — I'll come back to you on Friday." At senior level a smooth non-answer is the most damaging thing you can do. People are listening for whether you'd bluff them later, when it matters.
  • Lead with options, not conclusions. Two or three paths, the trade-offs, then your recommendation and the reasoning. Forcing a single answer through reads as junior, however right the answer is.
  • Expect to be asked what you'd stop. Focus is the executive skill. The examples that land are the ones where you deliberately gave something up, and can say what it cost.
  • Read which mode the company is in — shipping, optimising, or protecting what it already has — and aim your answers at that. The same strategy is visionary in one mode and reckless in another.
Questions to expect at the top of the loop10

Each one is a door, not a quiz. Have a specific situation ready for every one: the context, what you did, and what it changed.

  1. How do you make sure what your team builds serves the company's goals? — whether you think past execution.
  2. How do you balance a long-term bet against the need for visible wins this quarter? — how you manage expectations without stalling.
  3. Tell me about a major decision you made from data. What did you track, and what did it change?
  4. How do you prioritise when there isn't enough of anything? — your actual method, and how you communicate the trade-off.
  5. How have you built relationships with your peers in other functions? — whether you can operate across a company, not just down a team.
  6. Tell me about a time you had to change direction when the market moved. — adaptability, and how you handled it internally.
  7. How do you build and keep a team that performs? — mentoring, delegation, what culture you leave behind.
  8. How do you weigh what customers tell you against where you think things are going?
  9. How do you handle risk on a big investment? Tell me about a genuinely hard trade-off.
  10. What do you measure to know whether it's working, and why those things?

Offer and negotiation

Before the number comes up

  • Find out what the role pays before anyone asks what you want. Comp data and the people you've already spoken to are both better sources than your own guess.
  • Say your number in confidence, then stop. Don't shift in your seat, don't qualify it, don't fill the pause.
  • Keep your other conversations alive until you've signed. It is the only leverage that doesn't require you to bluff, and the only insurance against a process that quietly dies.
  • When it's done, close the loop — go back to everyone who helped and tell them how it ended. That is what makes them help you again, and it is the part almost nobody does.

Know your number

05

Staying in it

Staying sane

Treat the search as a design problem

It's the part of your career with the least structure and the most rejection.

  • Treat the search like a job. Set hours. Stop at the end of them. A search that runs 24/7 in your head produces less than one that runs 9 to 5 on your calendar.
  • Exercise daily. Not for fitness — for mood regulation during a months-long process with no feedback loop.
  • Keep learning something. It keeps you interesting in conversation, and it keeps you interested in yourself.
  • Manage your nervous system deliberately — NSDR, breathwork, meditation, whatever you'll actually do.
  • Don't pray and spray. Fewer, better-targeted applications beat volume, and they hurt less when they fail.
  • The market being hard is not a verdict on you. Most people I know who landed well went through a stretch where they were certain it wasn't going to happen. Keep going, and keep talking to people.
06

The prompt pack

How to use these

Copy them, fill in the brackets, and give the model your CV and the job description as context first. They're starting points, not scripts — the output is raw material you still have to edit into your own voice. A model that writes your CV for you produces a CV that reads like everyone else's, which is the opposite of the goal.

For your CV and profile

Extract the vocabulary of your market1 prompt

Feed it job ads one at a time — benefits and culture sections stripped out. What comes back is the keyword list for your Skills section and your CV.

You are extracting vocabulary from job ads.

I will paste job descriptions one at a time. For each one, pull out every
skill, tool, qualification and piece of role-specific terminology.

Rules:
- Keep the exact spelling and capitalisation used in the ad.
- Do not merge similar terms. "Java" and "JavaScript" stay separate.
- Pay special attention to anything following "required", "experience with"
  or "proficient in", and to items inside requirements lists.
- Count a term once per ad, however often it appears in that ad.

Maintain a single running table across everything I paste, sorted by count:

Term | Number of ads mentioning it

Reply with only the updated table.
Rewrite a bullet into the X-Y-Z shape1 prompt
Rewrite the following into a single CV bullet of no more than 20 words,
using the pattern: accomplished [result], as measured by [metric], by
doing [action].

Past tense, start with a verb, no first person, no adjectives that can't
be verified. If I haven't given you a metric, ask me for one rather than
inventing it.

Here is the raw description of what I did:
Tailor your CV to one job ad1 prompt
Here is my CV and a job description.

Rewrite my CV so a recruiter can match it to this ad in ten seconds:
- Use the ad's own vocabulary wherever it honestly describes what I did.
- Reorder the bullets inside each role so the most relevant one is first.
- Then tell me, separately, which of the ad's requirements my CV does not
  answer at all.

Do not invent experience, do not inflate numbers, and do not repeat the
job description back to me.
Draft your opening paragraph1 prompt
Write the opening paragraph of my CV. One paragraph, under 75 words,
third person, no bullets, no sentences starting with "I".

Use only what I give you: my field and seniority, my two or three real
areas of depth, my strongest two achievements with their numbers, and
what I am aiming at next. Professional and specific. No buzzwords, no
"passionate about", no "results-driven".

Here is what I have:
Rewriting your LinkedIn profile3 prompts

Use a reasoning-strong model for the first two, and a strong writing model for the third.

  1. "Find me the 10 largest, highest quality, and most engaged LinkedIn accounts in the field of [your field]."
  2. "Now look at my profile — here is the link: [your LinkedIn URL]. Considering everything you know about me, give me suggestions for improvement plus suggested wording for each section, taking inspiration from the common parameters of the best accounts we found earlier."
  3. "Based on everything you know about me, craft the next paragraph in a way that reflects my beliefs, speaks to the target audience, and makes them want to follow me."

For the search itself

Turn your contacts export into a plan1 prompt

Export your connections from LinkedIn first — Settings → Data Privacy → Get a copy of your data.

I am attaching an export of my professional contacts, with name, company,
title and profile link.

I am looking for [target role] roles in [domain], at [seniority] level.

1. Drop recruiters and agencies.
2. Score everyone else on how useful they could realistically be: are they
   at a company I am targeting, are they senior enough to refer someone,
   are they close to the work I want to do?
3. Give me the top ten as a table: name, role, company, why they are
   useful, and what specifically to ask them for - an introduction, a
   referral, or advice.
4. Draft three outreach messages, under 120 words each, that sound like a
   person wrote them and end with one clear, small ask.
Prompts — English8 prompts
  • Research the company

    I'm preparing for an interview at [Company Name] for the [Job Title] position. Give me a summary of their mission, core products or services, and recent news. Use their website [Website Link] and press releases for details.

  • Improve your resume

    Here's my resume. Can you suggest ways to improve it for the [Job Title] role at [Company Name]? Point out missing skills or gaps and recommend relevant online courses or projects to strengthen them.

  • Write a cover letter

    Help me craft a cover letter for the [Job Title] position at [Company Name]. It should highlight my experience, skills, and why I'm excited to work there.

  • Prepare for the interview

    For the [Job Title] role at [Company Name], what are the current challenges or trends in the industry I should be aware of? How can I show my understanding and offer solutions during the interview?

  • Learn the common questions

    What are typical interview questions for the [Job Title] position in the [Industry Name] industry?

  • Practice behavioral questions

    Create behavioral interview questions for the [Job Title] role at [Company Name]. Explain how to answer them using the STAR method — Situation, Task, Action, Result — based on my experience.

  • Follow up after the interview

    Help me write a thank-you email after my interview for the [Job Title] role at [Company Name]. It should express appreciation, reiterate my interest, and mention something specific we discussed.

  • Demonstrate a skill

    I need to show that I'm proficient in [Specific Skill or Software] for the [Job Title] position at [Company Name]. Create practice tasks or challenges to help me prepare.

פרומפטים — עברית8 פרומפטים
  • למידה על החברה

    אני מתכונן לראיון ב[שם החברה] לתפקיד [שם התפקיד]. תן לי סיכום של המשימה שלהם, המוצרים או השירותים המרכזיים, וחדשות אחרונות. השתמש באתר שלהם [קישור לאתר] ובהודעות לעיתונות לפרטים.

  • שיפור קורות חיים

    הנה קורות החיים שלי. האם תוכל להציע דרכים לשפר אותם עבור תפקיד [שם התפקיד] ב[שם החברה]? הצבע על מיומנויות חסרות או פערים והמלץ על קורסים מקוונים או פרויקטים רלוונטיים לחיזוק שלהם.

  • כתיבת מכתב מלווה

    עזור לי לנסח מכתב מלווה לתפקיד [שם התפקיד] ב[שם החברה]. עליו להדגיש את הניסיון שלי, המיומנויות, ומדוע אני נרגש לעבוד שם.

  • הכנה לראיון

    לתפקיד [שם התפקיד] ב[שם החברה], מהם האתגרים או המגמות הנוכחיות בתעשייה שכדאי שאכיר? כיצד אוכל להראות את ההבנה שלי ולהציע פתרונות במהלך הראיון?

  • הכרת שאלות נפוצות

    מהן שאלות ראיון טיפוסיות לתפקיד [שם התפקיד] בתעשיית [שם התעשייה]?

  • תרגול שאלות התנהגותיות

    האם תוכל ליצור שאלות ראיון התנהגותיות לתפקיד [שם התפקיד] ב[שם החברה]? הסבר גם כיצד לענות עליהן — מצב, משימה, פעולה, תוצאה — בהתבסס על הניסיון שלי.

  • מעקב לאחר הראיון

    עזור לי לכתוב מייל תודה לשלוח אחרי הראיון שלי לתפקיד [שם התפקיד] ב[שם החברה]. עליו להראות הערכה, לחזור על העניין שלי בעבודה, ולהזכיר משהו ספציפי שדיברנו עליו.

  • הוכחת מיומנויות

    אני צריך להראות שאני טוב ב[מיומנות או תוכנה ספציפית] לתפקיד [שם התפקיד] ב[שם החברה]. האם תוכל ליצור משימות תרגול או אתגרים שיעזרו לי להתכונן?

Found a dead link, or know something better?

No sign-in, and your name and email are optional. This page only stays useful because people do this.

Tell me