Building with agents
My job search is a marketing funnel, and I am the product
How I run my job search like a marketing funnel: a CRM of plain files, a landing page for every company, and an AI agent that never forgets a follow-up.
The screen
There is a screen I open every morning with my coffee. It shows a funnel, left to right: how many leads entered, how many converted to the next stage, how many closed. It shows every open deal with its stage, a next action, and a date. It flags the deals that went quiet so no follow-up slips. Any marketer would recognize it in two seconds. It is a campaign dashboard.
The campaign is my job search. The funnel holds 113 applications across 101 companies. The leads are employers. The product is me.
The friend
The machine was not born from my job hunt. It was born from a conversation with a good friend.
His business needed more clients, and we sat down one evening to talk about leads. The plan we sketched was not complicated, just thorough. Research every serious prospect properly. Keep what you learn in one place, so a second conversation starts smarter than the first. And for the leads that matter, build a custom experience: a page made for that one client, speaking to their world, not a generic brochure for everyone.
On the way home it hit me. I had just designed a better sales process for his business than the one I was running for my own future. My job hunt at the time was browser tabs, screenshots, and promises to follow up that lived in my head. I was treating the most important sale of my year like paperwork.
So I flipped the machine. A job search is a marketing problem with exactly one product. Companies are the leads. Applications are the campaigns. A CV is collateral. Rejections are conversion data. And nobody who respects a product launches it from memory. I gave myself what every product gets: a CRM, landing pages, campaign rules, and analytics. Then I put an AI agent in the operator's seat.
The product file
Before a machine can market a product, it has to know the product. So the system started the way a good recruiter starts: it interviewed me.
Tell me about yourself. Walk me through your history. What have you actually shipped, and where can I see it? What are you bad at? What do you want, and what would make you walk away?
The answers became one product file: my CV, my work with links to the real thing, my strengths, my honest gaps, my preferences, all in my own words. Every asset the machine produces is derived from that file, and nothing is ever invented. If a claim is not in the product file, it cannot appear in an application. That one rule matters more than any other, because the pressure to embellish grows with every rejection, and a derivation rule does not feel pressure. A marketing machine is only as honest as its product file.
The interview format matters too. A form collects titles and dates. An interview collects stories: why I built something, what broke, what I would do differently. Campaigns need the stories. So do interviews, and the system already holds my answer to "tell me about yourself" in words that are actually mine.
The campaign
Every job posting that catches my eye starts a campaign, and every campaign runs the same play.
Day one, the posting is saved word for word, and that copy is never touched again. Postings get taken down, and the interview three weeks later will reference the original text. Then it gets digested: buzzwords out, one honest sentence about what the role really is, and the three things this company actually wants. Most postings bury those three under fifteen requirements. Finding them is the first real work, because the whole campaign aims at those three and ignores the rest.
Then the machine researches the lead, the way a good salesperson researches an account. What they sell and how they make money. Their stage and funding. A recent piece of news worth mentioning. Their tech, their culture signals, the people I would likely meet, their competitors, and anyone I know near them. Every source is saved. Research that lives in browser tabs is spent once; research that lives in a file compounds, paying off again at the follow-up, the interview, and the negotiation.
The product file and the lead file then meet in a fit brief: the two or three real things I have shipped that map to what they want, my angle in one line, and my gaps, named plainly. Naming the gap sounds like bad marketing. It is the opposite. The first hard interview question always finds the thing you tried to hide, and a named gap with a plan reads as confidence.
Then comes the collateral. The CV is one true document, restyled for each company: their accent color, their typography, the same facts underneath. And for most campaigns there is a landing page: a one-page website built for that one company, in their own visual style, with my work mapped against their role. Seventy-six of those pages are live right now. I cannot prove what a personalized page does to reply rates, and I do not trust anyone who claims they can. What I can say is what it changes: a CV claims I fit. A page in their own design language shows I can research a company and ship something real in hours, which happens to be the job.
The copy rule came from my most expensive lesson. My early outreach sounded AI-written, and the reason was subtle: the drafts mirrored the posting's own vocabulary back at it. The posting said "ownership", so the draft said it too. Sounding like their posting means sounding like everyone. Now the rules are fixed: lead with shipped work, never echo their words, and one real personal detail beats a full list of skills.
And one rule sits above all of it: the agent never sends anything. It researches, drafts, and prepares. I read, edit, and send. Every word leaves my desk, not its. The moment something goes out, the exact sent copy is archived and the people involved are recorded, so when someone replies three weeks later, the machine shows me precisely what I said and to whom.
Conversion data
After the send, most job seekers enter the anxious quiet. This is where the funnel earns its keep.
Every campaign sits in a stage, and every company carries one next action with a date. That date is the difference between a tracker and a diary. A diary records what happened. A pipeline tells you what to do on Tuesday.
When an answer arrives, it gets digested, not just read. A rejection email moves the stage and writes its own timeline line. An interview invite becomes a calendar fact and a new next action. And when my notes disagree with the calendar, the calendar wins. The world owns the facts: dates, stages, what was actually said. I own the judgment: what it means and what to do next. Systems that mix those two drift from reality within a month.
The funnel also splits the endings honestly. Rejected means the company said no. Withdrawn means I did: wrong salary, wrong stack, faded interest. My board shows 68 rejected and 6 withdrawn, and keeping those apart reminds me that I am not only being chosen. I choose too.
This is where the marketing frame quietly changes how rejection feels. On the screen, 68 nos are not 68 verdicts about my worth. They are conversion data: a rate at one stage of a funnel, something to examine and improve. Around rejection twenty I noticed I had stopped flinching. Not because I toughened up. Because every no landed in the funnel instead of my head.
The same memory works forward. Before any meeting, the agent reads both sides of the folder, their file and mine, and briefs me: what to lead with, which gap will come up, what to ask. It can even run the classic interview questions against my own material. The machine that absorbed the rejections is the same one that prepares me for the interviews.
The honest funnel
Here are the real numbers. A hundred and thirteen applications across 101 companies. Sixty-eight rejections. Six withdrawn by me. One interview process open as I write this. Seventy-six landing pages live. The search is still running, so this is not a success story, and I will not dress it up as one.
I also know exactly where the marketing frame ends. A recruiter's call is not a conversion event. A coffee with someone who might become a colleague is not a touchpoint. Companies are people, and the moment a real person shows up, the metaphor steps aside. The machine does not replace that human part. It protects it. Because the funnel carries the memory and the follow-ups, I arrive at every human moment with full attention and the whole history at my back, instead of scrambling to remember what I said three weeks ago.
You are the product. That is not a cynical sentence; it is a respectful one. Products get research, tailored pages, honest positioning, follow-up discipline, and a dashboard. Job seekers get a spreadsheet, if anything. I closed that gap for myself with plain files and an agent, and the search has felt different ever since.
If you read this and want the same machine for your own search, say so. If enough people do, I will turn it into something you can run yourself.