I got laid off from a IT/Dev manager job I'd been at for nearly a decade. I loved the company, role and my team, but the company had to downsize.
The search that followed took 9 months: 249 applications, 21 screening calls, 7 interviews, and 2 job offers.
Somewhere around month 4 I stopped treating it as "send resume, hope" and started building a repeatable system around ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.
I created a skills database as the source of truth, alignment analysis against each JD, AI-driven interview prep through NotebookLM, and tracking everything in a spreadsheet so I could actually see what was working.
That system is what eventually landed me the 7 interviews (3 final interviews) and 2 jobs. The first job I took because I needed something, the second job is my dream job.
I wrote it up as a book because I wanted to help other people land their dream jobs without grinding through the same 9 months I did.
The whole thing is online for free at careervectorhq.com, no signup, no email wall. I also share every prompt I used, copy and paste ready, so you can run the same workflow yourself instead of reverse engineering it from the text. I am considering turning it into software, but for now just sharing my process.
Would genuinely value feedback from this crowd, especially from anyone who's hired recently and can tell me where the advice is off, or where AI-assisted applications are starting to hurt candidates rather than help.
