At fifty-four, Devjit had begun to suspect that no human being was reading anything he sent. Seven months out of work, heartbroken and exhausted, by his own account, he had spent those months firing résumés into portals and inboxes, and the résumés had disappeared the way stones disappear into a well: no splash, no echo, no proof they had landed anywhere at all.
His suspicion, it turns out, was probably correct. Before a recruiter ever sees a candidate's name, the document passes through an applicant tracking system, an ATS, which screens it in seconds, on formatting and keywords. Devjit's résumé had been written for a person. A person was not the first reader. Possibly a person was never the reader at all.
This is the small, bureaucratic humiliation at the centre of the modern senior job hunt: a career of two or three decades, reduced to a parsing exercise it was never formatted to pass. And it raises a question that sits underneath every story in this piece, what happens to a professional's sense of worth when experience itself stops being legible?
Robin can answer that. He had twenty years of experience, much of it in senior management, and the kind of title that once opened doors just by sitting on a résumé. For most of his career, it did. Success, he assumed, would keep finding him, not arrogance, exactly, but induction from the evidence: he had built teams from nothing, fixed profit-and-loss statements no one else would touch. Surely, he thought, someone somewhere was keeping score.
No one was. The phone did not ring. So he did what most people do: he applied. Not a handful of times, five or six hundred, over two and a half years.
"Out of five hundred or six hundred applications, I received one interview, probably one or two, max," says Robin, who today works as a Director of Delivery.
One reply in six hundred is not simply bad luck, and it is not, on its own, proof of a broken market. It is, Robin would eventually conclude, what happens when a highly capable person with no strategy walks into a room that three thousand equally capable people are also walking into. By the time he found NxtJob.ai, he had already paid for two other programmes that told him to tweak his résumé and wait. Neither worked. He very nearly refused to trust a third.
"I did not have any strategy. I don't know how to approach the job market, I simply went ahead and applied. After getting into the job search properly, my complete perception changed," he says.
The soldier's diagnosis
The company Robin turned to was founded by Major Richik, a serving officer in the Indian Army who had earlier built a recruitment-tech venture called HyreSnap. He does not romanticise the market he now works in.
"The market doesn't reward the most capable person in the room. It rewards the one with the better strategy," he says.
His central claim has a certain unsentimental clarity: for experienced professionals, the job search is itself a second job, one stacked on top of the role you already have, or the one you have just lost. Treat it like a hobby, a few tired clicks after dinner, and the market treats you the same way in return. It ignores you, quietly and completely.
Major Richik says the company's method eventually carried Robin to a Director of Delivery role, a rung above the positions he had spent years unsuccessfully applying for. The method itself, as the company describes it, unfolds in four movements, each of them a small correction to how professionals imagine the market works.
A document for the algorithm
The first correction is Devjit's: the résumé is not a summary of your career. It is a piece of software's first impression of you, and it should be built for the algorithm that reads it before any human does.
There is a mirror-image mistake, and Srinivasan made it. He tried the modern shortcut, fed his résumé to ChatGPT and asked it to "optimize" against a job description. The machine obliged, generously.
"It will throw something on me and interviews will be scheduled. But I would not be able to live up to the interviewer's expectations, because it's all fake. It was embarrassing, to say the least," he says.
The padded résumé, decorated with achievements he had never had, got him into the room. He did not survive five minutes inside it. There is something almost parable-like in the pairing: one man invisible because his truth was formatted wrong, another visible on the strength of fictions he then had to answer for in person.
The company's prescription refuses both errors. Stop editing a single file and calling it a strategy; build one exhaustive "master résumé" capturing every project, number and achievement, then tailor a fresh version for each specific role. On the platform, two AI agents, Navigator and Tailor, divide the labour, one mapping a career into the master document, the other generating a customised pitch per opening.
The rooms you are not in
The second correction is the one Major Richik says most unsettles his clients, a claim widely cited in career-coaching circles: that a large share of desirable roles, by many estimates as much as 70 percent, are never publicly posted at all. Not on LinkedIn, not on a job board, nowhere a routine search would reach.
If that is true even approximately, then the crowds are fighting over a fraction of the real market. The reason companies keep the rest hidden is not conspiracy but arithmetic: the moment a senior role is posted, thousands of applicants, some armed with automated bots, flood the listing, and filtering them, even with an ATS, costs weeks of human effort. So the roles are filled the older way, through people, a department head, a referral, a phone call between two professionals who trust each other.
"While you're refreshing job boards at midnight, the role you wanted was filled by someone who never applied. They simply got introduced," Major Richik says.
For the portion of the market that can be found, a third agent, Hunter, digs past the obvious boards into company career pages, Boolean searches and freshly posted listings, including the aliases a single job travels under. "Nobody calls your job by the same name twice," the Major observes; a product manager might be advertised as a product owner, a platform lead, a growth lead.
Networking, rescued from spam
Reaching the unposted rooms is the work of networking, a word so degraded by practice that Major Richik spends energy rescuing it. Not fifty connection requests carrying "Hi, can you refer me?", but the slower craft of finding the two or three people who actually sit inside a target company and building a relationship genuine enough that they would attach their own name to yours. Even the conversations that lead nowhere become seeds: someone changes companies, someone gets a budget, someone remembers you.
A fourth agent, Networker, identifies those contacts and follows up "the way a careful professional does, not a desperate one." The finer skill, the founder says, is making the recipient feel you are doing them the favour by reaching out, a discipline the company codifies as the WIN Method: a Well-researched problem, an Insightful solution, and a Narrative that ties the two together.
Underneath it sits a reframing of the interview itself. Beyond a decade of experience, interviews stop being interviews and become meetings, two professionals deciding whether to work together. You would never walk into a client meeting without researching their problem first; why walk into the most important deal of your career with less? A fifth agent, Pitcher, researches the specific problems a target company is facing and packages a problem-solution narrative sent straight to the decision-maker who owns it, not a recruiter, not an inbox buried under applications.
"It turns 'please consider me' into 'here's what I'd already started fixing on day one.' You're not sending applications anymore. You're sending proposals," Major Richik says.
The room, the offer, the streak
What remains is performance and price. Inside the room, an unscripted pressure decides whether a candidate projects calm confidence or the faint smell of desperation; a sixth agent, Interviewer, runs structured mock interviews with feedback and STAR-based storytelling, rehearsed until composure becomes instinct rather than performance. Robin went through the material "ten to fifteen times", and then walked into a final round for a Technical Program Delivery Manager role and walked out offered the more senior Director of Delivery position instead. Srinivasan, who had lost offers at PwC and elsewhere before joining, marks the same turning point: "That is when I understood it is the face-to-face practice which was missing. That was the game-changer."
And at the very end, the offer, the stage Major Richik insists professionals fumble most, by celebrating and signing at once. Acceptance runs both ways. Recruiters, he claims, routinely hold 30 to 40 percent more budget than their opening number, and he cites an estimate that a professional can forgo close to ₹8–10 crore over a lifetime by never learning to negotiate. A seventh agent, Negotiator, benchmarks what a role is actually worth and rehearses the counter-offer before it is needed. (These figures are NxtJob.ai's own estimates.)
Why does a serving soldier run a job-search company? The answer he gives is personal: he watched capable people lose, first to a filter, then to silence, then to a process he believes was never designed to recognise them, and he frames the mission in the language of his Army training, an ethos of helping the deserving who stand to lose from the system. Nine AI agents in all work alongside the company's human consultants, and he points the curious to a two-day weekend bootcamp where he walks through the full method used with Robin, Srinivasan and Devjit.
His parting line is aimed at every professional still waiting for a track record to speak for itself: you did not reach this level by being unprepared. You got here with a strategy, every single time. This is not the moment to break that streak.
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