Open any feed right now and it looks like everyone is winning. A friend just closed a round. Someone you went to school with is “thrilled to announce” a new title. The headlines are all record highs and hyper-growth and the future arriving early. And then you switch tabs back to your own search — the fourteenth application this week, the recruiter who went quiet, the “we’ll be in touch” that never turned into anything — and the gap between those two screens feels personal. Like everyone got a map you didn’t.
I want to say the thing that took me too long to believe myself: it isn’t you.
The job market genuinely got harder. There are more people applying to fewer openings, more automated filtering between you and a human, and more noise to cut through than at almost any point in recent memory. When something is objectively difficult, feeling like you’re falling behind isn’t a character flaw. It’s the correct response to a hard environment — you’re just missing the tools that match how hard it actually is.
Because here’s what a job search really is when you’re in the middle of one: it’s a dozen conversations happening at once, in a dozen different places. A thread with an agency recruiter in your inbox. A hiring manager’s name you scribbled somewhere. Four companies at four different stages, and you can’t quite remember which one asked for the take-home. A folder of resume versions with names like resume_final_v3_ACTUAL. It’s not that you’re disorganized. It’s that no one ever gave you a real instrument panel for one of the most important, most stressful projects you’ll ever run.
That’s what I’m building. It’s called Pursuit.
Pursuit is a personal CRM for your job search — one calm workspace where every recruiter, every company, and every opportunity lives in one place, and where a single glance tells you exactly where you stand in each conversation. Not a folder. Not a spreadsheet you dread updating. An actual picture of your search, kept current for you.
I made a deliberate decision about how it works. Most new products right now are racing to sprinkle “AI” over everything, whether it helps or not. I didn’t want that. In Pursuit, the software does exactly two things with a model, because they’re the two things a model is genuinely better at than you should have to be: it reads your inbox and quietly turns each job-related email into the right record, linked to the right company and recruiter — so your pipeline builds itself instead of you building it. And before an interview, it scans the web and hands you a focused brief on the company and the people you’re about to meet, so you walk in ready instead of cramming at midnight. Everything else — your pipeline, your records, your files — is fast, dependable software that stays out of your way. Boring on purpose, in the places where boring means reliable.
I keep coming back to one word for what this is supposed to give you: traction. Not a magic button that gets you hired — anyone selling you that is lying. Traction is different. It’s grip on the road. It’s the feeling of your wheels actually catching, of momentum you can steer, of knowing that the effort you put in is landing somewhere instead of spinning out. When the search is hard and the odds feel long, the thing that keeps you going isn’t false optimism. It’s the quiet confidence that comes from being organized, prepared, and in control of your own process.
That’s the whole reason Pursuit exists. Finding a new job — a new career, really — is one of the highest-stakes things a person does, and most people go through it feeling like they’re white-knuckling a wheel with no dashboard. We’re building the dashboard. We’re doing everything we can to make sure that when you’re looking for what’s next, you feel like you have a grip on the road — even when the road is genuinely tough.
If that sounds like where you are right now, come build your search with us. Early access is open, and I’d love to have you in early.
You’re not behind. Let’s get you traction.