I told people there was no Job. They sent me their CVs anyway.

One fake iOS/Android job post, a CFBR, a few unlucky tagged friends, and a useful lesson about how people search for work.

A few days ago I launched Career OS.

The way I work is simple: I build the candidate profile first, then I search for jobs around that person.

I look at experience, seniority, positioning, location, work authorization and the kind of work they can realistically own. Only then do I start looking for roles, and I validate them one by one.

I am not interested in giving someone 100 links that can be burned in two minutes. A dead role, the wrong country, incompatible work authorization, wrong seniority or a job completely disconnected from the candidate's experience is not a useful lead.

It is just another application.

That work takes time. One client can take me two or three days, so I suspended Career OS intake only two days after launching it.

I could make it faster by automating most of the process and handing people a nice green spreadsheet full of jobs.

I don't want to sell that.

Then something funny happened.

People started treating me like a recruiter.

CVs appeared in my inbox. People asked for jobs, openings and referrals.

So yesterday I decided to make the point a little less subtle.

I posted:

Senior iOS / Android. €125K. Full remote. Work from anywhere. Visa sponsorship.

A few lines later:

Caught you 🪤

Then I explained very clearly that there was no vacancy.

I am not a recruiter. I don't have jobs for you. Please don't connect with me just to ask for one. I even asked people to unsubscribe and disconnect if they saw me as a recruiter and had connected for that reason alone.

I expected people to laugh.

Instead, connection requests went up.

People sent CVs.

Someone commented "I'm interested."

Someone dropped a CFBR, apparently helping a nonexistent vacancy get better reach.

And people started tagging their friends underneath a post that literally explained there was no job.

That was my favourite part.

Imagine reading there is no job here and thinking:

I know exactly who needs to see this.

Funny, yes.

But it also exposed something I see constantly in job search.

People see the right technology, a good salary, remote and sponsorship, and somewhere along the way they stop evaluating the role.

They start wanting it.

Wrong location. Wrong level. Wrong scope. Missing experience.

Apply anyway.

Then 200 applications later:

Why is nobody replying?

This is why I work candidate first.

The useful question is not:

Where can you apply?

You can apply almost anywhere.

The useful question is:

Where does this company have a credible reason to interview you?

Alexander is one example.

We aligned his CV and LinkedIn, then he applied where I believed the match made sense. According to his verified review, he had his first screening after a week, followed by technical rounds, a culture-fit interview and an offer 2.5 weeks after buying the package.

Other candidates I have worked with have also gone from struggling with search to getting multiple interviews from roles selected around the profiles we built.

That is not a promise that everyone gets an offer in 2.5 weeks. Hiring doesn't work like that.

It is simply why I care more about qualified applications than application count.

And yes, sometimes I discount the work heavily.

Occasionally I see someone who can clearly do the job, but their search is a mess. Their positioning is wrong, they are applying in the wrong places, or they simply cannot get themselves into the room.

Sometimes I want to help and see what happens when we fix that.

One more thing about The Mobile Career Brief.

This is not a newsletter built around the sun is hot, water is wet advice dressed up as career wisdom.

I am writing from 15 years in mobile engineering and 500+ technical interviews from the hiring side.

When I write about CVs, seniority, technical interviews, scope, bad targeting or why candidates disappear before the first call, it comes from patterns I have actually seen doing the work.

That does not make every opinion universal.

It does mean I am not going to turn a viral post saying "network more" into next week's career lesson.

And this is not a free jobs feed either.

Subscribing does not mean I am eventually going to email everyone the same spreadsheet of "verified remote jobs". The roles I find for clients are useful because they were selected and checked for that person.

This newsletter is part of my business. I want some readers to eventually become clients. I am not going to pretend otherwise.

If you are here to understand hiring, improve your search and get better at getting into the room, stay.

If you're waiting for free job drops...

wrong newsletter 😄

See Part 1 and the comments on LinkedIn →

And yes, Part 2 is coming.

I changed the salary.

I changed the seniority.

Let's see who reads past the first line this time. 🍿