Show IH: I built a job search toolkit after 7 years on the recruiter side
Seven years recruiting at PageGroup meant watching the same thing happen every week. A strong candidate, filtered out before I could read their CV. The keywords were wrong, the formatting broke the ATS, or the cover letter was a copy-paste job that made no reference to the company. Fixable problems. But by the time I saw the application, the damage was done.
The tools to fix this existed, but you needed four or five of them and 45 minutes of switching between tabs per application. So I built one that covers the full cycle.
Personal Job Coach starts with Career Strategy before any job is in play: a coaching conversation that produces a professional base CV, an elevator pitch, and recommended target roles. From that foundation, everything else runs automatically. Add a job, and a tailored CV, cover letter, gap analysis, and company briefing generate in the background before you've opened a single tool tab. Mock interview prep draws on the actual company research, not generic questions about the job title.
There's also Job Radar, which captures job alert emails from 40+ boards, deduplicates them across sources, and scores each role against your profile. Forward your LinkedIn and Indeed alerts to one address, and scored jobs arrive without manual entry.
One thing I built in specifically for the French and Spanish markets: outputs follow the language of the job description automatically. A French speaker applying to a German company gets German outputs. No settings to change.
We launched paid on 6 May. Two paying users so far: €40 MRR, two weeks in. Pricing is €19.99/month, cancel any time.
2 questions i'd like to ask this community:
- Has anyone built job search tooling where the career profile (not the CV) is the core data model? The merge-multiple-CVs-into-one-master-profile problem was harder than I expected. Would love to hear how others handled it.
- And on distribution: the French and Spanish markets have almost no AI-native job search competitors. Has anyone found that launching in a non-English market first actually helps or hurts with English-language distribution later?
personaljobcoach.com | personaljobcoach.fr | personaljobcoach.es
The recruiter perspective in your toolkit is a strong differentiator. Something similar happened when I enrolled in https://www.onlytradeschools.com/online-ekg-technician-programs/ for a career shift, the platform’s structured prep was a game-changer for grasping practical skills. A clear “career profile” at the core could offer the same reusable foundation for candidates, reducing that buried experience issue others mentioned.
Really interesting approach. The “career profile” concept makes a lot of sense compared to rewriting the same information over and over for every application. Focusing on underserved markets first instead of competing head-on in the crowded English speaking space. Feels like you built this from actual recruiter pain points rather than just adding AI on top of the process. Curious to see how the Job Radar feature evolves. :) :)
Thanks for this, really glad the thinking came through.
The career profile piece is the bit we kept coming back to when building it. If the profile is shallow, every downstream output is shallow too, regardless of how good the AI is. Getting that foundation right felt more important than piling more tools on top of it.
Job Radar is the feature I'm most excited about right now. Still a lot of runway there. More soon!
This is genuinely useful — most job search advice comes from career coaches who haven't actually sat on the hiring side. 7 years of recruiter experience is a completely different lens. Curious what's the single biggest mistake you saw candidates make that they had no idea was hurting them?
Buried relevant experience, without a doubt. Someone would have exactly the right background for a role and spend two bullet points on it, sandwiched between stuff that didn't matter. The recruiter skims, doesn't clock the match, moves on. The candidate never knew why.
It's one of the things we built the gap analysis for. It reads the job description against your profile and surfaces exactly that kind of mismatch before you submit.
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This is stronger than a “CV generator” if the career profile is the core data model. Most job tools still optimize one application at a time, but your real wedge is building a reusable candidate intelligence layer: base CV, target roles, elevator pitch, job scoring, company briefing, and interview prep all coming from the same profile.
That is the part I’d make much louder. The painful problem is not only “tailor my CV faster.” It is that candidates keep rebuilding themselves from scratch for every role, every market, and every language. If Personal Job Coach becomes the system of record for a candidate’s career strategy, the product feels much more durable.
The naming is also worth taking seriously early. Personal Job Coach is clear, but it sounds service-like and generic. If this grows into a serious AI-native career platform across French, Spanish, and English markets, a brandable name like Beryxa .com would give it more ownership and expansion room than a descriptive coaching name.
That framing is spot on, and it's something users tell us too. The base CV and career profile are the fixed layer. Everything per-job draws from it rather than starting cold. It's more visible once you're inside the product than it is on the homepage, which is probably the gap to fix.
Exactly. If the fixed layer is the career profile, then the homepage probably needs to lead with that more clearly.
Right now, “CV generator” or “job coach” can make people think this is a one-off application helper. But the stronger product is more like a reusable career intelligence layer: one profile that powers CV tailoring, job scoring, pitch writing, company research, and interview prep across different roles and markets.
That also connects back to the naming point.
Personal Job Coach explains the immediate use case, but it may keep the product sounding like a service or advice tool. If the real asset is the candidate profile and everything built around it, the brand probably needs to feel more like a platform than a coach.
That is why Beryxa felt relevant to me. It gives the product room to become the career strategy layer, not just a personal coaching tool.
I would pressure-test this before the homepage and early user memory get too fixed around the “job coach” frame. If Beryxa is genuinely interesting as a broader brand direction, it is worth discussing privately before the product gets more public gravity under the current name.
The homepage framing point is fair and something we're actively working on. The career profile as the fixed layer is the real product. the per-job tools are the output of it, not the product itself. That's not coming through clearly enough yet.
On naming: we're staying with Personal Job Coach for now. It converts well in France and Spain precisely because it's direct. Platform ambiguity is a later problem.
One practical thought here.
Since Personal Job Coach is converting well in France and Spain, I would not force the naming question right now.
But the homepage/category framing still looks worth tightening, because the product sounds stronger when the career profile is treated as the fixed layer and the CV/job/interview tools are outputs from it.
I do focused naming and positioning audits for early products: current name risk, homepage category frame, domain perception, what buyers likely assume from the name, and where the positioning may limit the product later.
For your case, I’d focus less on “should you rename?” and more on how to make the existing brand carry the career-profile platform idea without losing the directness that already converts.
It is not a long consulting thing. Just a sharp written breakdown with practical recommendations.
I’m doing a few at $99 while refining the format. If useful, happy to give you a clear outside read before you lock the next homepage version.
That makes sense.
If Personal Job Coach is already converting well in France and Spain because the promise is direct, I would not fight that at the current stage.
The only thing I’d keep in mind is that the direct name may keep working very well for acquisition while still becoming limiting later if the product shifts from “coach” to “career profile infrastructure.”
So I’d separate the two decisions:
Keep the name if it is converting now.
But make sure the homepage starts training users around the career profile as the core asset, not just the per-job tools.
That way, if the platform layer becomes more important later, the market is already moving with you.
This is a masterclass in founder-market fit. Leveraging your recruiter background at PageGroup to solve the "pre-filtered candidate" problem is a massive wedge.
Regarding non-English markets: starting in France/Spain is a brilliant strategic move. CAC is likely significantly lower, and as you noticed, the competitive density for AI-native career tools is much thinner than the English-speaking world. In my experience, launching in a non-English market first actually helps with English-language distribution later because it forces you to build for localization and diverse cultural expectations of "professionalism" from day one. It also gives you a "blue ocean" to find PMF before you have to fight for attention on the global stage.
One conversion note: on the home page, I'd make the "Job Radar" feature even more prominent. The idea of "auto-deduplicating LinkedIn and Indeed alerts into one scored feed" is a killer feature for the 'burnt-out' applicant phase.
If you'd like a substantive conversion teardown of personaljobcoach.com (or the .fr / .es flows), I do them for $1 here: https://roastmysite.io/go.php?src=external_manual_ih_sofalda_jobcoach_may19_usd_presell_hv
Thanks for this. The Job Radar point is well taken. It tends to land better in demos than on the homepage, which probably means the copy isn't doing enough work yet. Adding it to the list.
On the non-English market question: that's exactly what we're testing. France and Spain first, then use the learnings to sharpen the positioning before going broader. Early signal is that the absence of direct competition helps with SEO more than with paid. Organic rankings come faster, but you still have to build distribution from scratch.