Stop Competing With 400 Applicants. Build This in One Weekend (Yes, there's a no code option too!)

LinkedIn is dead. You know this. Everyone applying for jobs in 2025 knows this.

It's not that the volume is gone. It's that the ability to get noticed has disappeared. So, what's the generic advice?

It's really common. You probably know it. It's beat the ATS.

It's use power words. It's network harder. It's format your resume so the robots can parse it.

But don't sound too robotic or you'll get filtered for being AI generated. Use AI to help you apply, but not too much or they'll catch you. The response to LinkedIn dying is to optimize harder for LinkedIn right now.

And it's not really working, is it? I've been watching the discourse for months now. Candidates are using AI to pass interviews.

Like clearly, they get hired often at big salaries. Yay. Then they get fired within a week because they cannot explain their own work.

They were using so much AI to interview it just doesn't go anywhere. Companies are using AI on the other side to screen resumes and then penalize candidates whose answers sound too much like AI. Is that fair?

No. The success rate on applications has dropped to something like half a percent. Not 5%, like 4%.

This is an arms race where both sides continue to escalate and everybody loses. Candidates invest more in gaming filters. Companies invest more in building filters.

The filters just keep getting smarter. The gaming gets smarter. 80 88% 88% of employers admit their own systems cause them to misqualified people.

Everyone knows the infrastructure is failing. Everyone keeps trying to win anyway using the same system. Here's the thing almost no one has thought through.

The arms race only exists because everybody accepted the same premise. As a candidate, you're a supplicant. The employer has all the gates.

Your job is to squeeze through their gate, to knock at the door, to present flowers, do whatever it takes to get them to open up and let you have a job. But the gates that are traditional like like LinkedIn are not the only path anymore. Think about what the hiring system actually fails to do.

It fails to show who you are. A resume compresses years of work into bullet points. An ATS scans for keyword matches.

A recruiter spends maybe six seconds deciding whether to keep reading. The entire infrastructure is optimized for filtering volume, not for understanding people. and you're competing for attention against 400 other compressed keyword optimized six-second impressions.

What if you were not in the pile at all? I know that sounds scary, but hear me out. What if instead of submitting yourself for filtering, you created and controlled the point of contact?

A surface where people encounter you on your own terms, where they can query your experience, explore you in depth, discover what you actually do instead of scanning various claims you can make in a tiny resume that's buttoned up. The same AI that broke hiring can make this kind of experience possible. Three years ago, building a custom interface required engineering skills or real money.

But that gap is closed now. If you can describe what you want clearly, you can build it. Working prototypes, interactive tools, AI powered experiences, a fancy personal site, you got it.

Which means you're not stuck optimizing for everybody else's broken system. You can build the surface that people encounter when they discover you as an individual, as a candidate. You do not have to make yourself squeeze through the filters.

And honestly, the only reason I'm sharing this is because the success rate with a conventional system is so low, you kind of got nothing to lose, right? 4%. Why not try this?

So, create your own option. I built a working example that I'm going to show on this video at the end to show you exactly what this looks like. I'll walk through the full site at the end of the video.

There's an AI chat, there's an expandable context, there's a fit assessment tool, all of it. And I built it all out. The source is on GitHub.

I've written up a complete build guide with all the prompts on Substack. And they're they're linked below. But first, I want to explain why this approach actually works because the mechanics matter just as much as the novelty of seeing me build something.

So, we'll get to the fun part, but but like stick with me. This is going to be really cool. This is a fundamentally different strategic move that unlocks a new kind of market and a new kind of employer relationship.

It unlocks a game we want to be playing and understanding why it works requires looking at what's actually scarce in the current market. So let let's look at the economics of attention inside a saturated market. The current hiring system operates on a specific assumption.

Candidates are supplicants. I described it earlier. You want access to their opportunity.

the employer has the power to grant or deny that access. Your job as a candidate is to sort of contort yourself into whatever shape fits through their specific keyhole. And this framing makes sense when companies control the only viable interface between talent and opportunity.

LinkedIn, job boards, ATS portals, these are the pipes. And if you wanted to move through the system historically, you had to fit the pipes and you couldn't build your own. That constraint has evaporated when you can't even get through the pipes anymore.

If the pipes are so clogged, it's4% to get through. What's the point? But most people haven't updated their strategy to reflect the new reality.

They're just complaining. Hiring managers, meanwhile, are drowning. A single engineering role can take hundreds of applicants.

A product management role at a known company can see upwards of a thousand. The volume is so high that meaningful evaluation has become structurally impossible. Even if you want to evaluate the candidates, you can't.

Managers can spend maybe a few seconds per resume scanning for pattern matches, trying to cut the pile down into something vaguely manageable. And they know they're missing good people. And yet they keep doing it because there is no alternative workflow.

And this creates a really interesting dynamic. The scarce resource isn't talent anymore. There's plenty of talent.

The scarce resource is attention. the ability to actually be seen rather than pattern matched and discarded. And in a market where attention is the bottleneck, especially human attention, I'm not talking about LLM attention.

The AI will look at your resume all day. You don't care and I don't care. Human attention is a bottleneck.

And the strategic question shifts from how do I present my qualifications to how do I capture attention in a way that leads an employer into a genuine moment of evaluation of me? Traditional optimization has typically said you do it by beating the filters, right? The pipes are there, you beat the filters, use the right keywords, format for ATS parsing, network your way past the pile.

It's not that the advice is wrong exactly. None of it individually is tactically incorrect, but it's playing a finite game within a collapsing system and you're trying to be the slightly better supplicant in a pool of 400 supplicants. Building an interface is just a different move entirely.

You're moving outside. You're moving on your terms. You're not trying to be the best candidate in the pile.

You're refusing to be in the pile at all. You're creating a different category of interaction on your own terms. One where the hiring manager encounters you not as a document, but an experience that they have to engage with.

The attention economics here are critical. When someone lands on a standard resume, they are in filtering mode from the start. Their cognitive goal is to find reasons to say no because saying no quickly is how you manage the staggering volume they're dealing with.

But when someone encounters an interactive interface, something they can query, explore, discover, suddenly your cognitive frame shifts. You're no longer filtering. You're investigating.

The psychological mode changes from find disqualifying signals to understand what this person can do. And that shift is worth an enormous amount. It's the difference between 6 seconds of scanning and five minutes of actual engagement, which is a tremendous difference.

If you can earn five minutes of human attention in this market, you are gold. In a market where attention is the bottleneck, just engineering that tiny shift in attention is the highest leverage move that you could make. Now, there's a deeper dynamic here that goes beyond capturing attention that I want to get at.

It involves how trust and credibility actually form during a job evaluation. And I want to be intentional and describe it because then you'll see how it plays out when I show the site in a in a couple minutes here. When you hand someone a resume, you're making claims.

You're making assertions. I did this. I achieved that.

Here are my skills. The person receiving it must then choose whether to believe your claims. And they have very little basis for that decision beyond pattern matching your assertions against their own expectations.

Did you actually reduce cost by $1. 2 $2 million or did chat GPT write that for you and hallucinate it? They have no way to verify this.

Did you really lead that crossf functional initiative? They're taking your word for it and hoping Claude didn't make it up. This creates a credibility problem that AI generated content has just exploded in terms of scale and impact.

When anyone can generate a perfect polished keyword optimized resume in 30 seconds, the signal value of polish collapses to zero. A well- formatted document with strong action verbs proves absolutely nothing in 2026 except that you have access to chat GPT. The gap between presented credentials and actual capability has become essentially unbridgegable through traditional document exchange methods that we've used for 50 60 70 years on resumes.

An AI interface changes all of that because it changes the epistemology of evaluation. It's a big word, but basically instead of in asserting claims and asking to be believed, you are creating a tool that demonstrates capability through use. Think about what happens when a hiring manager interacts with an AI trained on your actual work, your real projects, your genuine expertise.

They ask a question, they get a detailed, specific answer grounded in things you've really done. They ask a follow-up. The AI handles it with the same depth.

They probe an edge case. the AI answers substantively or honestly acknowledges a gap. The critical thing here is that the quality of interaction that you get that way is difficult to fake at scale.

You can write a resume that claims deep expertise in distributed systems. It is difficult for the same number of people who would love to fake that resume to train an AI to conduct a convincing multi-turn conversation about distributed systems architecture if they don't really understand it. The depth emerges from the underlying substance and the effort it takes to build this or it doesn't emerge at all.

And this is why interface functions as proof. Not because you directly have to claim the competence, but because the thing you built demonstrates it. The quality of answers shows depth.

The handling of edge cases shows real understanding. The acknowledgement of gaps can show self-awareness and humility in a positive way. The person evaluating you is now not in a mode where they're trying to figure out what claim to believe.

They're in a mode where they're observing demonstrated capability and becoming a fan of yours. There's a psychological dimension here that matters enormously in an era where trust is short. Research and persuasion consistently shows that people believe conclusions they reach themselves far more than conclusions that that they're told.

If I tell you my friend Bob is a great candidate, you're not necessarily going to believe me. If you decide for yourself that Bob is a great candidate, well, that's different. So, when someone explores your AI interface, you're you're inviting them to discover things about you through their own inquiry.

They feel like they investigated and formed their own judgment. But you architected that discovery. You decided what context the AI has.

You shaped which questions it handles well. You wrote the system prompt that governs the behavior. Every response reflects decisions you made about how to represent your work.

So they feel like they discovered the truth. You designed what they would find. And I'm not saying that because I want you to game the system and lie.

As I said earlier, it is actually difficult to lie this way because you're going to have to go into depth. But this is the real power move because you're not asserting credibility. You're creating conditions for credibility to form through proactive exploration.

The difference between these approaches is the difference between telling and showing. And showing is almost always more persuasive. Here's where I want to push beyond what anybody else is saying about this.

Most career advice, even very good career advice, accepts the fundamental power dynamic of hiring. You want the job. The employer decides whether to give it to you.

You're trying to impress them. They're evaluating whether you're worth the time. What if the interface went both ways?

Picture this. Someone lands on your site. There's a tool where they can paste a job description.

Your AI analyzes it against your experience and then tells them honestly whether you're right for the role. Not a pitch, a real assessment. When the fit is strong, it will actually explain that with evidence.

Here's the relevant experience. Here's what I've actually built. Here's how my background maps to your requirements.

The specificity can demonstrate depth. And yes, I'll show this piece, too. But when the fit is weak, it tells them not to waste their time.

It says this role needs deep consumer product experience. for example, and my career has been in B2B. I understand the concepts, but I haven't shipped consumer products at scale.

Some things will transfer, some won't. For this specific position, I'm probably not your person. But if you have roles that match, let's talk.

Sit with the courage that takes for a second. Sit with what that signals for a minute. You're not just presenting yourself for evaluation.

You're evaluating fit from your side, too. You're saying, "My time also has value. " You're demonstrating enough confidence in your market position to turn away mismatched opportunities.

You're not desperate for any chance. You're saying you're looking for the right match. This completely inverts the traditional power dynamic.

Instead of please look at my resume among hundreds and decide if I am worthy, you're saying let's figure out together whether this makes sense. And that positioning changes everything about how you're perceived. It's also genuinely useful.

Hiring managers waste enormous amounts of time on mismatched candidates. People who look plausible on paper, but don't actually fit the role. A tool that helps both sides assess fit before burning hours on the phone is providing real value.

You're not just differentiating yourself, you're offering a service while you differentiate. The economics work out pretty well. The tool costs you nothing at the margin.

The AI runs whether or not anyone uses it. But but each person who uses it gets much more value in the form of time saved and fit assessment. It is not hard to rig up a cheap LLM to a website.

It's basically no cost. You're capturing attention by providing real utility to the employer. And it's much more sustainable than trying to capture attention by endlessly seeking novelty as a way to get through that terrible, terrible hiring pipeline.

I should be direct about something. This approach requires real substance. I've tried to call that out throughout this video, but you cannot fake depth if you have a real AI interface.

You can write a resume that claims expertise that you don't have. But you cannot train an AI to conduct convincing multi-turn conversations about domains you don't understand if you're talking with someone who does. The interrogative format surfaces what's really there.

And if nothing is there, it surfaces that, too. So this is not a hack for seeming impressive. It is an amplifier for your real capabilities.

If you have genuine expertise that keeps getting compressed into bullet points, this lets the full shape of your capabilities show. If you spent years building deep knowledge that doesn't fit standard resume formats very well, this lets you unflatten yourself. And yes, you are probably still going to have to do some of the pipeline work just to get this in front of people.

Unless you already have a significant web presence. If you already have a significant web presence and your personal site gets traffic anyway, maybe this is all you need to do. But if you don't, you may need to make this the personal site of your dreams and take the employers who click on that personal site on this journey with you.

Because I will tell you as someone who is hired, I do click on those personal sites. I check them and this would be an eye openener. If you're early in your career without much substance yet, no interface design is going to fully compensate for that gap.

And so I don't want you to take this and build a fancy wrapper around something that doesn't feel substantive. I think the answer for you is a different kind of site, something that shows the way you can ramp and learn things quickly. And I would almost suggest that you go for some of the stronger professional bio sites I've seen where each page is effectively a story of a learning you had, a project you undertook, something you dug into, something you made, something you published.

that's going to probably be stronger early career-wise than something like this, which is designed to show a lot of depth. So, the key answer if you're figuring out whether this is right for you, is to assess how much meat is on the bone for your career, how much substance you feel like you have, especially if you feel like it doesn't fit on a regular resume. Look at the projects.

Look at the places where you have expertise, even if they're unconventional. A world where self-presentation can be verified through a conversation is a world that rewards real competence over credentiing games on LinkedIn resumes. And so if you've done the work, this environment is going to give you an opportunity to showcase that.

Now the obvious question is whether building this requires technical skills that you don't have. And I got to say after building it, it really doesn't. Like I stuck the code on GitHub because that's the easiest place to put it.

But I built it in lovable. It's super easy. The simplest version takes just a few minutes.

And I've written up a full implementation guide that helps you get there and a prompt to get you started, which you can change and query the the way you want. You can get to like 2 three hours of work and you're going to get to a nice website with a nice queryable option. So, if you like what I'm about to present, that's what I would do.

Just jump in, build it in lovable, follow the guide that I've got on the Substack, and you'll be able to get up and going quickly. All right. I promised I'd show you the actual site.

Let me walk you through what I built. This is Marcus Chen, fictional engineer, staff level platform infrastructure, background at Stripe and Data Dog. I built this as a working demo of everything I've been talking about.

The first thing you notice, I worked on the aesthetics. It looks clean. Name, title, company logo, standard stuff.

But see that button there? Ask AI about me. That's the first shift.

Instead of reading a static bio, you can query. Let me show you that. If I query what kind of leadership do they have, look at the answers that I'm getting.

At Stripe, hired and mentored six engineers on the platform team, described as a player coach, series B startup. I'm already deep into it. I'm already learning here.

Now, let's jump to the experience section. I'll close out the dialogue here. Sure, there's standard resume content, reduced infrastructure costs by $1.

2 million a year. You've seen a thousand bullets like that. But what do we have here?

We have view AI context. Look, now we get the real story. The situation is he inherited a $4 million a year AWS spend.

He built cost transparency in the first couple of weeks. He made spend visible. Now he realized that he could spot instances for non-critical workloads and he could rightsize for utilization data.

And he gives you a lesson learned there at the end. Now you see the full story. Suddenly I am much more convinced.

This is this is the beginning of what I would ask in an interview and it's just popped up for me to grab. That's a completely different picture than the bullet point. One is a claim that could mean really anything.

The other shows that this person understands the story, how the organizations work, how to organize a narrative. When you are at scale, when you're working through your whole resume with this, it's hard to fake that. Let's scroll down to skills.

Three columns. Strong, moderate, gaps. I'll tell you about most people will not publish the gaps.

This is already eyeopening. Look at what it signals. platform architecture, API design are strong, but consumer product and mobile and growth are weak.

That's confidence. It's self-awareness. It tells you that he knows where he fits.

And for a hiring manager drowning in candidates, this kind of this kind of calm, clear communication is refreshing. You know what you're getting. Now, for the part I'm most excited about, the fit assessment tool.

I actually pre-prep two of these. This is a weak fit example, and I have a strong fit example over here as well. What you do is you paste the job description in to analyze.

So this is a head of product for consumer one. And you know what? Marcus is honest.

He says, "This is not a fit for me. Here's why. Here's my recommendation.

Here's what does transfer. I've never seen this. Here's what does transfer about my skill set.

I would love to see this on the site. " And then here's a strong fit job description to analyze senior platform engineer at a fintech. Hey, let's talk.

I have platform API experience. I'm comfortable with ambiguity. I have cross functional leadership.

And by the way, you can vet all of this up here when you actually look at the AI context, when you actually ask AI about me, as we did. So, you know, he's not making it up here because you've had the conversation. This interaction just does not exist other places.

And the site honestly told the potential employer whether you should bother or whether you shouldn't. And that confidence signals way more in market value than a given credential on a resume ever could. And yes, for those watching at home, good old Claude is active in the tab group.

Although in this case, it was not Claude co-work that built this. It was lovable. Now, before we finish, let me steal man a little bit of skepticism because some of it is warranted.

First objection, nobody is going to find this. That's fair. If you build an interface and nobody visits it, you've accomplished nothing.

So, this is not intended as a replacement for distribution. It's a replacement for what people find when they arrive. You still need to get your work in front of people.

You still need to be talking publicly, building in the open. Yes, there's still networking to do. You need to show up in communities where your expertise matters.

And the interface changes what happens when someone lands on your site. It doesn't magically generate the traffic. Think of it as conversion optimization.

One of my old old jobs, not lead generation. That's an old job that AI does. Now, by the way, another objection that I tend to hear.

This seems like a lot of work for uncertain payoff. That's fair, but consider the alternative. Spending dozens of hours tailoring applications for a system with a point4% success rate.

What do you have to lose? Won't this seem weird or gimmicky? I've heard that one.

It might, depending on your field and audience. If you're applying to traditional industries with very traditional hiring managers, an AI chat interface could feel like showing up to a formal dinner in a costume, right? Know your audience.

But for tech roles, demonstrating fluency with these tools isn't gimmicky. It's actually a signal you need to send. And you're showing you understand the tech that's reshaping work.

Well, okay. What if everybody does this, Nate? Then quality becomes the differentiator.

Right now, having any interface at all is unusual enough to capture attention. If interfaces were to become standard, if magically everyone had these sites, which I very much doubt because they do take a little work, the depth of what's underneath determines who stands out. And that's actually a much healthier equilibrium for our system as a whole because you're then competing on substance rather than who gains the keywords the best.

And building a good interface forces you to develop clarity and self-nowledge that transfers to lots of other professional contexts. Last one. I don't have enough experience for this to work.

That's probably true if you're early in your career. An AI trained on two internships in a boot camp is not going to sustain very deep interrogation. And so this approach is designed to amplify what's there.

And if it's not there, as I said earlier in the video, you probably want more of a portfolio site and want to be really aggressively working on the distribution and showing you can learn. So where does all of this leave us? The hiring system most people are still navigating was built for a different era.

It assumes application volume is bounded, that documents can actually represent capability, and that platform infrastructure serves both sides of the talent market. None of those assumptions hold anymore. The same AI that broke the system also is enabling new kinds of in infrastructure like I showed today.

Not at the corporate level even at the individual level. I spun this up in an afternoon very very easily. You can create the interface people encounter when they find you.

You can design the experience they have when they evaluate you. You can architect discovery rather than hoping to survive the filtering. This will not work for everybody.

If your early career without real substance, no interface is going to substitute for the expertise that you have not built. And so if you're in a field where AI interfaces feel too strange to be accepted, that the timing also might not feel right and it might feel too risky. But if you've built real expertise that keeps getting compressed into inadequate formats, if you've had a nonlinear career path, if you've had experiences in a wide range of places that are hard to fit on a resume, this lets your depth show.

If you're tired of playing supplicant in a broken system, this lets you create new terms of engagement. If you understand that the strategic game has changed, this is how you can start to play a new game on your terms. So, I'm going to challenge you.

Give it a shot. What do you got to lose? It's a 4% success rate through the traditional system.

Write the prompt.