The Hiring Game Is Broken — And I'm Building Resume Buddy to Survive It

Job searching in anything tech or digital related in 2025 is a tough game.

If you're like me and just crawled out from under a rock—no personal brand, no professional social presence, no carefully cultivated network—then you're basically fighting a war on two fronts.

First front: the Recruiters.

This side has built an ATS-powered fortress you need to storm just to maybe get a chance to talk to a human being. The rules are vague at best. So you basically have to go full shonen anime protagonist mode and believe in yourself—and in your resume that believes in you.

You’re forced to navigate a minefield of conflicting advice from "career experts" and automated resume screeners. One tool says “add your hobbies to stand out,” another calls it unprofessional. One resume checker gives you a green light, another one tells you to rewrite everything from scratch.

Truth is: there’s no standard. No secret template. No silver bullet. Just a swirling mess of opinions and algorithms. You end up wasting hours tweaking formatting, guessing which verbs some parser might like better today.

Second front: the Competition.

The tech world hasn’t exactly been stable lately—mass layoffs, AI disruption, VC belt-tightening. And while there are communities out there genuinely helping each other out, let’s not pretend it’s all fair play. There's a whole league of people who treat job hunting like a social engineering game: inventing experience, faking credentials, using AI to write their resumes and even answer take-home tests. They just need to get in, cash out, and move on to the next gullible employer.

So what are you supposed to do? Stay honest and feel like a fool, or start bending the truth just to stay in the game?

I don’t have a universal answer. But for me, the goal became simple: don’t play their game on their terms. Make my own rules, build my own process, and focus on doing things in a way that feels right and effective.

I found myself in this mess recently—burned out from resume tweaking, tired of guessing what some black-box parser might like, and frustrated with the constant feeling of playing a rigged game.

So I did what I usually do when the system feels broken:

No, I'm not trying to "fix hiring" as an industry problem — I'm just trying to make this painful process a little easier for myself.

I started building my own tools.

Not another “AI resume builder” or “GPT-powered job coach,” but something for myself. A way to escape the burnout of rewriting the same resume over and over again.

I started by automating the part that drained me most: tailoring resumes. Pre-tested bullet generators gave wildly inconsistent results, and doing it manually took forever. So I built a system just for me.

The first proof-of-concept ran on n8n. It was messy, but it worked: I used an Airtable form for input, kept a master copy and generated resumes in a Git repo, optimized them with an AI agent, reviewed,  edited and exported to PDF from markdown with Obsidian.

It did the job — but the workflow was too fragmented. So I started thinking about a proper interface, all-in-one. An app where everything would live in one place.

And somewhere along the way, I realized: most resume tools out there sell fear. Use our template or you’ll never get hired. Use our optimizer or you’re doomed. That felt... gross.

So I wanted to go the other way. What if this thing wasn’t just a tool, but a little source of encouragement? What if it gave you a pat on the back for sending an application? Tracked your progress? Made you smile during a process that’s otherwise pure anxiety?

That’s how Resume Buddy was born. Part editor, part optimizer, part emotional support mascot. Not to turn job search into a game, but to make it suck a little less.

It’s still early, and it’s still personal. But it’s working. And yeah—I'm thinking about turning it into a proper product.

Here’s a quick preview of the current interface:

Stay tuned for the next part. More on the technical side next time.