Why PivotDesk exists

I've hired around 200 people. That means I've been on the other side of the table for well over a thousand interviews, and it gave me a front-row seat to how hiring works from the inside.

Here's what I kept seeing: genuinely strong candidates getting filtered out because their move didn't fit neatly into a keyword search or a 10-second CV scan.

When you post a role, you get 200+ applications. For generalist positions (product, analytics, operations) it's often 2-5x that. You physically cannot spend more than a few seconds on each one. If your background looks unusual on paper — wrong industry, wrong country, no obvious title match — you don't get the interview where you could explain yourself.

The gap wasn't talent or effort. It was a structural mismatch between how good candidates present and how hiring funnels filter.

I built PivotDesk because nobody teaches people how to work around that mismatch, and most advice out there is too surface-level to help.

Three things kept coming up:

1. Great candidates made avoidable mistakes. Not because they weren't capable, but because nobody had shown them how hiring works from the inside. The candidate side of the process is almost entirely self-taught, and without a way to see behind the curtain, people end up guessing at what works.
2. Harder moves got punished hardest. If your next step was obvious — same role, same industry, one rung up — the standard funnel worked fine. The moment you added a role change, an industry shift, or a geography move, the system stopped working for you entirely.
3. Enterprise sales figured this out years ago. I co-founded a B2B SaaS company, and the parallels between a great outbound sales process and a great job search are hard to miss: targeting, sequencing, tailored messaging, disciplined follow-up, preparation for every conversation. It's a deep, well-studied discipline. The playbooks exist — they just haven't been applied to job searching.

Before writing a line of product code, I offered to help people for free on LinkedIn. Around 30 people reached out; 15 were serious enough to commit to the work. Over about eight weeks, I worked hands-on with them to build and test the method that became PivotDesk.

The core idea came from an article I wrote four years ago. The idea hasn't changed, but the execution is far tighter now. What the pilot taught me:

• An article framework wasn't enough. People needed a sequence: what to do first, what comes next, when to follow up, how to prepare.
• The tedious parts are where people stall: researching companies, drafting outreach, prepping for calls. AI can genuinely help with those.
• The method makes intuitive sense, but turning it into action is harder than it sounds. Hitting send on a cold email takes real courage. So PivotDesk makes each step concrete enough that you can just do it.
• Most people are learning all of this for the first time. The product needs to teach, not just execute.

Every piece of PivotDesk — the target scorecard, the contact-mapping workflow, the outreach drafting, the follow-up cadence, the interview prep — came directly from watching real people try to do these things and seeing where they got stuck.

PivotDesk is software plus a guided workflow. You get a structured system that walks you through building a target list, choosing contacts, writing and sending outreach, managing follow-ups, and preparing for conversations.

In the early days, I'm more hands-on with users than a typical SaaS product would be. That's on purpose — I'm still learning fast and improving the product based on real usage, and early users get tighter support because of it.

The Advisor tier includes direct sessions with me. Sprint is self-serve but built on the same method.

Named testimonials coming soon from early pilot participants.

Here's what early users accomplished in practice:

• Built a scored target list of specific companies within the first 14 days
• Sent first tailored outreach messages to real contacts within days of starting, because they knew the message was strong enough to send
• Generated a warm referral introduction from cold outreach
• Started informational conversations and early interviews at target companies

These are concrete movement signals. PivotDesk tracks progress this way because it's the honest measure before final outcomes arrive.

Got questions? Email [email protected]. I read everything and reply personally.

This is especially true for the Advisor tier — it starts with a fit conversation to make sure the programme matches what you need. That conversation is free and comes with zero pressure.