Work is a Verb
A newsletter by
"Show Me, Don't Tell Me."
Last Friday I spoke at the Remote Rebellion virtual job fair. The speaker right before me was a recruiter, and near the end of her talk she said this:
Don't tell me you use AI. Show me a workflow that you built...
Don't just tell me you're a fast learner, tell me about the things that you didn't know six months ago that you know today.
The talk I was about to give made the same argument from the other side of the table. We had never compared notes. When the person reading the applications and the person advising the people sending them arrive at the same place on their own, I think you can stop treating it as a theory.
My last job search ran on a spreadsheet and sweat equity. I tailored my resume a little, tracked everything by hand, applied a lot, and it worked. Since then, one-click apply made applying cheap and AI made a decent application free. Ashby, whose applicant tracking system many startups use, now counts 291 applications per hire, roughly triple 2021. Applying still works; in the same data, about half of all hires come in through applications. But a strong candidate can now get lost among hundreds of applications that are, as I put it on stage, about 80 percent good.
That's why the talk was called Don't Fish with Dynamite. Tools that fire off hundreds of applications for you make that math worse for everyone, including the recruiter buried under the results, and plenty of job seekers I've talked to paid for one and got nothing back.
The fly rod starts with being selective. Decide what you actually need (how remote, which benefits, which values) and stop applying to jobs you wouldn't accept if they were offered. In my opinion, the impulse to apply to 20 jobs a day and hope it eventually works is the biggest single cause of job-search burnout: enormous effort, almost no feedback, and nobody can keep that up emotionally.
Every application you don't send gives you back time to do what the recruiter was asking for. Learn something, make something, show up with the proof.
Designers have portfolios and engineers have open-source contributions, but proof works in every role. If you work in accounting, sales, marketing or support, it can be a short write-up of something you fixed, a workflow you built, or how you think about your work. What a hiring team wants is a look at how your mind works.
And treat the search itself as a skill. I've watched people search for months and then land several offers at once. That isn't luck. They got better, and the results showed up all at once. Unfortunately, feedback is rare in a job search, so you have to make your own: track what you sent where and what happened next, so the twentieth application is smarter than the first.
What I didn't expect was the rest of the day.
After the talk our booth filled up and stayed full. It turned into one long group conversation: how to get the most out of Remotivated, how to put the AI tactics from the talk into practice, general search strategy, and what it takes to stay steady while job hunting in 2026. People were still dropping in the next day with follow-up questions. It felt wholesome in a way job hunting rarely does. (The prompts and the plugin from the talk are free at remotivated.com/rr.)
Several people asked whether they could work with me as a job coach. That isn't what I do... But I didn't want what happened at that booth to end when the fair did, so we're trying something new.
If you join Remotivated Pro while this runs, you get a one-to-one, 20-minute call with me. We can set your job alerts up properly, get the free Job Hunt Skills plugin running, or just talk through where your search is stuck.
You also get 45-minute group working sessions with me and the other founding members, in the spirit of that booth: bring a posting you're weighing up, bring a question, or just listen. Any plan counts, monthly included. It's a thank-you for joining early, and it won't be around forever.
