Career Thought Leadership

Notes from our Desk

Not every opportunity deserves your time

A serious job search is partly an allocation problem. If you’re in an intensive job search, one of the hardest problems isn’t finding things to do. It’s deciding what deserves your time. Job postings. Recruiter messages. Networking introductions. “Confidential” opportunities. Applications. Follow-ups. LinkedIn messages. Some deserve an hour. Some deserve five minutes. Some deserve nothing at all. And unfortunately, making that judgment has become harder. Recently, I received

Don’t use AI only to write the reply. Use it to decide whether to reply.

After discovering that two apparently unrelated “executive search” approaches sent virtually the same follow-up script, I changed the way we handle unsolicited opportunities. I asked Tara, the AI system I work with daily, to create a standing screening rule for the way she reviews opportunities in both my personal inbox and Careerly’s: Unexpected opportunity + flattering specificity + vague employer + unfamiliar domain = independently verify before replying. And “verify” mean

A Tale of Two Scammers

Everyone knows job scams exist. The problem is how sophisticated the "credibility-building" markers have become. For example, yesterday, I received a message about a leadership opportunity that didn't read like typical spam. Because it referred to several specifics of my background: Wharton → finance → Georgetown → Johns Hopkins → executive leadership → career development Those are real things. The opportunity sat at the intersection of strategy, leadership, and talent develo

VaudTax Apollo 11: The Mission Control Reports

An entirely real Swiss tax filing became a three-part Mission Control comedy about ADMIN, the Helsana Nebula, three jurisdictions, lost telemetry and one improbable landing.

What Five Days of Filing My Swiss Tax Return With AI Actually Looked Like

A lightly edited transcript from an entirely real five-day collaboration: three jurisdictions, conflicting records, one failed session, repeated reconciliation—and a successfully filed Swiss tax return.

What's So Different This Time?

By Hira Fernando | February 2026 | Career Strategy I've been saying this since early 2024 — definitely since ChatGPT-4 dropped. In fact, I wrote a blog post about it (it's on my website). I watched people nod politely, then go back to their day. So when Matt Shumer — co-founder of OthersideAI and someone who actually lives inside this technology — published an article in Fortune that went viral with over 50 million views, I felt equal parts vindicated and quietly alarmed. Bec

It's Already Late. But Better Late than Never: Try AI Now.

By Hira Fernando | September 2025 | Career Strategy Let's say you're a sceptic. Fair enough. Let's say you think the AI hype has been overdone, that the tools are overrated, that it's a bubble waiting to pop. Fine. I'm not here to argue with you — I'm here to tell you it doesn't matter. Even if you're right — even if this turns out to be less transformative than the most breathless headlines suggest — the cost of getting a basic handle on the technology now is low. And the c

It's Called the Exponential Function - and Humans Are Bad at it

By Hira Fernando | May 2024 | Career Strategy This is why your brain can't process what's happening with AI Let me take you back to January 2020. A respiratory illness was spreading in Wuhan. A handful of people were paying attention. The rest of the world was... not. By mid-March, the entire planet had shut down. In a matter of weeks, everything changed. The problem wasn't that people lacked information. It was that the information was growing exponentially, and human brain