Bengaluru (Karnataka) [India], July 15: Senior professionals are failing to land roles not because they lack capability but because they lack a job-search strategy, according to NxtJob.ai, a career platform founded by Major Richik, a serving officer in the Indian Army. The company said it pairs nine AI agents with human consultants to take experienced candidates from résumé to negotiated offer.
The company pointed to the case of Robin, a professional with twenty years of experience, much of it in senior management, who applied to roles the way most people do. Over two and a half years, he sent out between five and six hundred applications. By his own count, they produced a single interview.
“Out of five hundred or six hundred applications, I received one interview, probably one or two, max,” Robin, now a Director of Delivery, said.
Before finding NxtJob.ai, Robin had paid for two other programmes that advised him to tweak his résumé and wait. Neither worked, and he said he nearly did not trust a third.
“I did not have any strategy. I don’t know how to approach the job market, I simply went ahead and applied. After getting into the job search properly, my complete perception changed,” he said.
Major Richik, who previously built the recruitment-tech venture HyreSnap, offered a blunt diagnosis of the senior job market.
“The market doesn’t reward the most capable person in the room. It rewards the one with the better strategy,” said Major Richik, Founder and CEO, NxtJob.ai.
For experienced professionals, he said, the job search is itself a second job, stacked on top of the role they already hold or the one they have just lost. Treated like a hobby, a few tired clicks after dinner, the market responds in kind and ignores the candidate completely, he added.
According to the company, its method eventually helped Robin land a Director of Delivery role, a rung above the positions he had spent years unsuccessfully applying for. NxtJob.ai outlined the four-step approach it says it used, illustrated by three of its clients.
A résumé written for a machine first
The first mistake, according to Major Richik, is treating a résumé as a summary of a career. In practice, he said, it is a piece of software’s first impression of a candidate, and it must be built for the algorithm that reads it before any human does. Applicant tracking systems, or ATS, screen candidates in seconds on formatting and keywords before a recruiter ever sees a name, he said.
The company cited Devjit, who came to it at 54, seven months out of work and, by his own account, heartbroken and exhausted. He had spent those months sending résumés into portals and inboxes that he suspects never reached a human being. The problem was not his ability, Major Richik contended, but a document built for a person rather than the software screening it.
Others err in the opposite direction, the company said. Srinivasan, another client, fed his résumé to ChatGPT and asked it to “optimize” against a job description, with results that backfired.
“It will throw something on me and interviews will be scheduled. But I would not be able to live up to the interviewer’s expectations, because it’s all fake. It was embarrassing, to say the least,” Srinivasan said.
The padded résumé got him into the room, but he said he did not survive five minutes inside it. Major Richik’s prescription is to stop editing a single file and calling it a strategy. Instead, he tells clients to build one exhaustive “master résumé” capturing every project, number and achievement, and then tailor a fresh version for each specific role. On the platform, two AI agents, Navigator and Tailor, handle each half of that task, mapping the career into the master document and generating a customised pitch per opening, the company said.
The market that never gets posted
The claim that most unsettles clients, according to Major Richik, is a widely cited one in career-coaching circles: that a large share of desirable roles, by many estimates as much as 70 per cent, are never publicly posted at all, not on LinkedIn, not on a job board, nowhere a routine search would reach.
If true even approximately, it means candidates are fighting over a fraction of the real market, he said. His explanation for why companies keep roles unadvertised is practical: the moment a senior role is posted, thousands of applicants, some using automated bots, flood the listing, and filtering them, even with an ATS, costs weeks of human effort. Many such roles are therefore filled through people, a department head, a referral, a phone call between two professionals who trust each other, he said.
“While you’re refreshing job boards at midnight, the role you wanted was filled by someone who never applied. They simply got introduced,” Major Richik said.
To widen what a candidate can actually see, the company deploys a third agent, Hunter, which it says digs past obvious job boards into company career pages, Boolean searches and freshly posted listings, including under the many different titles a single job can hide behind. “Nobody calls your job by the same name twice,” Major Richik noted, pointing out that a product manager might be advertised as a product owner, a platform lead or a growth lead.
Networking as craft, not spam
Reaching the rest of the market, the roles filled through people, comes down to networking, and Major Richik is scathing about how most professionals attempt it: fifty connection requests and a note reading “Hi, can you refer me?” Real networking, he argued, means finding the two or three people who actually sit inside a target company and building a relationship genuine enough that they would attach their own name to yours. Even conversations that lead nowhere immediately become seeds of future referrals, he said.
A fourth agent, Networker, identifies relevant contacts and follows up “the way a careful professional does, not a desperate one,” according to the company. The higher-level skill, Major Richik said, is making the recipient feel the candidate is doing them a favour by reaching out. The company’s framework for this is the WIN Method: a Well-researched problem, an Insightful solution, and a Narrative tying the two together.
Beyond a decade of experience, he said, interviews stop being interviews and become meetings, two professionals deciding whether to work together. A professional would never walk into a client meeting without researching the client’s problem first, he argued, and the next role is the most important deal of a career. A fifth agent, Pitcher, researches specific problems a target company is facing and packages a problem-solution narrative the client can send straight to the decision-maker who owns it, not a recruiter, and not an inbox buried under applications.
“It turns ‘please consider me’ into ‘here’s what I’d already started fixing on day one.’ You’re not sending applications anymore. You’re sending proposals,” Major Richik said.
The room, and the offer
Once inside, he said, the question is whether a candidate projects calm confidence or desperation. A sixth agent, Interviewer, runs structured mock interviews with feedback and STAR-based storytelling, rehearsed until composure becomes instinct rather than performance, the company said.
Robin credited that preparation, he said he went through the interview material “ten to fifteen times”, for walking into a final round for a Technical Program Delivery Manager role and walking out with an offer for the more senior Director of Delivery position instead. Srinivasan, who had lost offers at PwC and elsewhere before joining, pointed to the same turning point.
“That is when I understood it is the face-to-face practice which was missing. That was the game-changer,” Srinivasan said.
The final stage, Major Richik insisted, is the one professionals most often fumble: the offer. His advice is not to celebrate or sign immediately, since acceptance runs both ways. He claimed recruiters routinely hold 30 to 40 per cent more budget than their opening number, and cited an estimate that a professional can forgo close to Rs 8-10 crore over a lifetime by never learning to negotiate. A seventh agent, Negotiator, benchmarks what a role is actually worth and rehearses the counter-offer before it is needed. The company clarified that these figures are its own estimates.
Why a soldier built a job-search company
Major Richik said the venture is personal. He built NxtJob.ai not because résumés interest him, he said, but because he watched capable people lose, first to a filter, then to silence, then to a process he believes was never designed to recognise them. He frames the mission in the language of his Army training: an ethos of helping the deserving who stand to lose from the system.
The company said its human consultants work alongside nine AI agents in total, more than could be covered here, and Major Richik pointed prospective clients to a two-day weekend bootcamp where he walks through the full method used with clients such as Robin, Srinivasan and Devjit.
His closing message was aimed at senior professionals who assume their track record still speaks for itself: they did not reach this level by being unprepared, he said. They got here with a strategy every single time, and this is not the moment to break that streak.
