I Coached Job Seekers Before I Had to Be One
How 11 years in GTM, presales, and career coaching shaped a different view of what's broken in job search and led to building RoleNavigator.
I spent 11 years at CivicPlus. Five roles. I built the presales function from scratch. Hired engineers, wrote the playbook, and scaled a team of four into fourteen. As Associate General Manager, I ran end-of-life strategy across a portfolio of twelve product lines and managed transitions for over 1,500 government clients.
Then I got RIF’d.
That’s not a complaint. It’s context. Because what happened after that is the reason I see RoleNavigator the way I do.
Before the RIF, job search coaching was part of my consulting practice. I worked with professionals navigating transitions, promotions, and the specific confusion that comes from being good at a lot of things and unclear on what to sell.
The pattern was consistent. Smart people. Real track records. Positioning so broad that no hiring manager could figure out what to do with them. They applied to everything adjacent to their experience and heard nothing. Then they concluded the market was against them.
It wasn’t. Their signal was.
I’d helped candidates get specific. Narrow the target. Identify the one thing a company could hire them to do right now and make a measurable difference in 90 days. It worked. They got callbacks.
I thought I understood the problem. I was solving the strategy side. The positioning. The story.
I was missing the mechanics entirely.
When the RIF hit and I started my own search, the first thing I noticed was the volume of manual work. Every board surfaces the same listings. Every application form asks for the same information in slightly different boxes. A “tailored resume” that everyone says you need takes fifteen minutes per application. Multiply that by forty applications. Multiply that by the number of iterations before you figure out what’s landing.
That’s not a search. That’s a second job with worse feedback loops and no performance review.
I’d built the presales playbook at CivicPlus because the SE function had no replicable process. Great individual contributors doing hero work. When we systematized it, team performance scaled. What one person did brilliantly got shared. The floor raised.
Job search has the same problem. The work is manual, individual, and completely unreplicable. The person who navigates it well does so through trial and error and usually can’t explain exactly how. There’s no playbook.
That’s what I went to build.
RoleNavigator handles the mechanics. It scans 10+ job sources daily, scores listings against your resume with fit percentages, and generates tailored resumes and cover letters with what the platform calls “voice matching” so the output still sounds like you. The pipeline board tracks everything. You finish your coffee before you’ve done what used to take a morning.
But the part I care about most is the scoring. Because the problem I kept seeing in coaching wasn’t effort. It was effort aimed at the wrong targets. People spending real time applying to roles they were never going to get. The AI scoring answers the question before you invest the thirty minutes: is this actually a fit?
That’s a GTM insight, not a product insight. Know your buyer. Know their problem. Don’t pitch to people who can’t say yes.
When I was an SE, my job was helping buyers see why a solution fit their specific situation. The job search is the same conversation from the other side. You’re the product. The company is the buyer. The pitch is: I can solve this specific problem, in this specific window, and here’s the evidence.
Most candidates never get that specific. They list everything they’ve done and let the reader make the connection. The reader doesn’t make the connection. The reader moves on.
RoleNavigator is the tool. The strategy is still the human layer. Both matter.
I run Hammon Consulting alongside the products. Coaching is still a service I offer because the positioning work is hard and it’s different for every person. If you want to talk through your specific situation, that’s how.
If you want to cut the manual work out of your search today, RoleNavigator has a free tier and a 7-day trial on paid plans starting at $19.99/month.
I built it because I needed it. I know it works because I coached people through the problem before I had to live it myself. Those two things together are why I’m more confident in it than anything I’ve shipped.
