After 2 years of doing my own thing, I recently got the itch to work on something bigger than myself again and earn some money in the process. After talking to a few interesting companies, I was reminded that hiring engineers is really hard, really time consuming and has a large degree of risk attached to it.

When I think about which company makes the most sense for me to join, I picture myself as a jigsaw piece, with a unique blend of skills, experience and personality traits that you could conceivably draw as a pretty complex jigsaw piece. Each company is also a jigsaw, with a bunch of pieces missing. Just as your shape is unlike anyone elses, so each company's gaps are uniquely shaped as well.

As I plan to do full stack engineering for a company that has a strong AI focus, the jigsaw for a company that might be an optimal fit for me could look like this. Each blue piece is a position the company has already filled, with the blank ones being empty positions they are hiring for:

Imagining myself as the green piece and other candidates for the role as the orange and red, this is a company jigsaw where I would have high alignment, because the shape of my puzzle piece fits with the gap in the company jigsaw without missing areas or overlapping too much.

This is a good company to consider joining, with both company and candidate benefitting from the strong alignment. Our orange and red candidates don't fit so well, or overlap too much, so their ability to create value for the company (and therefore themselves) is lower.

When people research you, what do they see?

Thinking from the hiring company's point of view, it's quite a lot of effort to do the research on a candidate. I honestly don't know if the automated candidate screening tooling is good enough to trust yet, but there are 2 things I do know:

1. Almost all the information they will gather about you will be from the internet
2. You don't get to see a copy of what they find out about you

With OpenAI's release of Deep Research last week, it starts to be possible for candidates to do some of the same kinds of research on themselves. Deep Research is an ideal way to do something like this, for a few reasons:

• Critically examining yourself is both uncomfortable and subject to bias
• You already know yourself pretty well, but the person on the other side only has google to go on
• It's kinda boring and time-consuming, but the AI doesn't care

Deep Research Yourself

With access to a tool like Deep Research, it's pretty easy to have it go off and perform that dispassionate research on you and give you a candid assessment of what companies see when they think about hiring you.

I went ahead and did that on myself and made the response public (link below). I put myself in the shoes of a hiring manager for the type of company jigsaw I imagine myself fitting into, and asked it the following:

I am considering hiring a full stack software engineer called Ed Spencer.
He has a blog somewhere and says he is good at full stack engineering.
We're using React with Next JS and have a big complex AI model on the backend 
but need someone to bring order to the front end and understand the back end 
enough to make sure the whole thing works well, is fast and delightful to users, 
things like that.

Please research this guy and give me a full report on everything you could find 
about him and whether he would be a suitable candidate for the position.

I am considering hiring a full stack software engineer called Ed Spencer.
He has a blog somewhere and says he is good at full stack engineering.
We're using React with Next JS and have a big complex AI model on the backend 
but need someone to bring order to the front end and understand the back end 
enough to make sure the whole thing works well, is fast and delightful to users, 
things like that.

Please research this guy and give me a full report on everything you could find 
about him and whether he would be a suitable candidate for the position.

This is the sort of requirement I hear all the time when people are looking for someone who does the type of thing I do. ChatGPT had me answer a follow-up question, as it is wont to do, and then it went off and browsed the web for 5 minutes before coming back with a report:

In the end it churned out this final report. I published it because a) it's trivial for anyone with ChatGPT Pro to copy and paste the prompt above and reproduce it and b) so you can see an example of what it comes up with:

You can read the full report here if you want to see what the rest looks like. Employers are going to be increasingly relying on techniques and technologies like this to find the right candidates, so it's important to make sure that what your ideal company sees matches when you want them to see. The first step to doing that is to do the deep research on yourself.