Bengaluru , A growing number of experienced professionals are sending out hundreds of job applications and hearing back from almost none, a pattern that Bengaluru-based career platform NxtJob.ai attributes not to a shortage of ability but to the absence of a job-search strategy.
The scale of the problem is illustrated by the experience of Robin, one of the platform’s clients. A professional with twenty years of experience, much of it in senior management, he spent two and a half years applying to between five and six hundred openings. The exercise yielded, by his count, one interview.
“Out of five hundred or six hundred applications, I received one interview, probably one or two, max,” said Robin, who now works as a Director of Delivery.
Robin had earlier paid for two other programmes, both of which advised him to adjust his résumé and wait, according to the company. Neither produced results, and he was initially reluctant to trust a third service.
“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,” Robin said.
NxtJob.ai was founded by Major Richik, a serving officer in the Indian Army who previously built the recruitment-technology venture HyreSnap. The company combines nine AI agents with human consultants and works with mid- and senior-level professionals through what it describes as a four-step method covering the résumé, job discovery, networking and the final offer.
“The market doesn’t reward the most capable person in the room. It rewards the one with the better strategy,” Major Richik, Founder and CEO of NxtJob.ai, said.
According to him, the job search at senior levels amounts to a second job in itself, layered on top of an existing role or a recent job loss. Professionals who treat it as a hobby, a few clicks after dinner, are ignored by the market “quietly and completely”, he claimed. A capable candidate without a strategy, as Robin later concluded from his own experience, is walking into a room that three thousand equally capable people are also walking into.
The company said its method eventually helped Robin secure a Director of Delivery position, a rung above the roles he had spent years applying for without success.
Screened by software before any human
The first correction the platform makes concerns the résumé itself. According to Major Richik, most candidates treat the document as a summary of their career, when in practice it is read first by an applicant tracking system (ATS), software that screens candidates in seconds, on formatting and keywords, before a recruiter ever sees a name.
The company cited the case of Devjit, who approached it at 54 after seven months out of work, describing himself as heartbroken and exhausted. He had spent those months submitting résumés to portals and inboxes that, he suspects, never reached a human being. His ability was not the issue, Major Richik contended; his document was written for a person rather than for the software that read it first.
A second client, Srinivasan, made the opposite error, the company said. He fed his résumé to ChatGPT and asked the tool to “optimize” it against a job description. Interviews followed, built on achievements he had never had.
“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, adding that he did not survive five minutes in the interviews the padded document secured.
The company’s prescription is a single exhaustive “master résumé” recording every project, number and achievement, from which a fresh version is tailored for each specific role. Two of its AI agents, named Navigator and Tailor, divide that work between them, one mapping the career into the master document, the other generating a customised pitch per opening, according to the company.
A majority of roles never advertised, platform claims
The company also points clients to a claim widely cited in career-coaching circles: that a large share of desirable senior roles, by many estimates as much as 70 per cent, are never publicly posted at all, on LinkedIn, job boards or anywhere a routine search would reach.
Major Richik’s explanation for the practice is administrative. The moment a senior role is advertised, thousands of applicants, some deploying automated bots, flood the listing, and filtering them, even with an ATS, consumes weeks of human effort, he said. Companies therefore fill many such positions through people instead: a department head, a referral, or a phone call between two professionals who trust each other.
“While you’re refreshing job boards at midnight, the role you wanted was filled by someone who never applied. They simply got introduced,” he said.
To expand what a candidate can find, a third agent, Hunter, searches beyond the obvious job boards, into company career pages, Boolean searches and freshly posted listings, including the many alternative titles under which a single job may appear. “Nobody calls your job by the same name twice,” Major Richik noted; a product manager, he pointed out, might be advertised as a product owner, a platform lead or a growth lead.
Referrals over connection requests
Reaching the unadvertised roles, the founder conceded, depends on networking, a practice he says most professionals reduce to fifty connection requests and a note reading “Hi, can you refer me?” Genuine networking, in his account, means identifying the two or three people who actually sit inside a target company and building a relationship strong enough that they would attach their own name to the candidate’s. Even conversations that lead nowhere immediately become the 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,” per the company. The underlying framework is what it calls the WIN Method, a Well-researched problem, an Insightful solution, and a Narrative connecting the two, built on the premise that the candidate should make the recipient feel the outreach is doing them a favour.
Beyond a decade of experience, Major Richik argued, interviews cease to be interviews and become meetings between two professionals deciding whether to work together. No one would enter a client meeting without researching the client’s problem, he said, and a candidate’s next role is the most important deal of their career. A fifth agent, Pitcher, researches the specific problems a target company is facing and assembles a problem-solution narrative that can be sent directly to the decision-maker who owns the problem, bypassing recruiters and application inboxes.
“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,” he said.
Mock interviews and the counter-offer
For the interview itself, a sixth agent, Interviewer, conducts structured mock sessions with feedback and STAR-based storytelling, rehearsed until composure becomes instinct, the company said. Robin credited this preparation, he went through the material “ten to fifteen times”, he said, for entering a final round for a Technical Program Delivery Manager role and leaving with an offer for the more senior Director of Delivery position.
Srinivasan, who had lost offers at PwC and elsewhere before joining the platform, identified the same stage as decisive. “That is when I understood it is the face-to-face practice which was missing. That was the game-changer,” he said.
The final stage the company coaches is the offer, which Major Richik described as the step professionals most often fumble by celebrating and signing immediately. Acceptance runs both ways, he said, claiming that recruiters routinely hold 30 to 40 per cent more budget than their opening number. He also 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 worth and rehearses the counter-offer in advance. The company said these figures are its own estimates.
Major Richik described the venture as personal, saying he built NxtJob.ai after watching 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 platform’s human consultants work alongside nine AI agents in total, the company said, and Major Richik directs 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 parting argument to senior professionals who assume their track record speaks for itself: they reached this level with a strategy every single time, and this is not the moment to break that streak.
