This is the complete back story for MyNewJobHunt.com as told by David Perry

In 2006 my best friend Kevin Watson got laid off.

AGAIN!!!!

Kevin was in high tech – so obviously it wasn’t his first time.  However, this was a particularly bad time to get laid-off.  High-tech unemployment was running at about 65%.  The two major tech companies in town had tanked in rapid succession a few years earlier and took most of the supporting businesses with them.  There were so many talented people looking for work, that employers actually stopped advertising because they were being crushed under the volume of resumes they were receiving.  The city was under duress as job hunters seemed to be fighting each other for leads.  Kevin needed a way to get an “Edge” – a Big Edge over the other job hunters who where competing for fewer and fewer job postings.

So, as Kevin wrote in Guerrilla Marketing for Job Hunters 3.0,…

“My wife and I needed to find jobs fast. Traditional jobs boards where slow and we found most of our days/evenings spent surfing Monster. With these tough times we needed an easier approach.  So, my wife Natalie said “why don’t you have the jobs e-mailed to you?” And so I did what any loving husband would do…. I built Natalie a “job alert engine” to search news groups, corporate web sites, and government agencies for new jobs.”

Kevin decided to create an application that would bring job leads to him. 

This was a novel concept at the time.  But Kevin was a genius.  Like big time genius! For  example, the real-time operating system he wrote in his 20’s with two other guys still sorts the US Postal Service mail every day – almost 30 years later.  That kind of smart. Kevin had invented a job aggregator way back in 1998 – long before SimplyHired.com or Indeed.com were born .  Nat’s job alert engine became NatsJobs.com after the two of them found jobs.

But for Kevin, creating the job alert system wasn’t enough.  Almost as soon as they started using the job alert engine,  managing the volume of opportunities coming their way became a major headache.  Turned out Kevin had the job alert system so well tuned, that he was getting near real time updates on, not just jobs, but also events that trigger growth for companies (like new contracts awarded or expansion plans) and it resulted in a lot of interviews.  How many?  Too many to track on an excel spread sheet that’s for sure. 

The interviews weren’t the problem… it was managing his job search which became the problem.   Kevin wanted to solve that issue in anticipation of the next time – because by the mid 2000’s it was clear that all jobs are temporary.

So you might be wondering how many interviews Kevin did get in a town with 65% unemployment? 

He had 35 initial interviews, 28 call backs and 24 offers over a seven to eight week period.  

Getting offers turned out to not be a problem for Kevin because he was pioneering some new guerrilla tactics I had developed in my lab…  No getting the offers wasn’t an issue.  What was? Surprisingly, keeping track of all the interviews and the notes he was keeping on the questions he was asking.  That was a nightmare.  So, to bring some order to all of this chaos Kevin created a very simple contact management system to track the jobs he was interviewing for as well as which resume and cover letter he had used for each.

After finally accepting an offer and settling in to his new role, the two of us continued to build on the idea of a CRM (contact relationship manager system) for job hunters. I designed it on paper and Kevin built it.  That system was designed to allowed job seekers to completely manage their job search from start-to-finish using one online platform.

Sadly, Kevin would never see NatsJobs.com or MyNewJobHunt.com go live.

Tragedy struck July 1st 2012.   While camping with his son and daughter Kevin had a massive heart attack.   

At Kevin’s wake, his brother Dave Watson, and I decide to finish the site as our memorial to Kevin.  I  mean we thought we were days away from unveiling it – and boy was it fantastic. Nothing had been built like this had ever been built for job hunters and we were confident the site was now finally finished – Kevin had actually told me it was ready that fateful morning before he headed out.  We had one glitch and he had found and fixed it.  NatsJobs was ready to go. 

Sadly, as is all too often the case with entrepreneurs, things are not always written down the way they should be.  Kevin hadn’t left the passwords anywhere that someone could find them in the event of an emergency.  And believe me we looked – for months.  We tried every password combo we could think of. It was pointless.

After more than two years of trying to get access to Kevin’s code we stopped.  It just wasn’t going to work and by this time I had retooled several of the processes and they would require new software be written to work.   So Kevin’s older brother Dave Watson and I decided to resuscitate the project.  I had  my original design and provided all the IP from the Guerrilla Job Search Boot Camps and Dave is a software technical leader.

So, here we are nearly many years later. 

Dave Watson has  expanded the original project tremendously to include the Guerrilla Boot Camp Course material that has had a 96.4% success rate over the last dozen years.  Dave’s  transferred the course material to his web based platform (FutureTek).   As luck would have it,  Dave was laid off from his position as a senior software developer at a local high tech firm in Aug/2016 and decided to make MyNewJobHunt.com and NatsJobs.com a priority for a very simple reason…

Dave’s an ‘experienced’ tech worker, so finding new employment would be more difficult in the high tech sector but he knew using the Guerrilla tactics, not impossible. He was fed up with the current outplacement systems that rely mostly on “networking” with unpredictable results – He wanted a solution that was quick, reliable, predictable, repeatable and inexpensive.  As Dave’s wife Nancy put it:

“You were meant to make this project happen –  someone upstairs has just pointed you in the right direction“.

Today MyNewJobHunt.com goes way beyond what Kevin and I had imagined.  MyNewJobHunt contains it’s own job aggregator and it works seamlessly to deliver customized jobs to Users.  When they open their desk top in the morning… jobs are waiting for them to apply to.  No more hunting form job board to job board.

MyNewJobHunt.com is that one-stop-shop for job hunting and career management.  This is the program that job boards and social networking sites never bothered to build because selling job ads is their priority – NOT helping job hunters.

Inside MyNewJobHunt.com Dave has designed a Contact Relationship Management System (CRM) to help you keep track of your contacts, leads and interviews. The platform is also integrated with a Content Management System (CMS) to deliver the guerrilla job search content.  Both of these systems rest over top of an Education Information Management System (EIMS) which monitors and manages your progress in the program.

So that’s everything.

Thank you for reading this long message. 

It’s important to Dave and I that you know why NatsJobs and MyNewJobHunt exist.  Hopefully you’ll appreciate the effort and care we put in to bringing this to you.  It’s been a long journey for us.   Personally I think Kevin would be proud.  He had a big heart.  He was a brilliant engineer, a loving father, devoted husband and a great friend.  This is our legacy and Kevin’s too.  Use it well.

The  future is in  your hands,