#career

Oxana Willeke has built a career around that gap. A former recruiter, technology professional, and now executive career coach based in the Greater Seattle Area, she works with senior leaders across every industry, with particular depth in tech and climate, professionals who are polished on paper and invisible in practice. Named among Influence Digest’s Top Career Coaches in Seattle for 2025, her insight comes from sitting on both sides of the hiring table, and concluding that the real shortage isn’t talent. It’s visibility.

Her work carries a personal edge, too. She has a particular affinity for coaching international professionals and executives in transition, having navigated both herself. When a client is starting over in a new country, a new industry, or after a layoff, Oxana isn’t working from theory, she’s working from experience.

Her own career taught her this before she coached anyone through it. After moving to the U.S. from Novosibirsk, Siberia, she watched applications disappear into silence, until a mentor at the University of Washington told her to stop applying and start talking to people. A conversation at a gaming conference led to an introduction, and eventually her first U.S. role at Big Fish Games. The lesson stuck: relationships open doors that resumes can’t.

Drawing on a background in project management, Oxana built Path to Placement, a six-step private coaching program that takes clients from career direction through brand-building, networking, resume and LinkedIn optimization, interview prep, and negotiation. It exists to replace what she saw repeatedly: talented people burning out on volume, hundreds of applications, no traction, because effort without direction doesn’t convert.

Oxana’s reach extends past private clients. As a National Speakers Association member, she delivers keynote presentations and webinars, including “How to Beat the Application Tsunami” and “Supercharge Your LinkedIn”, and writes regularly on interview prep, LinkedIn strategy, and AI’s growing role in recruitment. She’s also active with Climatebase, where she completed a Fellowship with distinction and facilitated mastermind groups for professionals entering the climate sector. Careers grow through community, not in isolation.

The Oxana Willeke Playbook: 5 Lessons for Building a Career That Gets Noticed

• 1. Start with clarity: Where do you see yourself next? What are your dream companies? A deep, targeted approach beats “spray and pray” every time.
• 2. Optimize application materials: Focus your résumé and LinkedIn around measurable impact, not job descriptions.
• 3. Leverage existing networks: Expand your network strategically. Relationships don’t just support the search, they often are the search.
• 4. Track every step: Treat your job search like a project with milestones and accountability, not a waiting game.
• 5. Become a LinkedIn subject matter expert: Visibility compounds—the goal is to be sought after, not to keep searching.

Career-Ops turns any AI coding CLI into a full job search command center. Instead of manually tracking applications in a spreadsheet, you get an AI-powered pipeline that:

Evaluates offers with a structured A-F scoring system (10 weighted dimensions)
Generates tailored PDFs -- ATS-optimized CVs customized per job description
Scans portals automatically (Greenhouse, Ashby, Lever, company pages)
Processes in batch -- evaluate 10+ offers in parallel with sub-agents
Tracks everything in a single source of truth with integrity checks

Important: This is NOT a spray-and-pray tool. Career-ops is a filter -- it helps you find the few offers worth your time out of hundreds. The system strongly recommends against applying to anything scoring below 4.0/5. Your time is valuable, and so is the recruiter's. Always review before submitting.

Career-ops is agentic: Claude Code navigates career pages with Playwright, evaluates fit by reasoning about your CV vs the job description (not keyword matching), and adapts your resume per listing.

Heads up: the first evaluations won't be great. The system doesn't know you yet. Feed it context -- your CV, your career story, your proof points, your preferences, what you're good at, what you want to avoid. The more you nurture it, the better it gets. Think of it as onboarding a new recruiter: the first week they need to learn about you, then they become invaluable.

Built by someone who used it to evaluate 740+ job offers, generate 100+ tailored CVs, and land a Head of Applied AI role. Read the full case study.

Instead of using equity to fund sales and marketing spend, General Catalyst provides structured growth capital tied directly to customer acquisition and recurring revenue. The goal is to let startups like Chainguard preserve equity while using outcome-based financing to scale efficiently.

Connecting the most prolific open source maintainers & contributors with their next jobs

The thread is called “Who is hiring?” And they get posted monthly-ish.

2010 - Dec 2025

The job openings rate, at 3.9 percent, changed little over the month. The number of job openings decreased in professional and business services (-257,000), retail trade (-195,000), and finance and insurance (-120,000). (See table 1.)

The number of job openings for November was revised down by 218,000 to 6.9 million, the number of hires was revised up by 6,000 to 5.1 million

US job openings fell to 7.15 million in November, down from 7.45 million in the previous month, marking the lowest level since September 2024, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Job Openings and Labor Turnover Summary report released Wednesday.

declined across most industries, with the biggest pullback seen in leisure and hospitality, healthcare and social assistance, and transportation and warehousing. Only a few industries, including construction and retail, added jobs.

Hiring slowed as well, while layoffs declined to a six-month low, extending the “hire less, fire less” mode that has defined the US labor market for much of the past year