The Bridge Search

25/09/2026

Happy Friday — Job Seeker Café Weekly Insight

Back again this morning with the brilliant community at Trevor Churchley Talentology AU Job Seeker Café, where I share practical, real-world advice on working with recruiters and navigating the job market, especially in tech.

This week we cracked another recruiter myth: that a recruiter is only useful when they have a job for you.

If you haven’t joined yet, I’d highly recommend it: https://lnkd.in/gwCK3C_F

Here’s a secret: recruiters know things. Not in a trench-coat way, more in a “12 hiring managers told me this week they can’t find a decent cloud engineer” way.

Most candidates treat us like a vending machine: insert CV, wait for job. The smart ones treat us like the friend who always knows the industry gossip. We know what companies actually pay, which skills are gold dust, and which teams have quietly frozen hiring while leaving their ads up for decoration.

All you have to do is ask.
A few questions worth trying:
→ “What are offers actually landing at, not just what’s in the advert?” (Adverts are like dating profiles. Broadly true, generously framed.)
→ “Which skills are your clients struggling to find?”
→ “Is anything on my CV starting to look a bit vintage?”
→ “Is remote still negotiable, or are clients saying they ‘value collaboration’?” (Translation: please come to the office.)
→ “When candidates like me get turned down, what’s usually the reason?”

Why will we tell you? Honestly, because informed candidates are easier to place. They negotiate sensibly and are less likely to ghost us at offer stage, which is the recruiter equivalent of being left at the altar.

A word of caution from the inside: we’re well informed, but not neutral. We get paid when a placement happens, so ask two or three recruiters the same questions and compare notes.

Your challenge: next time you’re on a call with a recruiter, ask at least two market questions before you hang up. Think of it as a spy mission, with less glamour and more LinkedIn.

Job seekers, what’s the most useful thing a recruiter has ever told you? Recruiters, what do you wish more candidates asked? Tell me in the comments.

22/09/2026

This week's Notes from the Architecture Desk. https://lnkd.in/p/divZsU48

18/09/2026

Happy Friday — Job Seeker Café Weekly Insight

Back again this morning with the brilliant community at Trevor's Talentology AU Job Seeker Café, where I share practical, real‑world advice on working with recruiters and navigating the job market, especially in tech.

If you haven’t joined yet, I’d highly recommend it.
https://lnkd.in/gwCK3C_F

Share Achievements, Not Just Duties

Why IT Candidates Need to Show Impact — Especially in the Age of AI‑Generated Resumes

AI‑generated resumes are everywhere now. Tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude produce CVs that look clean, keyword‑rich and neatly formatted. And that’s fine — AI can help you present your experience clearly.

But here’s the catch:

Most AI‑generated resumes focus on duties and keywords, not achievements and outcomes.

They list responsibilities.
They match job descriptions.
They stack technologies.

But they often miss the one thing hiring managers actually care about:

What did you deliver? What changed because you were there?

That’s where candidates lose their edge.

The Core Idea

Achievements show impact. Duties show activity. Clients hire impact.

When I’m pitching you to a CTO, Engineering Manager, Delivery Lead or Head of Architecture, I need outcomes, improvements, metrics, delivery wins. Without achievements, you blend into every other candidate who “worked on a migration” or “supported BAU”.

AI can’t invent your achievements. Only you can provide them.

Why Achievements Matter in Tech

They prove capability

They differentiate you

They help recruiters sell you

They match how engineering leaders think

They build confidence

What IT Candidates Should Do

Add numbers

Show improvements

Highlight outcomes

Use action + result

Keep duties minimal

Feed achievements into AI

IT‑Specific Examples

Software Engineering
Duty: Built backend APIs
Achievement: Reduced API response times from 800ms to 120ms for 40k daily users

Business Analysis
Duty: Gathered requirements
Achievement: Cut rework by 30% and accelerated delivery by two sprints

DevOps / Cloud
Duty: Maintained CI/CD pipelines
Achievement: Reduced deployment failures from 18% to 2% and cut release time from 45 mins to 8 mins

Data & Analytics
Duty: Built dashboards
Achievement: Improved decision‑making speed for operations by 50%

Solution Architecture
Duty: Designed solution architectures
Achievement: Delivered a cloud‑native design that cut hosting costs by 35%, improved resilience to 99.95% uptime, and enabled scaling from 5k to 50k daily users

A Line to Remember
Duties tell us what you did. Achievements tell us why it mattered.

Summary
AI can help you write your resume, but it can’t replace your achievements. If you want recruiters to advocate for you, give them something to work with. Achievements show impact, value and momentum — the things IT hiring managers care about most.

This week’s Job Seeker Café insight:
Share achievements, not just duties. Achievements get you hired.

The Bridge Search

15/09/2026

Nobody agrees what an architect is, and it's costing you a quarter of a year.

I've been recruiting architects for a few decades now, first in the UK and for most of that time here in Australia. Technology, solution, business, enterprise. Long enough to have placed people who now sign off my invoices, and others who've retired from the whiteboard entirely and spend their afternoons thinking about a sundowner rather than a roadmap.

In that time, the thing that's changed most isn't the technology. It's the language.

"Enterprise architect" in 2005 described a fairly predictable person doing a fairly predictable job. Today the same two words might mean a governance lead who lives in a review board, a strategist sitting next to the CIO with no delivery accountability, or a senior engineer who got tired of the title debate and took whatever was on the requisition.

That's not a semantic problem. It's a hiring problem, and it has a cost.

A role opens. The brief is inherited from the last version of it. Three or four candidates in, someone finally says what should have been said before the role went to market: I'm not sure this is the person we actually need.

The role gets rewritten and the pipeline gets binned, including at least one person who'd have been excellent for the revised brief but has been declined once and won't come back. Six weeks gone. In a hot market, the two strongest people in that pipeline are employed elsewhere by the time you're ready.

It's worse here than in London or Singapore. Senior architecture in Australia is a small community. Sydney and Melbourne are a few thousand people who've mostly worked with or against each other at some point, and they talk. A search that visibly changes shape halfway through gets discussed, and the next good candidate arrives already knowing.

None of this is carelessness. Architecture is one of the few senior disciplines where the title doesn't tell you the job. You can hire a financial controller largely on title and level. You cannot do that with an architect, and the market keeps pretending you can.

So when a client gives me a brief, my first question isn't about the stack or certifications:

In twelve months, what will this person have produced that doesn't exist today?

The answers sort into piles quickly, and each pile is a different hire. A target state and a set of principles the organisation actually follows means you want a strategist, so test for influence and written clarity rather than platform depth. Three major programmes landing without colliding is a solution architect at scale, so test for judgement under delivery pressure. A platform that's coherent, paved and used by teams who chose it? You're describing an engineering leader, and you'll lose them in the first interview if you open with governance.

If the answer is a blank pause, the role isn't ready. That's not a criticism. It's a saved quarter.

If you've rewritten an architecture brief mid-search, what triggered it?

28/07/2026

Data architects: designing lakehouses. Storage vendors: offering bigger lakes

SPONSORED FEATURE: AI's hunger for data outstrips storage smarts, leaving GPUs famished

28/07/2026

Tech sector pours $1T into AI and sends customers the bill

History's biggest infrastructure build-out is pushing up hardware and software prices, analyst says

01/06/2026

AI in Australia must be built as a data system, not just a compute system

Long-term success with AI means understanding how AI systems behave over time and that AI not only creates intelligence, but also creates data.

25/05/2026

AWS sees partners as architects of seismic change - ARN

Amazon Web Services (AWS) sees its partners as central to the huge wave of artificial intelligence (AI)-driven transformation now underway — not just spectators.

15/05/2026

The next enterprise architecture asset: Ontologies for AI

AI agents can’t just guess what your data means; they need an "ontology" to act as a shared rulebook so they don't make confident, expensive mistakes.