For two years I did what everyone tells you to do. Spring weeks, summer internships, insight days, off-cycle roles. I rewrote my CV more times than I can count and answered the same competency questions in a hundred slightly different portals. And quite frankly, I was shit at HireVues. Talking to a webcam about a time I demonstrated leadership is not a skill I ever managed to develop. Most applications never even earned a rejection. Just silence.
The odds were never the worst part. The worst part was knowing that nobody had actually read anything. You spend an evening on a cover letter and a screening system bins it in milliseconds because you are not from one of five universities. You are not underqualified. You are unseen. Nobody with authority ever looked.
At some point I stopped applying and started researching. I made a list of small firms: boutique advisory shops, tiny asset managers, six-person consultancies, firms with no careers page at all. I read each one's website properly and sent a short personal email from my own Gmail to the address on their contact page, saying exactly what they do that interested me and what I could bring for a summer.
Replies came back within days. Real replies, from partners, with my name spelled correctly. Some were polite nos, which after two years of silence felt almost like affection. Some turned into calls. Two turned into offers. Two years of portals produced nothing; one term of direct, researched emails produced two offers.
There was no magic in any of it. It was research, respect, and reaching the person who actually decides. It was also brutally slow: thirty-plus hours a week of searching, reading and writing to keep a real pipeline going alongside a degree.
So I started writing code to do the slow parts. Find the firms in an area. Read their websites. Draft the first version of each email from my CV, one per firm, mentioning what that firm actually does. Check the draft never claims anything my CV cannot back up. Send politely, slowly, from my own account.
That pile of scripts eventually became GEN-MAX. I did not set out to build a product, and for a long time it was not one. I built a way out of the silence for myself. The product came later, when it turned out I was not the only one who needed it.
Max, founder of GEN-MAX