The Missing Manual Show

Can your applicant tracking system be gamed?
Yes, and this episode of The Missing Manual shows you exactly how to check. Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas break down AI resume prompt injection, the practice of hiding invisible instructions inside a resume that tell an AI screener to move a candidate forward regardless of fit.
Research out of Duke University found the pattern in roughly one percent of a 200,000-resume sample, and Julia and Jenny explain why that number is likely to grow as more applicant tracking systems bolt on AI without telling buyers exactly what it touches.
The conversation moves quickly from the resume problem to the vendor problem. Jenny lays out the two-pronged defense every hiring team needs: work directly with your ATS vendor to ask how they're arming against prompt injection and how they red team their own technology, and separately, test your own process by building a candidate application specifically designed to break it. Julia and Jenny are direct about what happens next if that test reveals a real gap. It is not something to quietly patch. It is a conversation for legal and HR leadership.
The back half of the episode turns to the human side of AI hiring fraud: candidates and employers misrepresenting themselves, deepfake interview avatars, a low-tech but effective way to catch one on a video call, and a real story about a former employee who got someone else to sit in for their interview. Julia and Jenny close with the harder truth underneath all of it: candidate behavior is going to keep evolving, and the organizations that fare best are the ones pressure testing their hiring process regularly instead of setting it once and walking away. The Missing Manual exists to name exactly this kind of unwritten rule before it costs you.
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Cognitive load—the amount of information your brain can track at once—is a real limiting factor in how much you can actually accomplish. When that load gets too high, you're not just tired; you're stuck. The Missing Manual walks you through how AI agents (systems built to handle specific tasks on your behalf) can reduce that load by doing the indexing work most people do manually.
Julia and Jenny share three concrete examples from their own work. The first came from RecFest: Jamie Leonard posted a thread with 41 comments about conference fringe events, and a Claude agent pulled all that scattered information into one clean list organized by day. The second example is Julia's work launching Your Network Read, a LinkedIn analysis tool that produces 38-page reports—which she then optimized with AI to reduce duplication and improve readability for her users. The third is how agents can audit your existing presentations and documents to ensure they meet accessibility standards (contrast ratios, cognitive load, compliance) before you publish them.
The key insight: these are exactly the right uses of AI. Not to replace thinking. Not to write your ideas for you. But to handle the cognitive work of indexing, organizing, and quality-checking so you can focus your actual brain on decisions only you can make.
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The fastest way to make AI agents useful in your organization is to map the work that never made it into a system in the first place. On this episode of The Missing Manual, Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas explain why every system leaves work behind, and why that leftover work, sitting in spreadsheets, inboxes, and people's heads, is exactly what has to get mapped before any agentic AI tool can do something real with it.
Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas trace this problem across several real situations. Julia points to visa and mobility tracking, a process that in most organizations sits with a single person and carries legal and personal consequences if a step gets missed. She also describes mapping decades of undocumented process inside her family's chocolate business, using live interviews and AI transcription to pull knowledge out of long-tenured staff and onto paper for the first time. Jenny Cotie Kangas describes coaching a private insurance adjuster through three weeks of narrating his own judgment calls, work he found tedious, that let his team build an agent system able to label and file a hundred and forty four claim photos in four minutes instead of four to five hours.
The Missing Manual keeps returning to the idea that the tool is never the first problem. Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas point to emerging technology, including audit tools built by Mike Hennessy's Grace Blocks and the experience layer approach from Matt Ekstrom's Sync to Hire, as evidence that more of the industry is waking up to this same gap. Both hosts agree that mapping shadow work is not glamorous, but it is the actual prerequisite for building AI that fits how an organization really operates, rather than forcing every process into a one size fits all system.
This episode continues The Missing Manual's ongoing look at agentic work and AI strategy, the same territory that shapes the show's take on corporate navigation and workplace tactics for anyone building an executive career. Find The Missing Manual wherever you listen to podcasts.

Conference season arrives with more invitations than budget, and the decision most practitioners make by default is the one that costs them the most. Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas open this episode of The Missing Manual with the question that should come before any registration form: what problem are you trying to solve this year. Everything else follows from the answer. If the problem is vendor selection, the room you need looks nothing like the room you need when the problem is craft development or peer benchmarking.
The field sorts into four buckets. Vendor user conferences run by the tools already in your stack. National industry events like the HR Technology Conference and UNLEASH, which carry the broadest and deepest vendor presence. State and regional gatherings such as SHRM Talent and the state SHRM chapters. And local or free options, including the events run by regional recruiting networks, that cost almost nothing beyond your time. Jenny makes the case that most practitioners skip the cheapest option available to them, because a customer of a vendor running a user conference can usually get a ticket at no cost, and sometimes travel, simply by asking the account rep who already has levers on the back end.
Julia spent 25 years in Fortune 500 talent acquisition without attending a single SHRM conference, and she explains why. When she was coming up, the competency model did not include talent acquisition at all, which told her where she sat in the priority order. She also did not attend the HR Technology Conference until last year, because at her companies the HRIS team owned that trip. Both are examples of the same discipline: matching the room to the problem, rather than attending because everyone else is. Jenny adds a systems read on the physical environment itself, noting that an outdoor format like RecFest produces measurably different attendee behavior than a hotel ballroom where half the audience is still working the day job.
The episode closes with the five checks Julia runs before booking anything. Name the problem you are solving. Confirm the vendors you need are actually on the floor. Confirm the sessions cover the part of the craft you are trying to build. Look at whether the speakers come from companies you would want to learn from. Then call two peers who have been and ask them straight.
The Missing Manual exists to close the gap between knowing a decision matters and knowing how to make it, and a conference budget is one of the clearest places that gap shows up.
Find The Missing Manual wherever you listen to podcasts.
 
[00:00] Conference season and the practitioner budget problem
[00:34] Mugs, Ted Lasso, and meeting at UNLEASH Las Vegas
[01:39] Why Julia skipped the LinkedIn and Indeed conferences
[02:20] SHRM and the talent acquisition afterthought
[03:31] The four conference buckets, vendor, national, state, local
[03:50] How to get a free vendor conference ticket and travel covered
[04:47] Local and free events worth tracking
[05:35] RecFest and the Unplug stage
[06:20] Why outdoor conferences change how people show up
[07:45] Fresh voices versus the same speaker rotation [08:20] HR Tech and UNLEASH for vendor shopping [
09:32] Evolve and the case for smaller practitioner rooms [10:15] The five questions to ask before booking

Most people run their job search the same way, opening a job board, typing in a title, and scrolling through hundreds of roles that almost fit. In this episode of The Missing Manual, Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas show a different way to do it, using AI agents that search for roles by fit instead of by title and build a resume that is one size fits one for each posting they find.
The heart of the episode is a principle Jenny keeps coming back to, that good is subjective to the individual person. Before any agent can help you, you have to define what good looks like for you, and most people never pause to do it. Jenny walks through the system she built to find applied AI roles, starting with an interview that draws out her version of good, then a grounding document, then a career blueprint that captures everything she has ever done, then a daily search that finds the roles and a running log that keeps her agents from surfacing the same one twice.
Julia brings the buyer side view from 25 years leading talent acquisition inside Fortune 500 companies. She and Jenny spent their careers building these systems on the employer side, and this episode is the flip side, the same power handed to the person looking for their next role. Julia also adds the step she learned to rely on, naming the environments that are a hard no so the search filters them out before they ever reach her.
Jenny productized her entire search into a free guide called the Builder's Playbook and put it on GitHub for anyone to use, because the job search can be a defeating process and everyone deserves a real shot at their next right thing. The link is with the episode. Find The Missing Manual wherever you listen to podcasts.
Access Jenny's step by step process FREE here: Job Search Automation

The forward deployed engineer is the new and hot role in AI, and most job descriptions ask for eight to twelve years of software experience. Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas think that requirement is looking in the wrong place. In this episode of The Missing Manual, they make the case that the person best equipped to get a forward deployed engineer role right is often a great recruiter who has never written a line of code.
A forward deployed engineer gets to know a specific user's problem in full, understands its one-size-fits-one nature, then reverse-engineers a build to solve it and ships it into that user's world. Jenny walks through the double diamond design model that sits underneath the work, where you define the right thing before you build the thing right. Her own aha moment is the heart of the episode. The eight to twelve years of experience she has for this role did not come from software. It came from talent acquisition, where you work with a hiring manager to define what right looks like, then go find that person in the wild.
Julia adds the piece that makes or breaks it. Design bias is the wall. The people who have already decided how a problem should be solved cannot see the problem clearly enough to solve it, and a career insider who has done everything the same way for years can be the most stuck of all. The two of them name the recruiter traits that map directly onto the FDE skill set, from tactical empathy to building relationships across departments to deconstructing a role into the parts that actually matter. They point to sourcers like Shally Steckerl who were doing this work before the title existed.
For HR and TA leaders, the takeaway is practical. Before you hire an engineer, look at the full-cycle recruiter or sourcer you already have, because the business to technical translation this role runs on is a skill your best people are already using. The Missing Manual exists to hand you the how that never makes it into the manual, and this episode gives you a clear way to find forward deployed engineer talent inside your own team. Find The Missing Manual wherever you listen to podcasts.

Job posting errors cost employers more than embarrassment. Missing salary data in transparency states, template instructions published by accident, and dropped EEO statements create legal exposure and send candidates a signal about how the organization runs. In a world where LLMs read and rank job content, those errors also make employers harder to discover. On this episode of The Missing Manual, Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas dig into why these errors are everywhere and what AI agents can now do about them.
Jenny shares the story behind Rec Check, an agent she built after an industry friend asked whether AI could audit his company's public job postings. The agent pulls a public job feed, indexes every error, and returns a list with the requisition number, the problem, and a recommended fix. Her audit across 1,100 live postings at one organization surprised both of them, and the same concept worked when pointed at Ashby, Greenhouse, and iCIMS feeds.
The bigger lesson comes from a principle Jenny learned from a former leader: lean teams cannot afford symptom mitigation alone. Many posting errors trace back to configuration issues upstream in the ATS, so the agent also flags the problems that can be fixed once at the source. Julia adds the talent acquisition leader's view from 25 years inside Fortune 500 organizations, including why candidates judge employers for posting errors the same way recruiters judge resumes, and where compliance mistakes turn into settlements.
The Missing Manual is built for working professionals who want the practical how, not the theory. If you run a TA function and have never audited your live postings, this episode will change your Monday. Find The Missing Manual wherever you listen to podcasts.

How to write better AI prompts is less about memorizing a framework and more about learning to have a real conversation. Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas break down what actually makes a prompt work and why letting the AI help you build the prompt is one of the fastest ways to get there.
Most people either type into AI like it's a Google search or freeze up worrying their prompt isn't good enough. This episode covers how to narrow the aperture, use constraints as a superpower, save your best prompts for reuse, and know when to bring in a different tool for a different job.
Chapters[00:00] Why people have prompt anxiety and why it's fixable[00:33] Using AI to write your own prompts[01:14] How Julia started: chatting vs. prompting[03:16] Narrowing the aperture: the recruiting lens applied to AI[05:10] Real example: building LinkedIn carousels and switching tools for images[07:42] Constraints as a superpower: why AI likes guardrails[08:03] Ask the AI to interview you before you start[09:40] How to capture a great prompt so future you can use it again[10:34] Spreadsheets, projects, and gems: where to store what works[11:22] A note on sourcing and PII: what to keep out of your LLM[12:17] The one thing: choose to begin
Hosts: Julia Levy (julia-levy.com) + Jenny Cotie Kangas | The Missing Manual Podcast
Tags: prompt engineering, AI prompts, how to use AI, AI for HR, AI for recruiters, AI productivity, ChatGPT prompts, Claude AI, Gemini AI, LLM prompts, AI strategy, agentic AI, future of work, Julia Levy, Jenny Cotie Kangas, The Missing Manual podcast, AI tools, AI for professionals, workplace AI, AI tips

Your Network Read is a tool Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas built to help people show up correctly on LinkedIn — whether they're actively job searching, building a personal brand, or selling into their network. This episode of The Missing Manual is what happened when Jenny Cotie Kangas stopped building it and actually ran it on herself.
The output was immediate and specific. Skills tagged as Microsoft Office that hadn't been relevant in years. An industry classification left over from a previous role. Gaps that were invisible until the tool named them. JCK walked away with a clearer LinkedIn and a sharper reminder of why they built Your Network Read in the first place: most people don't know what's working against them until something shows them. The tool shows them.
Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas also talk through what it actually looks like to bring a product to market when it's just the two of you — no marketing team, no launch playbook, no blueprint to follow. The mindset that's making it work: stop asking what could go wrong and start asking what if it went right. Julia brings in a parallel reframe she used with job seekers in graduate school, and JCK shares the free two-part prompt she posted on LinkedIn this week to help people define their version of good before they start a search. It's been tested across industries and career levels, and the feedback has been consistent: people hadn't thought through this before.
Life has also been a lot. Julia's dad had open heart surgery. The Missing Manual missed a week. Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas showed up anyway. Find Your Network Read and the free job seeker prompt on JCK's LinkedIn. Find The Missing Manual wherever you listen to podcasts.

When life moves fast and nothing goes according to plan, most people don't need another framework. They need a map for the moment the frameworks don't cover. That's what this episode of The Missing Manual is.
Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas (JCK) are bringing you into a real week.  Julia traveled to Florida for a short trip to help a parent through knee surgery and ended up staying through an ICU stay and an upcoming surgical procedure. JCK stepped fully into her consulting company, Whiterock Road, after exiting her last role, and navigated what it looks like to move forward with clarity when the timing isn't clean. Both hosts missed a week of the show. Both kept going anyway.
In this conversation, Julia and JCK talk through what actually helped: accepting support from people you didn't expect to show up, articulating what you need even when you're not sure, and finding the specific, personal version of good that regulates you when everything else feels uncertain. JCK's version involved a ten-dollar gallon of paint and a backyard she's been slowly reclaiming. Julia's involved hospital hallway walks, text threads, and a few minutes of sunshine between doctor updates. One size fits one. That's the through-line.
They also talk about Julia's AI tool, Your Network Read, currently in final build-out with JCK's help, and what it looks like to hand a passion project to someone you trust when you don't have the headspace or time to carry it yourself. That's not failure. That's a pivot. Find The Missing Manual wherever you listen to podcasts.