The Archieve of IRIDIUM

Iridium came from repeatedly seeing people describe how they had sent hundreds of job applications and barely heard anything back. I kept wondering what they were supposed to do with that silence, because after weeks of applying, you could still have no idea whether you were approaching the wrong employers, presenting yourself badly, or simply competing for a role that already had someone in mind.

I was interested in whether the thinking behind positioning a business could help someone approach their career. When you build a business, you have to understand where you can be useful and give people a reason to choose you; I wondered what a job search would look like if more of it started there, with the needs of the market and the evidence someone could build to show they could meet them. Qualifications would still matter, but there would be a clearer connection between what someone could do and why a particular employer might need them.

That was what I wanted to work through with Iridium, and I spent a few months trying to put it into a process that someone could actually follow.

When I started contacting people who had publicly shared their difficulties, many didn’t reply, while some responded with frustration. I had expected more willingness to talk, given how often I had seen the problem discussed, but I couldn’t tell much from the responses alone. There were several possible explanations, including how I had approached them, whether they trusted me, and whether the idea sounded useful enough to deserve their attention.

What stayed with me was the possibility that I was asking for effort from people who had already spent a great deal of it.

It is easy to look at someone struggling and think they have a strong reason to try something that might help. But if they have spent months applying, rewriting their CV, and following advice without much changing, another process can come with a fairly reasonable question: how much more time am I going to put into this before I find out whether it helps?

I couldn’t know whether that was what the people I contacted were thinking, but I needed to consider it in the product. Iridium would ask someone to research employers, reconsider how they presented themselves, and develop evidence of their abilities, all while the pressure to find work was still there. I could believe that work was worthwhile and still have very little basis for deciding whether it was a reasonable thing to ask of that person at that moment.

That made me more interested in the first part of the experience: what could someone get out of it before committing to the whole process? If they spent an afternoon on it, would they leave with a clearer decision about where to apply or what to improve, or would they mostly leave with more work to do? I would need a convincing answer to that before asking someone to put their existing search aside, even briefly.

It also mattered who that person was. Someone exploring a career change while still employed could have time to investigate a different approach, whereas someone needing an income immediately might find the same process difficult to justify. They could both struggle to get interviews, but that shared difficulty wouldn’t make them equally suitable users for Iridium.

There was a further complication in what I could promise, because helping someone make better decisions about their search wouldn’t give me control over the employer’s decisions. I could help them identify opportunities and explain their value more clearly, but I couldn’t promise a response or a job. The work would need to be useful enough for someone to recognise its value before that final outcome, and I hadn’t established that it would be.

By the time I decided to stop, I still liked the idea. What I didn’t have was enough evidence that the people I wanted to help would be willing and able to follow the process, and building more wouldn’t answer that for me. I wasn’t comfortable continuing towards a release while so much depended on assumptions about what users could take on.

The repository is still private, although I’ve never quite decided whether keeping it is good organisation or unfinished curiosity. For now, Iridium remains a slightly awkward archive entry: I’m writing about why I stopped while keeping the code in case I change my mind.