Nico blog

How to read a job description like a hiring manager

2026-09-15T00:00:00Z

Most job descriptions are assembled from a template, a previous posting, and twenty minutes of a hiring manager’s afternoon. Reading one well means knowing which parts were written with care and which were pasted in.

The three layers of a job description

The role summary. Usually the first two or three sentences after the title. This is the part the hiring manager wrote, and it says what the team needs the person to do in the first year.
The requirements list. A mix of the must-haves and everything anyone in the approval chain asked to add. The first three items are the ones that matter most; the order is rarely an accident.
The boilerplate. Company description, benefits, equal-opportunity statement. Useful for context, not for deciding whether you fit.

Answering the real ask

Once you have found the role summary, write your application to it. A resume that mirrors the summary’s language in its first few lines reads as a match to a person skimming forty applications before lunch.

For the requirements list, be honest with yourself about the top three. If you meet two of them well, apply and say so plainly. If you meet none of them, the role is probably not the right one this year, and there are better uses of an evening.

Where Nico fits

Nico reads job descriptions the same way, and shows you the match between your experience and the role in the summary and the top requirements. When there is a gap, it points to courses and resources to close it, so that the next time that role comes around you meet all three.

The jobs that only live on company career pages

2026-09-08T00:00:00Z

Every employer with more than a handful of staff runs a careers page. It is the place where a role appears first, and for a surprising share of roles it is the only place the role ever appears.

Why a role stays on the careers page

Posting a job to an external board costs money, takes time, and invites a volume of applications that a small recruiting team may not want. So many companies publish to their own site and let their applicant tracking system handle the rest. Some syndicate a subset of roles to the big boards, often the ones that are hardest to fill. The rest stay home.

The result is a large, quiet inventory of open positions that never reach the places most people look.

What that means for your search

If your search starts from a job board, you are looking at the roles an employer chose to advertise, not at everything they have open. The roles that stay on the careers page tend to be:

Specialist positions where the hiring manager already knows the profile they want.
Local roles at companies that hire from their region and rarely need a national campaign.
Newly opened positions that have not yet made it through the syndication queue.

Reading careers pages directly puts those roles in front of you while the applicant pool is still small.

Doing this by hand, and doing it with Nico

You can bookmark the careers pages of thirty companies you admire and check them every week. It works, and it is how many people land roles that others never see.

Nico does the same thing at a different scale. It reads thousands of career pages, keeps track of what is new, and shows you the few roles that match what you are looking for. The idea is the same as the bookmark list. The difference is that the list never gets stale.

Why we are building Nico

2026-09-06T00:00:00Z

Looking for a job is a project. It has research, writing, follow-ups, deadlines and a lot of waiting, and most people run it in the evenings, on top of the job they already have. We started Nico because that project deserves better tools than a spreadsheet and a stack of browser tabs.

The idea in one sentence

Nico is an AI agent that works the whole job hunt with you, built around the one role that is right for you rather than the hundred that are not.

That sentence carries two choices we made early and have kept.

The first is the whole job hunt. Finding a role, preparing an application, keeping conversations moving and getting ready for interviews are one process to the person doing it. We wanted one agent that understands all of it, not a separate tool for each step.

The second is fit over volume. Applying to a role you match well, with an application written for that role, is a better use of an evening than applying to twenty roles at once. Nico is designed to make the well-matched application the easy path.

What Nico does today

It finds roles where they are first published. Nico reads the career pages of thousands of companies directly, in the language they were written in. Many roles appear there and nowhere else, and the rest appear there first. You describe what you are looking for, name a city or a company, and Nico shows you the few roles that fit.

It reads job descriptions the way a hiring manager would. For a role you like, Nico compares your resume to the description and shows where you match and where you do not. Where there is a gap, it points to courses and resources that close it, so the next time that kind of role comes around you meet all the requirements.

It tailors your resume to the role. Not a new resume from scratch, but your resume, with the experience that matters for this role brought forward and phrased in the language the description uses.

It keeps every conversation moving. Nico reads your inbox, surfaces what needs a reply, helps draft the response and schedules interviews. Every application has a clear next step and a date on it.

It works with the assistant you already use. Nico has its own intelligence, and it also connects to ChatGPT and Claude, so you can ask about your applications and interviews from the chat window you already have open.

Nico speaks English, Dutch, German, French and Spanish, and reads job postings in many more languages than that.

Who it is for

Anyone whose next role is a considered choice rather than a numbers game. People changing companies, changing fields, or returning to work after a break. People who would rather be doing almost anything else than job hunting, and want it done well anyway.

The private beta

Nico is in private beta. We are opening spots in small groups so that every new person gets attention while we learn what works. Requesting access takes a minute on the homepage, and we will be in touch as spots open up.

On this blog we will write about what we learn along the way: how companies publish roles, what makes an application land, and what an AI agent can and cannot do for a job search. If there is a topic you would like us to cover, reply to any of our emails and tell us.