How Manish landed a Director of AI Engineering role at FICO after two years of searching

Manish came to us after nearly two years in the job market. Six months of that was on his own. The next year was with two or three vendors who touched up his resume and left the heavy lifting to him. Nothing had worked.

In under 6 months we landed him 39 interviews and the Director of AI Engineering role at FICO at $300,000 base.

He told us on the first call he did not believe us

This is the most useful thing about Manish’s story: he was not an easy client to win, and he said so out loud.

“I have spoken to three other vendors similar to you, and unless I see results, I don’t know what to believe in, because I have spent a year just doing this.”

His scepticism was earned rather than general. He had already bought the promise twice:

“They are hands off. They basically do your resume and then they want you to do all the heavy lifting, and it did not work for me.”

What made him try one more time

Running out of options, and one specific distinction.

“I said, I need to do something differently. I was running out of options. Something has to change.”

He pushed us on exactly that point before signing, because it was the thing that had failed him twice:

“I just wanted to make sure I understand this. This is not a hands-off where you touch up a resume, give me some instructions, then walk away and I have to go do all the heavy lifting, because that thing is not working for me.”

What he was told, and what he then got, was a team running the search rather than advising on it: applications, outreach and follow-up, at every stage.

“Think about it as having your own team working on your behalf, getting you your interviews. That felt different from what I had previously undergone.”

Why FICO fit

Manish had built AI platform capability at his previous company. FICO had world-class products at real scale and was moving them toward generative and agentic AI, which is the same problem one step further along. The positioning work put that history at the front rather than burying it in a list of technologies.

The mechanism, in his words: neither offer came from an application

This is the clearest account of what actually changes when someone else runs your outreach, and it is his description rather than ours.

“Reaching out directly to a hiring manager or a decision maker bypasses the queue when there are a thousand applicants on it. You are just one of a thousand applicants waiting for a call back, versus reaching out directly to the hiring manager. When they see the profile, and they see the keywords they are looking for in a prospective applicant, and that is available on the LinkedIn profile, I immediately see them reaching out to me saying, okay, let’s schedule a call.”

Then the specific claim, which is the one worth reading closely:

“Both FICO and Intuitive, we did not wait for someone to pick our application from the job application itself. The hiring manager directly reached out, and then we were able to schedule those calls.”

Two of his opportunities, including the one he signed, never went through an application queue at all. If you want the method rather than the outcome, it is written up in how to find the hiring manager and what to write to the hiring manager.

He also makes the volume comparison himself:

“Combined, over the last two years, I haven’t had these many interviews.”

The search in numbers

• 39 interviews landed in under 6 months, after two years of little movement
• Both final-stage opportunities came from direct hiring-manager contact, not an application
• $300,000 base at FICO
• Level: Director. Function: AI and Machine Learning