Hi, I'm Paul...

Recruiter. Career coach. The person your friend told you to call.

A few years ago a close friend of mine left her corporate job after eight years. The role had become toxic, her contributions unrecognised, and eventually the environment pushed her past moral limits she hadn’t expected to have tested at work. She resigned. Spent the better part of a year in therapy working through what had happened and what came next.

When she was ready, she called me. She wanted to make a pivot, insurance claims into something quieter and less draining, and she needed help with the practical stuff. Resume, interview prep, the mechanics of a job search she hadn’t had to do in nearly a decade.

But the practical stuff wasn’t really the problem. Her mind wasn’t in the right place. Her confidence had taken a serious hit. She was fearful of rejection, anxious about being judged, uncertain whether she had anything worth offering. We spent a few weeks working through it together, and because we’re close she was honest with me in a way that most people aren’t with a recruiter.

What I saw in her was something I had seen before, but never this clearly. Before the resume, before the interviews, before any of it, there’s the emotional work. Get that right and everything else becomes easier. You can have a perfect resume and still fall apart in an interview because you haven’t dealt with what the last role did to you. You can be brilliant at your work and still not know how to talk about it to a stranger across a table.

She found the right job. She’s still in it.

That experience is what Career Hijack is built on. Not just my 22 years working as a recruiter across agencies, internal talent teams and my own consultancy. Not just the 500 or so professionals I’ve coached or the thousand-odd hiring processes I’ve been part of. Those things matter and they inform everything here. But the reason this exists is simpler than a CV of credentials.

I watched someone I care about go from securely employed to feeling like a pure commodity in a faceless system. I knew exactly what was happening because I’ve sat inside that system my entire career. I’ve seen what hiring managers actually look for, how decisions really get made, what a resume needs to do and what it doesn’t, how to walk into a room and own the conversation rather than survive it.

I built Career Hijack because that knowledge shouldn’t only be available to people who can afford a consultant or happen to know someone like me. It should be accessible to anyone who needs it, at the moment they need it most.

The courses here cover both sides of the problem. Emotional first. Technical second. Because that’s the order that actually works.

If you have questions, I’m at paul@careerhijack.com.