The first time I was retrenched, I handled it the old way.
January 2025. I had just turned 47. After nearly five years directing commercial strategy across more than 25 market launches, I found myself suddenly back on the job market. I updated my resume, sent out 50+ applications, sat through round after round of interviews, and eventually landed a role by July. Six months of grinding. It worked.
What I did not fully appreciate at the time was how much of that process I was doing manually, inefficiently, and largely in the dark.
Fast forward to March 2026. Age 48. Retrenched again, this time after less than a year in my next role. Restructuring, not performance. And this time, I came back to the job market a different person.
Because between those two retrenchments, I had discovered AI. And I had opinions about it.
The AI promise that did not deliver
When I started my second job search, I did what most people do. I found the AI resume prompts circulating on LinkedIn and Reddit. The ones promising to "optimise your resume for ATS" and "tailor it to any job description in seconds."
I tried them. And I will be honest: at first, it felt impressive. Fast. Efficient. Like a factory.
Then I looked more carefully at what was actually coming out.
The AI was rewriting what I had given it. Rearranging the same sentences. Swapping in keywords from the job description. It was a reformatting machine, not a thinking partner. And it had a fundamental problem that no prompt length could fix.
It did not know what it did not know.
Twenty years of experience across pharma and medtech in Asia: the market access wins, the zero-to-one market builds, the commercial playbook I built that meaningfully grew brand reach from a standing start. None of that was going to surface unless I explicitly wrote it into the prompt. And if I already knew exactly what to say, I would not need the AI in the first place.
The AI was bounded by whatever I had already written down. I needed something that would help me figure out what I had not yet written down.
YouTube University and a problem statement
I am not a developer. I had never touched a line of code in my life. But I had heard about an AI coding tool and I decided to learn it from scratch. YouTube tutorials, a code editor, a lot of patience, and more than a few late evenings where I would brainstorm an idea and then let it sit overnight before coming back to it the next morning with clearer eyes.
It took me about a week to get comfortable. By April 2026, I had a working prototype.
The problem statement I gave it was simple: "I need to customise my resume for various job applications, and I need you to understand my skills and work experience in order to work this out."
Not a prompt. A conversation. The AI reading my resume and the job description, identifying the gaps, then asking me targeted questions to surface experience I had forgotten about or described in outdated terminology. Commercial wins buried inside cross-functional roles. Market access achievements that had never made it onto the resume because I did not think they were relevant to that particular job. Stories with real metrics that I had told in interviews but never written down.
Section by section, with my approval at every step. Nothing written without my say-so.
That tool became Make Me A Top Applicant. And in June 2026, I decided to share it.
What people got wrong, and what I should have said clearer the first time
A couple of people messaged me after my last post, and their questions told me I had not explained this well enough.
One asked why it could not just generate a "best-in-class" profile for their role, the way a generic tool might. I get the instinct, but that is not what this does, and honestly, it is not what I think anyone actually needs. Every company wants something different from the same job title. A best-in-class profile is generic by definition. What gets you the callback is being the best match for the specific job description in front of you, not the best match for an industry average that does not exist anywhere except in a slide deck.
Another said they could not try it because their resume was not ready. Fair point, but worth clarifying: this is not a tool that builds a resume from nothing. You need something on hand, even a rough, outdated draft. If you are retrenched or actively looking, you almost certainly have that already, even if it has not been touched in two years. That is exactly the starting point.
And a few were not sure why they would need to be interviewed at all. Here is the honest answer: because the gaps are usually not gaps. They are experience you already have, described in the wrong language for the job in front of you. Say the job description asks for clinical trial experience and your resume does not mention it. A reformatting tool flags that as a gap and moves on. This tool asks: have you worked with clinical data, study results, or cross-functional teams that touched clinical programs? More often than not, the experience is sitting there, just buried under a job title that never made it sound relevant.
What I know for certain, and what I do not
I have sent out 50+ applications in this second search. I have received several callbacks. My resume is working, it is getting noticed. I know that.
What I cannot promise you is a job offer in 30 days. I cannot tell you the market is fair, or that the process is not exhausting, or that age does not factor into decisions in ways that are never spoken aloud. I am still in this with you.
What I can tell you is that the version of me who built this tool is applying for jobs more confidently than the version from January 2025. Not because I have a magic tool. Because the tool forced me to tell my story properly, to myself first, before anyone else.
If you want the short version of what I mean by "the AI was bounded by what I had already written down," that is worth reading next: Why your resume isn't working, and it's not what you think.
If you are also wondering whether your age is working against you in this search, that is a different problem worth looking at: Should you hide your age on your resume? The honest answer.
If you are navigating this too: retrenched, job hunting, frustrated with tools that do not actually help. This is what I built for us.
Try MMATA free at resumecoach.pro. Your first guided session is on me.
Built by EY, Singapore. Still job hunting. Still building. 😅