I don't know why, but January is often a forced career transition moment, so it seems now is a good time to subvert the newsletter to talk about this Claude skill. It's a pretty useful demonstration of what you can do with a skill, making use of all sorts of techniques. Next newsletter, I will take a dive into what I have learnt having written 50+ Claude skills.
Sometimes Everyone Needs a Little Help
I've been fortunate in my career. Good timing, good mentors, and more than a few people who went out of their way to help when they didn't have to.
One piece of advice I was given years ago has stayed with me: give help forwards. When someone helps you, you can't always repay them directly. But you can help the next person who needs it.
This is my attempt at that.
What I Built
Career Helper is a skill for Claude. If you use Claude (the AI assistant from Anthropic), you can install this skill and it extends what Claude can do for you. Specifically, it helps with job searching.
I'm not a recruiter. I'm not a career coach. I'm a consultant who has been through career transitions myself, helped colleagues through theirs, and spent enough time with Claude to realise that AI is genuinely useful for the heavy lifting that job searching requires.
The insight isn't complicated: job searching involves a lot of repetitive, time-consuming work that most people do badly because they're doing it alone, often under stress, and without the bandwidth to do proper research or preparation. AI is good at exactly this kind of structured, research-heavy, detail-oriented work.
So I built a tool and made it free.
What AI Assistance Actually Looks Like
There's a lot of noise about AI replacing jobs. Less discussion about AI helping people find jobs.
Here's what I've learned from building this: AI assistance isn't about replacing human judgement. It's about doing the legwork so humans can make better decisions.
Career Helper doesn't tell you what job to apply for. It doesn't make decisions for you. What it does is the preparatory work that most candidates skip because they don't have time, don't know how, or are too overwhelmed to do properly.
It will research a company before you interview there, surfacing information about their strategic priorities, recent news, leadership changes, and financial health. You still have to decide what to do with that intelligence. But at least you have it.
It will rewrite your CV to pass through applicant tracking systems, identifying the keywords you're missing and restructuring your experience to match what the algorithms are looking for. You still have to verify the result is accurate. But the heavy lifting is done.
It will prepare you for interviews by generating likely questions based on the specific role, creating structured answers that draw on your actual experience, and explaining what interviewers are really assessing behind each question. You still have to practise and perform. But you're not starting from scratch.
The pattern is consistent: AI handles the volume, the research, the structural work. You provide the judgement, the authenticity, the final decisions.
Non-Judgemental Support
One thing I've noticed about working with AI on career topics: it doesn't judge.
Job searching is emotionally difficult. There's rejection, uncertainty, and often a sense that you should already know how to do this. Asking for help can feel like admitting failure.
AI doesn't care. It will show up for you at 11pm when you're anxious about tomorrow's interview. It will help you rewrite your CV for the fifteenth time without sighing. It will research the same company again because you forgot what it told you yesterday.
It's not a replacement for human connection. But it's a form of support that's available when you need it, doesn't tire of your questions, and treats every request as worth taking seriously.
For people going through career transitions, especially difficult ones, that consistency matters.
What Career Helper Actually Does
The skill extends Claude with fifteen capabilities designed for different stages of job searching. You don't need to use all of them. Start with whatever you need most.
Getting Your Materials Ready
- LinkedIn Profile Optimisation - Rewrites your profile so recruiters can actually find you when they search. Covers headline, about section, skills ordering, and discoverability.
- CV Optimisation for ATS - Restructures your CV to pass through applicant tracking systems. Identifies keywords from job descriptions and ensures your experience is presented in formats that algorithms can parse.
- LinkedIn Content Strategy - For longer searches, helps you maintain visibility with a sustainable posting approach. Authentic content based on your actual expertise, not viral hooks.
Researching Opportunities
- Company Research - Comprehensive intelligence gathering before you apply or interview. Financial health, strategic direction, leadership, culture, recent news. Every claim cited with sources.
- Networking Intelligence - Identifies who to connect with at target companies. Maps hiring managers, internal recruiters, potential advocates, and warm introduction paths.
Preparing for Interviews
- Interview Preparation - Generates likely questions for the specific role and creates structured answers using your actual experience. Explains what interviewers are really assessing.
- Interviewer's Perspective Reports - Shows you the view from the other side of the table. What makes a strong answer. What red flags interviewers watch for.
- Mock Interviews - Practice sessions with different interviewer personas. Detailed feedback on your responses.
When Things Don't Go to Plan
- Post-Interview Coaching - Diagnoses what went wrong after a rejection. Identifies whether you faced a skill gap, a signal gap, or a fit issue. Helps you learn from it rather than just move on.
Planning and Strategy
- 3-Month Job Search Plan - Structured activity planning with goals, weekly breakdowns, and daily rhythms. Includes wellbeing practices because job searching is hard.
- Application Strategy - Timeline planning, stakeholder mapping, and follow-up protocols for high-priority opportunities.
Offer Stage
- Salary Negotiation Coaching - Market research, counter-offer scripts, and total compensation analysis. Adapted for UK, US, EU, and APAC markets.
- Offer Evaluation - Framework for comparing multiple offers or evaluating a single one. Weighted decision matrix based on your priorities.
Non-Traditional Paths
- Portfolio and Fractional Careers - For those building fractional executive, advisory, or portfolio careers. Rate setting, legal structures, client acquisition.
- AI Readiness Assessment - Skills gap analysis and upskilling roadmap for demonstrating AI competency in the 2025+ job market.
Not Looking for a Job?
Career Helper isn't only for active job seekers.
If you're happily employed but want to keep your LinkedIn profile current, the profile optimisation tools work just as well for maintenance as for job hunting. Profiles go stale. Skills sections become outdated. Headlines that made sense three years ago no longer reflect what you do. Periodic refresh matters, even when you're not looking.
If you're building a portfolio career, juggling fractional roles, advisory work, consulting, or board positions, there's dedicated support for that. Rate setting guidance, legal structure options (IR35 considerations for the UK, LLC versus S-Corp for the US), client acquisition strategies, and LinkedIn positioning specifically for fractional executives.
If you're focused on thought leadership, the content strategy coaching helps you develop a sustainable posting rhythm based on your actual expertise. Not viral hooks. Not LinkedIn clichés. Authentic content that positions you as a thinking professional in your domain.
The tool adapts to where you are. Not everyone is job searching. But almost everyone could use help keeping their professional presence sharp.
Career Stage Matters
The skill also adapts its guidance based on where you are in your career. The challenges are genuinely different.
Early career candidates need to demonstrate potential without much track record. Mid-career professionals often face pivots and transitions. Experienced executives encounter age bias, both quiet and explicit. Late-career professionals may be exploring fractional, advisory, or board positions rather than traditional employment.
Career Helper doesn't require you to navigate this complexity. Tell it where you are, and the guidance adapts accordingly.
How to Get It
The skill is available on GitHub. You'll need a GitHub account, which requires nothing more than an email address. If you don't have one, now's a good time. GitHub is increasingly where useful tools live, and having a login opens up a lot of resources.
Download link: github.com/Zal4DW/career-helper/releases/tag/1.0.7
Installation instructions are in the repository. If you use Claude Pro or Claude for Work (you do need a subscription, and this is for the desktop/web app), you can add skills to extend its capabilities. Career Helper is one of those skills.
It's free. No catch. No upsell. Licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0, which means you can use it, share it, and adapt it for non-commercial purposes. If you think it would be useful to someone, share it forwards, if you end up as a CEO at a company needing AI help, you know how to find us.
What This Demonstrates About Claude Skills
If you're curious about what Claude skills can actually do, Career Helper is a reasonable example.
Skills are essentially structured instructions that extend Claude's capabilities in specific domains. They can include templates, workflows, research methodologies, and quality standards. They can make Claude behave more like a specialist tool than a general assistant.
Career Helper includes fifteen capability modules, each with its own approach and output templates. It uses web search for research, generates structured documents, maintains context across a conversation, and adapts its guidance based on user inputs.
This isn't magic. It's careful prompt engineering, good templates, and thoughtful workflow design. Anyone can build skills like this for their own domains.
If you're interested in building skills for your own use cases, Career Helper's repository shows one approach. The methodology is transferable.
The Bottom Line
Job searching is hard. It's emotionally taxing, procedurally complex, and most people have to do it without much support.
AI won't make it easy. But it can make it less lonely, less overwhelming, and more structured. It can do the research you don't have time for, prepare you for interviews you're anxious about, and help you learn from rejections rather than just endure them.
Career Helper is my contribution to that. Built because someone once helped me when they didn't have to. Given away because that's what giving help forwards means.
If it's useful to you, use it. If it's useful to someone you know, share it.
And if you land a role, perhaps consider what giving help forwards might look like for you.
Career Helper is a Claude skill developed by Paul Bratcher at Prosper AI Consulting. Free for non-commercial use.
Download: github.com/Zal4DW/career-helper/releases/tag/1.0.7