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 he spent on his own. The next year he spent with two or three vendors who touched up his resume and left the heavy lifting to him. None of it 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 that he did not believe us

Manish was not an easy client to win, and he said so to our face on the very first call.

“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.”

You can see where the scepticism came from. He had already bought this 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

He was running out of options, and he had one very specific worry.

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

Before he signed, he pushed us hard on the exact thing that had burned him twice already.

“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 we told him, and then what he actually got, was a team running the search for him instead of advising him from the sidelines. Applications, outreach, follow-up, all of it, 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 that same problem one step further along. The positioning work put that history right at the front, where before it had been buried in a list of technologies.

Neither offer came from an application

Here he explains, better than we could, what actually changes when someone else runs your outreach.

“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.”

And then the claim worth slowing down for.

“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 touched an application queue. If you want the method behind that and not just the result, we wrote it up in how to find the hiring manager and what to write to the hiring manager.

He makes the volume comparison himself, too.

“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