Halfway into a conversation about LinkedIn visibility, Jenny Cotie Kangas realized a month of posts had never reached her profile. Julia Levy had been tagging her as a collaborator on every Missing Manual post. LinkedIn collaborator posts only appear on your profile after you accept the invite, and Jenny never had.

Worse, the Accept button stays on screen after you click it, so the only way to check is your own profile. Jenny opened a browser agent on the spot and had it work back through every invite while the recording kept going.

That moment opened up the bigger question of what consistency looks like when life doesn’t cooperate. Julia stepped away from posting for a few months and came back with a rhythm she can actually keep.

Her recent post on layoffs has drawn between 250,000+ impressions. She has been laid off herself and has had a say in who was affected on her own team, and she holds a master’s in counseling. Now she’s studying why that post broke through when LinkedIn’s algorithm makes reach so hard to predict.

Jenny took the opposite path. She went quiet on LinkedIn while building her company, set up a chief revenue agent and a chief of staff agent, and has three deals about to close. Her lesson for anyone chasing growth: fix the leaks in your funnel before you add more to the top. Julia adds a warning to read LinkedIn’s terms of service before pointing any AI agent at your account.

For product teams, The Missing Manual closes with a direct note. When you ship a feature, teach people how to use it, and make sure your interface shows what still needs action.

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AI agents and scheduled automations are not set it and forget it. The requirements you start with are an educated guess, and you often discover what you need only after the agent does something you don’t need. In this episode of The Missing Manual, Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas explain how to tune an agent once it is running, and why telling the AI where it falls short is the step most people skip.

Jenny starts with a question from a recent workshop. An attendee built a Gmail agent to triage her inbox, and the agent kept stopping to ask for permission. The fix was in the architecture. An agent connected to Gmail on the back end should not need permission every time, but one working through the browser will. Jenny then describes her own signal brief, which drafted replies in her voice across email, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, and text. If she left one email unanswered for five days, she came back to five drafts of the same reply. She rebuilt the agent so it shows her where her attention needs to go, and then they work through each response together.

Julia adds that AI models change, so anything built on a model can drift over time. She recommends putting regular reviews of your automations on the calendar, the same way you would review a website. She has Claude interview her at the start of a build and ask what she isn’t thinking of. Then she runs the same conversation through Gemini and ChatGPT to catch what she missed. Jenny suggests going one step further with a scheduled automation that reviews your other automations, checking which model each one uses, its outputs, and its token use.

The closing advice from both hosts is direct. If an agent frustrates you, say so to the AI, because it cannot match your idea of good until you define what good is and what it isn’t. Then have the AI ask you questions and challenge you rather than agree with everything. The Missing Manual is also opening up to guests, so if you are building something interesting with AI, Julia and Jenny want to hear from you.

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AI in recruiting fails most often because companies apply it to the wrong problem. In this episode of The Missing Manual, Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas bring back what they heard at RecFest Nashville. Their main observation is that many organizations are using AI to get to the wrong answers faster.

The clearest example of AI used well came from a team that pointed AI agents at its recruiting funnel conversion data instead of adding more applicants at the top. The analysis showed that Indeed was not producing quality candidates for those roles. The team turned it off and ended up with stronger candidates. The counterexample was a large company that fixed its internal process but never brought its MSP along. Candidates got a worse experience, and that experience reflected on the employer's brand, not on the MSP.

Julia Levy explains why AI screening breaks down when job postings are never fixed. Candidates use AI to match their resumes to the posting, and screening tools grade them against that same posting. If the requirements are wrong, both sides are optimizing toward the wrong target. She also shows how a weak needs analysis and a rushed intake conversation lead to scope creep three months into a search. Jenny Cotie Kangas calls this the same problem wearing different clothes: misalignment that never gets captured in the process. Her fix is to treat AI change as a program rather than a project, and to use AI to build a runbook that helps a first-time hiring manager pre-mortem the search before the role opens.

The Missing Manual is a podcast for working professionals about the unwritten rules of work, careers, leadership, and AI strategy, with every episode under 20 minutes. Find The Missing Manual wherever you listen to podcasts.

Talent acquisition teams do not need more convincing to use AI. At RecFest 2026 in Nashville, most of the leaders in the room already had leadership buy-in and access to tools like Claude and ChatGPT. What they wanted was the actionable how: which use case to start with and how to build it. In this episode of The Missing Manual, Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas recap two days of hosting, speaking and listening at one of the biggest TA and HR conferences in the US.

Jenny Cotie Kangas spoke on the applied AI stage. When she asked the standing-room-only audience who had leadership buy-in and who had AI tools at work, almost every hand went up both times. The notes came out when leaders described agents they had actually built, such as a job posting checker and a signal brief. Julia Levy spoke on the "Your ATS Sucks" panel, where teams of every size described the same problems and different ways to work around them.

The hosts also explain why RecFest feels like an unconference, and why the relationships built there matter. On the Unplugged Stage, they gave every audience two minutes to meet a stranger, and attendees kept telling them about those connections for the rest of the event. Julia connects this to her relationship bank account idea and to the peers she has called for advice over the years, including people at competing companies, because the problems in TA rarely change from one company to the next.

Julia is also honest about her plans that never happened: the QR code business cards, the badge photos and the notebook that stayed blank. The takeaway for your next conference is to go in with a plan, meet people outside your own team and follow up afterward. Find The Missing Manual wherever you listen to podcasts.

To get the most out of attending a conference with AI, have it interview you first. Define your goals, the problems you need solved and the tools you already use. Then send AI to research the sessions, speakers and exhibitors that match. On this episode of The Missing Manual, Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas explain how to plan any event around what you actually came for.

Jenny Cotie Kangas starts with step zero: know your current state. When AI asks about your goals and your tech stack, it shows you the gaps worth closing and gives your research a direction. Julia Levy adds the next layer. Filter speakers by industry and company size, because they likely face the same problems you do. Then use AI to narrow everything into a schedule that balances sessions, exhibitor conversations, networking and some fun. You cannot boil the ocean in two days.

The hosts also cover how to check what a vendor claims. Software companies put their best foot forward, much like an online dating profile. G2 ratings help, although G2 leans positive, so read the lower reviews too. Julia recommends asking peers in professional communities, since a vendor will not hand you a reference who will criticize it. Jenny shares a client project where AI agents collected every speaker's company, found its career site and identified its applicant tracking system, which confirmed her hypothesis about which ATS dominated the lineup.

The Missing Manual gives working professionals the practical how behind work, careers, leadership and AI strategy, in under 20 minutes.

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Can your applicant tracking system be gamed?

Yes, and this episode of The Missing Manual shows you exactly how to check. Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas break down AI resume prompt injection, the practice of hiding invisible instructions inside a resume that tell an AI screener to move a candidate forward regardless of fit.

Research out of Duke University found the pattern in roughly one percent of a 200,000-resume sample, and Julia and Jenny explain why that number is likely to grow as more applicant tracking systems bolt on AI without telling buyers exactly what it touches.

The conversation moves quickly from the resume problem to the vendor problem. Jenny lays out the two-pronged defense every hiring team needs: work directly with your ATS vendor to ask how they're arming against prompt injection and how they red team their own technology, and separately, test your own process by building a candidate application specifically designed to break it. Julia and Jenny are direct about what happens next if that test reveals a real gap. It is not something to quietly patch. It is a conversation for legal and HR leadership.

The back half of the episode turns to the human side of AI hiring fraud: candidates and employers misrepresenting themselves, deepfake interview avatars, a low-tech but effective way to catch one on a video call, and a real story about a former employee who got someone else to sit in for their interview. Julia and Jenny close with the harder truth underneath all of it: candidate behavior is going to keep evolving, and the organizations that fare best are the ones pressure testing their hiring process regularly instead of setting it once and walking away. The Missing Manual exists to name exactly this kind of unwritten rule before it costs you.

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Cognitive load—the amount of information your brain can track at once—is a real limiting factor in how much you can actually accomplish. When that load gets too high, you're not just tired; you're stuck. The Missing Manual walks you through how AI agents (systems built to handle specific tasks on your behalf) can reduce that load by doing the indexing work most people do manually.

Julia and Jenny share three concrete examples from their own work. The first came from RecFest: Jamie Leonard posted a thread with 41 comments about conference fringe events, and a Claude agent pulled all that scattered information into one clean list organized by day. The second example is Julia's work launching Your Network Read, a LinkedIn analysis tool that produces 38-page reports—which she then optimized with AI to reduce duplication and improve readability for her users. The third is how agents can audit your existing presentations and documents to ensure they meet accessibility standards (contrast ratios, cognitive load, compliance) before you publish them.

The key insight: these are exactly the right uses of AI. Not to replace thinking. Not to write your ideas for you. But to handle the cognitive work of indexing, organizing, and quality-checking so you can focus your actual brain on decisions only you can make.

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