The job market has become strange, crowded, automated, and often brutally indifferent. Candidates are told to be resilient, authentic, strategic, technically fluent, emotionally intelligent, and grateful — preferably while applying into systems that may never acknowledge they exist.

How to Get Hired in a Broken Job Market is a field manual for people who need work now. It does not promise magic, shortcuts, secret algorithms, or motivational wallpaper. It offers something more useful: a clear-eyed strategy for navigating the modern hiring mess without losing your nerve, your dignity, or your grip on reality.

The book looks at what actually works now: building proof, using AI intelligently, sharpening resumes and outreach, understanding the hidden job market, avoiding application theater, preparing for interviews, managing rejection, and learning how to become useful before trying to appear impressive.

This is not a book about chasing your dream job while sipping cold brew under a tasteful ficus. It is about getting organized, getting visible, getting sharper, and getting hired in a market that no longer behaves the way people keep pretending it does.

For recent graduates, career changers, laid-off professionals, and anyone staring into the fluorescent cave of online job applications, this book offers practical guidance with a cranky edge — because false optimism is cheap, but strategy still matters.

The market may be broken. You do not have to be

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Cool is still out there. It's hiding behind sunglasses, status updates, and overpriced lattes.

Most of us are performing some version of "cool" every day, whether we mean to or not.

At work. Online. Whenever and wherever we're supposed to know exactly what we're doing. But the truth is, we're not really trying to be "cool" like Muhammed Ali, The Fonz, David Ortiz, Bette Middler or George Clooney; we're actually just trying to project the illusion that we're not falling apart.

Cool on the Outside, Screaming on the Inside is a field guide to that performance.

Through Brand Mavrick—creative director at the fictional Panopticon Agency—this book tracks the pressure to appear composed, capable, and slightly above it all ... even when you're not.

This is satire—sometimes uncomfortably close to nonfiction. But if you have ever looked at yourself—in the tiny onscreen window during a Zoom meeting, in a poorly-lit bathroom mirror, in the reflection of your office window in the middle of a workday—and wondered: “Am I actually composed … or am I just tired in a more presentable way?” you are already in the right place.

Brand Mavrick is the alter ego of Charlie O’Neill, who is writing from his long exposure to corporate life and the strange rewards it quietly hands out: endless meetings, hollow language, authority hoarded like damp cardboard, and obedience dressed up as initiative. 

Here's a link to Charlie's conversation with WBZ 1030 News Radio's Dan Rea on Nightside, iHeart Radio (Starts at 24:58)

Order a complimentary copy of our audiobook edition of Cool.

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