By private invitation — to any VP or Director laid off in the last 90 days who has quietly applied to a dozen senior roles and heard back from almost none of them —
I Spent 6 Months on the Recruiter's Side of the Table in 2007. What I Saw There Was So Broken I Quit the Industry for 18 Years.
An invitation to twelve laid-off VPs.
In the next 12 minutes I'm going to tell you about a £28 million traincare contract in Southampton, a junior engineer who crossed an ocean to land a Head of Product Development role he shouldn't have qualified for by any standard recruiting logic, the one confession I owe you before you decide whether this is right for you, and the single feature of this service that no recruitment firm, no AI job tool, and no career coach in the market can legally promise you.
I'm also going to walk you through two questions about your last role — on this page, right now, free — that will tell you more about why your applications aren't landing than any recruiter has told you in the last eight weeks.
Read every word. The next 90 days of your life will look very different depending on whether you do.
Hello. My name is Darren Miller.
I'm the founder of HQ Career.
And today, I have an invitation I'd like to extend to you personally — if, that is, you are a Vice President or Director who has been quietly applying to senior roles for more than six weeks and hearing almost nothing back.
Before we go any further, I want to be direct about what this is — and what it isn't.
This is not a sales page in the usual sense.
It's an invitation to work with me on a one-to-one basis inside a 12-client practice I run personally.
I do not mass-market this service. There is no funnel. There is no seven-email sequence waiting to re-target you if you close this tab. If you decide this is not right for you, we will simply go our separate ways and I wish you well in your search.
What I am going to do, in the 12 minutes that follow, is tell you the honest story of how this practice came to exist, give you one real piece of work to do on yourself right here on this page, walk you through how the service works, tell you exactly what it costs, tell you exactly who it's not for, and tell you exactly what happens if you decide to accept the invitation.
But first, let me take you to where this all started.
Let me tell you about the day I almost gave up on the recruitment industry.
June 2007. Southampton. Friday afternoon.
I'm sitting in the Oneway Resourcing office on a grey high street in the middle of town. The fluorescent lights are humming. The rain is slanting sideways against the window. Someone across the room is on a phone call pretending to laugh at a client's joke.
I'm six months into my first job out of nowhere important — a junior recruitment consultant at a construction talent agency — and I've got a CV on my screen I can't stop staring at.
It's the CV of a Commercial Project Manager. Quiet man. Good track record. Two kids. Mortgage.
And I have a brief in my inbox that, on paper, he's perfect for.
The brief is from Siemens Transportation Systems.
It's for a new £28 million traincare project — a depot build-out for Britain's rail network. The kind of contract that makes the evening news when it goes wrong and disappears into a filing cabinet when it goes right.
The problem is simple.
My candidate isn't on the shortlist.
He's not on the shortlist because a senior recruiter two desks over has been pushing three other names for weeks. Those three names will get the interviews. My guy won't. The decision will be made on Monday.
And I know — I know — my guy is the right hire.
I know it the way you know something when you've read the CV twelve times and you've spoken to his last employer and you've heard the tone of voice that came back when his previous PM was asked about him.
He's the one.
But he's not going to get the call.
Because in recruitment, you don't get the call from being right.
You get the call from being pushed.
Here's what I did that afternoon — and why I'm telling you this story 19 years later.
I did something stupid.
I did something a polite, risk-managed six-months-in junior recruiter is not supposed to do.
I picked up the phone and called the hiring manager at Siemens directly. Bypassed my senior. Bypassed the process. I had one shot and about two minutes before the guy on the other end was going to hang up on me for being an irritating nobody from Southampton.
I said one sentence.
"The three CVs you've been sent this week are the CVs of candidates that someone wants placed. I have a fourth one. It's the CV of the candidate you actually need. Will you read it?"
He read it.
He interviewed my guy on Tuesday.
My guy got the job.
That Commercial Project Manager went on to run on the Siemens traincare programme, and — as far as I'm aware — he is still in and around that world today.
I should have been thrilled.
I was not thrilled. I was furious.
Think about what almost happened there for a minute.
A perfect candidate for a £28 million infrastructure contract was 48 hours away from being invisible — not because he wasn't good, not because he hadn't applied, not because his CV was bad — but because a senior recruiter two desks over was pushing three other names for reasons that had nothing to do with fit.
If I hadn't read his CV twelve times that Friday afternoon, he'd have been unemployed in July 2007.
The hire Siemens needed would have been replaced by the hire someone else was pushing.
On a £28 million contract.
And I realised something on the drive home that I have not been able to un-realise in the 19 years since.
I realised that the entire system is built around the wrong person.
The whole apparatus — the databases, the brief calls, the shortlists, the ATS rankings, the "top 3" that go to the hiring manager — all of it is optimised for the convenience of the person paying the fee.
Which is the employer. Not the candidate.
Not the candidate's family. Not the candidate's mortgage or their pride or their kid's school fees or the 4am stomach-drop when they open another silent inbox.
The candidate is a line item.
And I knew, sitting there on the M27 with the rain on the windshield, that I could not spend my career doing this job the way the industry wanted me to do it.
So I quit.
I walked out of recruiting in December 2007. I stayed out for 18 years.
I did other things. Normal things. I watched two children grow up. I watched the internet turn into something it wasn't before. I watched LinkedIn become the thing everyone in a suit was on. I watched an entire generation of "AI job tools" show up promising to revolutionise the job search and end up being spam cannons dressed up in a Stripe checkout.
LoopCV. LazyApply. Sonara. Teal. A new one every Tuesday.
All of them doing the same thing: firing hundreds of applications into hiring-manager inboxes, burning through the candidate's professional reputation one auto-generated cover letter at a time.
And every 18 months I'd think the same thing.
None of these people understand what I saw in Southampton in 2007. None of them are solving for the candidate. They are all — every single one — just running the employer-side playbook with more horsepower.
I stayed out.
Then, in early 2025, something changed.
Two things, actually.
The first was that the underlying AI crossed a threshold. For the first time in my lifetime, a piece of software could read a job posting the way a good recruiter reads a job posting. Not just keywords. Not just filters. Actual interpretation of what a role required, what it rewarded, what it punished, and what a specific candidate's fit against it really was.
The second was that a principled engineer named Santiago Fernández de Valderrama open-sourced a tool called CareerOps — a command-line system that wrapped this new AI capability into a pipeline for running an individual job search.
Santiago's decision is worth pausing on. He could have wrapped it in a SaaS and charged $99 a month. Instead he published it openly under an MIT license. Thirty thousand engineers starred the project inside a few months. It remains free for anyone who wants to run it themselves today. I hold that work in very high regard. HQ Career is built on top of it with full attribution, and none of what follows would exist without his original contribution.
What Santiago built was powerful. It was also, frankly, built for engineers — a CLI tool you had to install and configure and babysit. The typical laid-off VP of Product cannot and should not be expected to clone a GitHub repo to run their job search.
I read the code. I read the community posts. And for the first time in 18 years I thought: the tools now exist to build the thing I couldn't build in 2007.
I spent nine months adapting it. I layered my own methodology on top — the methodology that started on that grey Friday in Southampton with me calling a hiring manager I wasn't supposed to call. I built a scoring system. I built an approval architecture. I built a pipeline dashboard. I made it a managed service so the candidate didn't need to touch the command line.
And in September 2025 — 18 years after I walked out of Oneway Resourcing — I ran the system for the first time on a real candidate.
Here is what happened next.
The candidate was a UK-based engineer. Less than 6 months of experience. Bright guy, serious but junior. Not the kind of candidate you would ever, by any standard recruitment logic, place into a Head of Product Development role.
Especially not overseas. Especially not in China.
The standard playbook would have sent him into mid-level engineering roles in Birmingham or Bristol at £40–£55K. He would have taken one. He would have been fine.
That's not what happened.
I ran him through the system.
The scoring engine flagged something the standard playbook would have missed entirely — that his specific combination of technical depth, communication style, willingness to travel, and a particular piece of work he'd done at university mapped almost perfectly to a Head of Product Development role being quietly opened at a popular Chinese school launching a new technical programme.
A role no British recruiter would have sent him on. A role no British recruiter had ever heard of.
We built the application around the fit score. We tailored the outreach. He approved every submission before it went out. He interviewed. He got the job.
Today he runs product development at that school.
Six months of experience when we started. Head of Product Development six weeks later.
Now — before we go any further — I owe you a confession.
You might expect me to tell you that I was confident the system would work.
That I'd built a rigorous thing, run my tests, validated the methodology, and I knew from week one that my candidates would get placed.
That would be a lie.
The truth is this: when I ran the system on that UK engineer in September 2025, I was not sure it would work.
I thought it was more considered than the standard recruitment playbook. I thought the 10-Dimension Fit Score was a real improvement over keyword-matching. I thought the approval gate was a serious upgrade over mass-apply spam.
But I also thought — and this is the part I need you to hear — that at the end of the day, this might just be a slightly better version of the same broken industry I'd walked out of in 2007.
The China placement changed my mind.
Not because we got lucky. Because of how we got him placed — we matched him to a role no human recruiter in Britain would have found, on another continent, in an industry none of us knew, at a level that shouldn't have been possible given his experience — and every step of that match was legible in the scoring data.
That's when I understood.
The Right 30 Method isn't a better version of recruiting.
It is a different thing entirely.
It runs on candidate-side incentives, not employer-side ones. It evaluates fit across dimensions a human recruiter doesn't have time to consider. It surfaces roles a human network can't surface. And because it filters out the 74% of roles that don't actually fit before they ever reach the candidate's inbox, it protects the one asset in a senior job search that every other tool silently erodes — the candidate's professional reputation.
That's my confession, and that's the moment I knew I'd built something worth inviting people into.
Before I tell you how it works, I want you to do two minutes of real work with me.
I promised at the top of this letter that you'd walk away with something useful whether or not you ever engage me. Here it is.
Think about the last role you applied to that you should have heard back on. The one where you looked at the job description and thought this is literally me.
Dimension 1
Scope fit
Not seniority — scope. What was the size of team, the size of budget, and the size of business outcome on that job? And what is the equivalent on your last role? If the role you applied to had you running a team of 4 and a $2M line, and you just finished running a team of 18 and a $40M line, the ATS screener flagged you as overqualified before a human saw the file. You weren't rejected. You were filtered. And in most cases, no one will ever tell you that's what happened.
Dimension 2
North Star trajectory fit
Forget the role for a second. Where do you want to be in three years — not the next title, the one after that? Now look at the job you applied to. Does it sit on the path between where you are and that three-years-out version of you, or is it a sideways move dressed up in a title you like? Senior hiring managers can feel the difference between a candidate on a trajectory and a candidate on a flight from their last role. One of them lands interviews. The other doesn't.
That's two of ten. If one of those two just re-framed the last eight weeks of silence for you, sit with it for a minute before you keep reading. The other eight dimensions run deeper and we'd do them together in your onboarding.
The Three Things Most Senior Leaders in Transition Have Never Been Told
These are not motivational points. They are structural facts about how senior hiring actually works.
Shock #1
You are invisible not because you are not good. You are invisible because no one is pushing you.
The matching layer between you and the hiring manager — the recruiter, the ATS, the shortlist — is not a neutral filter. It is a political one. The shortlist that lands on a hiring manager's desk is the shortlist that someone had a reason to push.
Your applications are not being rejected. In most cases they are not even being seen.
Until you understand this, every "polish your CV" piece of advice is missing the point. It's not a CV problem. It's a push problem.
Shock #2
Every week you spend on the employer-side playbook is actively damaging your reputation.
The spam tools (LoopCV, LazyApply, Sonara) fire hundreds of applications a week under your name. Hiring managers see the same candidate applying to 40 roles at the same company in 3 days.
In your city's senior hiring network — which is smaller than you think — you get tagged.
Not formally. Not with a red flag. Informally: "Oh, that guy. We've seen 12 applications from him this month. Pass."
Shock #3
The role you panic-accept at week 10 is not a one-year decision.
It re-prices your base, your negotiating position, and your next title for the rest of the decade.
I am not going to do the ten-year compound-interest math for you on this page. Any spreadsheet can be made to say anything, and I'd rather be honest with you than impressive.
What I'll say plainly is this: at VP and Director level, the gap between the right role at the right comp and the "just-get-something" role taken in week-10 panic is the single largest financial decision most people make in the second half of their career. The point of the next 90 days is to make sure you are not the peer your friends quietly mention in three years.
The Methodology
The Right 30 Method™ — how the service actually works.
Three pieces of infrastructure run in sequence on your behalf.
Component #1
The scan agent
A continuous, 24/7 AI-driven intelligence operation that watches thousands of senior roles across every major and minor job board, every company careers page, every executive search pipeline, and — most importantly — the hidden postings that never make it to the public boards.
It runs while you sleep. It runs while you're on the weekly call with your spouse about the mortgage. It runs while you're trying to hold it together at your kid's football game.
You don't check job boards anymore. Ever.
Component #2
The 10-Dimension Fit Score
Every role the scan agent surfaces gets scored across ten dimensions: compensation floor match, scope fit, team-size fit, reporting-line fit, industry fit, company-stage fit, technical/functional fit, cultural signals, North Star trajectory fit, and retention risk profile.
Roles below threshold are silently discarded. You never see them. You never apply to them. Your name is never attached to them.
74% filtered out.
Three out of every four roles discarded before they ever touch your credibility. What's left: the right 30.
Component #3
The approval gate
Nothing ever leaves under your name without your personal, one-click approval.
Not a CV. Not a tailored cover note. Not an outreach message. Not a follow-up. Nothing. Every piece of communication the system generates lands in your inbox with an Approve button and a Reject button. You click, it goes. You don't click, it doesn't go.
The HITL Promise is written into your engagement letter as Clause 4.2. Not in the marketing. In the contract.
What this looks like, day to day, for you.
You accept the invitation. You fill out a 4-minute intake form. I personally review it within 48 hours.
If we're a fit, we set up a 60-minute onboarding call where we build your three-year North Star — not just your next role — and the version of you you want walking into interviews.
Day 3: the scan agent is live. Day 5: your first scored shortlist lands in your private dashboard. Day 7: your first tailored application is waiting for your approval.
From there, a 30-minute strategy call every week until you are placed. A live dashboard you can open any time to see every role, every score, every application's status, every pending approval. No black holes. No "I don't know what happened to that one." No silence.
Here's what makes this different from every other service you've looked at.
You've probably already checked:
- The boutique career agencies that charge $8,000 to $15,000 upfront, produce a PDF, and send you into the same job-board ecosystem you could have used for free.
- The "reverse recruiting" firms that promise they'll "apply on your behalf" — which in 90% of cases means an offshore VA submitting mass applications with your name on them.
- The AI tools like LoopCV and LazyApply that fire 300 applications a week for $99 a month and, to put it plainly, actively damage your professional reputation with every hiring manager in your city.
- The career coaches who will charge you $400 an hour to help you "work on your narrative."
None of these solve the actual problem.
The actual problem is that you need a candidate-side operating system that filters hard, tailors everything, keeps you in full control, and compresses a 90-day search into something closer to 45.
HQ Career is that. There is nothing else on the market that is.
A short track record — for context, not boasting.
Because this practice is new, I want to be honest about what the track record is and isn't.
Southampton. Placed a Commercial Project Manager onto Siemens Transportation Systems' £28M traincare programme by calling a hiring manager I wasn't supposed to call. The moment I realised the matching system was broken.
I quit recruiting.
Watched eight-plus generations of "AI job tools" launch and fail to solve the problem. None were candidate-side. All were employer-side infrastructure with more horsepower.
Large language models crossed the threshold of being able to read a senior job posting with real interpretation. Santiago Fernández de Valderrama open-sourced CareerOps. For the first time I saw that the tools now existed.
Adapted Santiago's codebase into a managed-service methodology. Built the 10-Dimension Fit Score. Built the HITL Gate.
First real placement. UK engineer. Head of Product Development. China.
Opening the practice to twelve VP- and Director-level clients.
This is not a decade of case studies. I will not pretend it is.
If you want to work with someone who has placed 400 candidates, I am not that person and I will tell you where to find them.
If you want to work with someone who has thought about why the last 18 years of job-search technology has failed you, and who has built the specific thing he believes solves it, that is the invitation on the table.
On price — and how to think about it honestly.
The market rate for a boutique executive career agency serving VP-level candidates is $8,000 to $15,000 upfront, no refund if you don't get placed.
The market rate for a retained executive search firm (if you could hire one on the candidate side, which you structurally can't, but stay with me) is 20–30% of your first-year base salary. On a $220K placement, that's $44,000 to $66,000.
The market rate for a career coach running a 90-day engagement is $5,000 to $9,000, and what you'll get is a stack of Zoom calls and a PDF.
None of these firms give you the approval gate. None give you a live dashboard. None do 10-dimension scoring.
The Accelerator Tier
$2,500/month + 5% success fee
End to end on a typical engagement: three months of retainer is $7,500. Success fee on a $220K placement is $11,000. Total: $18,500.
I'm not going to put a precise dollar figure on what this unlocks. Any figure I chose would be engineered to make this page more persuasive, and that's not the relationship I want to start on.
What I will say is: if this practice is the right fit for your situation — and on many calls I will tell you plainly that it is not — the math on the engagement is not subtle.
Four things included with every Accelerator engagement.
These come with the engagement at no additional cost. I'm not going to put made-up dollar values next to them. What matters is what they do for you.
The 10-Dimension Fit Card
A personal scorecard I build for you during onboarding, mapping your career profile across all ten dimensions. You keep it forever. You use it for every future search you run — with or without me.
The Hidden Job Market Briefing
Within week one I personally prepare a one-page intelligence brief on five companies the scan agent has flagged as high-fit but which have not posted public roles for your level yet. This is not a list of openings. It is a list of companies where the opening is about to appear — or where a direct, ungated approach to a decision-maker is currently possible.
The Recruiter's Language Dictionary
A short swipe file I wrote based on my time inside the industry. It decodes what recruiters actually mean when they say "we're moving forward with other candidates," "we'll be in touch," "the role has been put on hold," and "we'd like to keep you in mind for future openings." Each phrase translated into plain English plus what your correct response should be.
The 90-Day Negotiation Playbook
The step-by-step playbook I walk you through when an offer lands. Base, bonus, equity, sign-on, severance, non-compete, and the two specific clauses most candidates sign without reading that cost them six figures across the rest of their careers.
Who this practice is — and isn't — for.
This is not for you if:
- ✕You're looking for roles below $150K.
- ✕You've been unemployed more than 12 months.
- ✕You want a passive service where you delegate everything and check back in 90 days.
- ✕You want to apply to 100+ roles a month. That's the spam playbook. We do the exact opposite.
This is for you if:
- ✓You're a VP or Director, currently unemployed, with 8+ months of runway.
- ✓Your last base was $150K to $280K.
- ✓You've applied to 10+ roles and the silence is starting to eat at you.
- ✓You want a structured process, weekly human contact, and full control of what goes out under your name.
- ✓You want to be placed in 45 to 60 days, not 90.
On capacity — and a founding-cohort note.
HQ Career can serve a maximum of 12 active clients at any one time. That is a hard operational ceiling — not a marketing trick. The AI infrastructure has per-account rate limits. The weekly strategy calls I personally conduct take time. The approval pipeline requires real human review of every application package before it lands in your inbox.
Because the practice is new, I am taking the first five clients as a founding cohort at the standard Accelerator rate with two additions: you keep that rate for the life of your engagement (even when the practice re-prices later in the year), and I will personally brief you on any material change to the methodology before I roll it to other clients.
When the five founding slots fill, the next intake opens at standard terms.
If you are not ready this month, I would genuinely rather you wait until you are. I'd rather meet you when you've clearly decided this practice is the right fit, than have you panic-sign an engagement letter this Friday and cancel it in three weeks.
You may not get in as a founding-cohort client if you wait. But take the time you need to decide. That is how this practice is meant to work.
Risk Reversal — what I'm authorising.
These four protections are written into your engagement letter. Not in the marketing. In the contract.
Protection #1 · Month-to-month, no lock-in.
Cancel at the end of any calendar month with 7 days' notice. No clawback. No cancellation fee.
Protection #2 · The HITL Promise in writing.
Nothing — no CV, no cover note, no outreach message, no application — leaves under your name without your personal one-click approval. Clause 4.2 of your engagement letter. If we ever violate it, the engagement terminates immediately with full retainer refund for the month in question.
Protection #3 · 30-day refund.
If at any point during your first 30 days you decide this isn't right for you, I refund your first month's retainer in full and release your slot to the next person on the waiting list.
Protection #4 · The free consultation actually has to be useful.
If after our 20-minute call you don't walk away with at least one concrete, named action that improves your search — whether or not you ever hire me — I'll send you the Recruiter's Language Dictionary as a thank-you for the time. The call has to be worth the call.
The free consultation — what actually happens on the call.
Twenty minutes. Four stages. You will know what's happening at every moment.
Ground rules.
I open by saying three things out loud: this is a consultation, not a pitch; I will tell you the truth even if it costs me the engagement; at minute 20 you will have a clear answer on whether this is right for you and you will not be followed up with for weeks afterwards. Then I ask if those ground rules work for you. If they don't, we end the call, no offence taken.
Your situation.
Last role, last comp, exit circumstances, runway, target titles, comp floor, applications sent, responses received, three-year North Star. I take notes. I ask clarifying questions. I do not pitch a single thing during this stage.
My honest read.
In plain English: what I think is actually going on in your search, whether The Right 30 is a fit for your specific situation, and — if it is not — where I'd send you instead and why. Roughly one in three calls end here with me telling the caller this is not the right fit for them.
The decision.
If we're a fit, I explain the next two steps: engagement letter by end of business that day with the HITL Promise as Clause 4.2, and an intake call booked within five business days. You do not need to decide on the call. You have 48 hours to read the engagement letter and sign or not sign, with no pressure either way.
Twenty minutes. Four stages. No funnel. No sequence. No nonsense.
If you'd like to accept the invitation.
Click the button below. Fill in the 4-minute form. It asks the minimum I need to know to prepare properly for our call. Within 48 hours I will personally reply — not a VA, not a sequence — with a calendar link to book your consultation, or an honest note telling you I don't think we're a fit.
That is the entire decision you need to make today. Not whether to engage HQ Career. Just whether to fill in a 4-minute form and receive an honest reply.
Accept the Invitation — Start My 4-Minute Intake →I look forward to speaking with you. — Darren Miller, Founder, HQ Career
P.S. — The 12-client cap is real by design. The first five engagements go out at founding-cohort terms (your rate locked for the life of the engagement, plus a personal briefing on any material change to the methodology before it rolls to other clients). When the five fill, the next intake opens at standard terms. If you are ready this month, I would welcome the conversation this week. If you are not ready, take the time you need — I would rather meet you when you are.
P.S.2 — Earlier I promised I'd name the one thing no other service on the market can legally promise you. I'll name it one more time, because it is the whole thing: nothing — no CV, no cover note, no outreach message, no application — ever leaves under your name without your personal one-click approval. Every service built on the employer's side of the table is unable to make that promise. HQ Career is built on your side. That is the entire difference.
P.S.3 — If you're reading this at 11pm on a Tuesday and your spouse has asked you four times this week what the plan is, and you're starting to feel like you don't have a real answer — you are exactly the person I had in mind when I built this practice. Fill in the form. Get a real reply. Sleep tonight knowing you've moved a piece on the board.
Plain English · Engagement Terms
What You Are Agreeing To When You Fill In The Form
Read this section carefully. Nothing here is binding until you sign the full engagement letter — but this is what the full engagement letter will say.
Section 1 · The Practice
I understand that HQ Career is a managed, AI-powered reverse-recruitment practice run personally by Darren Miller, supported by The Right 30 Method™ — a proprietary 10-Dimension Fit Score, a 24/7 scan agent, and an approval-gated application pipeline built on top of the MIT-licensed CareerOps open-source codebase by Santiago Fernández de Valderrama, with full attribution retained. I understand that the practice serves a maximum of 12 active clients at any one time. I understand that my weekly involvement — a 30-minute strategy call every week and one-click approval of every application package — is a required component of the engagement.
Section 2 · The HITL Promise
I understand that nothing — no CV, no cover note, no outreach message, no application, no follow-up — will ever be sent under my name without my personal one-click approval. I understand that this promise is written into my engagement letter as Clause 4.2, and that if it is ever violated, the engagement terminates immediately with full refund of the month's retainer.
Section 3 · Pricing
I understand that the Accelerator tier is $2,500/month retainer plus a 5% success fee on my first-year base salary when HQ Career places me. I understand that the retainer is month-to-month with no lock-in, cancellable with 7 days' notice at the end of any month. I understand that the 5% success fee is payable only when a placement is made through the HQ Career pipeline — and that if I self-source a role through my own network outside the pipeline, no success fee is owed. I understand that if I am among the first five founding-cohort clients, my rate is locked for the life of my engagement.
Section 4 · The 30-Day Refund
I understand that if at any point in my first 30 days I decide HQ Career is not right for me, I can request a full refund of my first month's retainer — no questions asked — and my slot will be released to the next person on the waiting list.
Section 5 · The Free Consultation
I understand that the first step is a free, no-obligation 20-minute consultation with Darren Miller personally, following the 4-stage plan: ground rules, my situation, honest read, decision. I understand that Darren may tell me on the call that HQ Career is not the right fit for my situation, and that if he does, he will recommend what to do instead. I understand that if the call does not produce at least one concrete, named action that improves my search, Darren will send me the Recruiter's Language Dictionary as a thank-you for the time.
Section 6 · What's Included
I understand that when I engage HQ Career on the Accelerator tier, I receive the following at no additional cost: the 10-Dimension Fit Card (personal scorecard built during onboarding), the Hidden Job Market Briefing (one-page intelligence brief on five high-fit companies, delivered within week one), the Recruiter's Language Dictionary (swipe file decoding common recruiter language), and the 90-Day Negotiation Playbook (step-by-step playbook walked through personally when an offer lands).
HQ Career's pipeline infrastructure is built on CareerOps, an open-source project by Santiago Fernández de Valderrama, published under the MIT License. Full attribution is retained. The CareerOps codebase is available freely for anyone who wishes to run it independently.