Strap on your job helmet

This edition is brought to you by our friends at Venngage.

AI that hands you the file, not just the picture.

Every AI design tool gets you to about 90%. Then the headline runs two words long, the third stat sits in the wrong place, the blue isn't your blue, and your only move is to regenerate and hope the next one breaks differently.

Venngage AI gives you the editable file. Move the elements, retype the copy, drop in your hex codes, keep whatever the first pass got right. You're editing a design, not accepting an output.

Feed it a report, a set of stats, an old blog post. What comes back is yours to finish.

Last call on the Superpath offer: 30% off any Venngage plan with SUPERPATH30 at venngage.com

Hey folks, it's your content friend Eric here.

Back when I was an innocent, naive little fledgling baby content dove, I thought I understood the job market.

More people than jobs? Bad job market. More jobs than people? Good job market.

And then I met the content job market.

In other industries, you hear about stuff like “nursing shortages.” But in content, there is always an infinite oversupply of marketers. The low barrier to entry—an internet connection and the ability to write at a 6th-grade level—means dummies like me in remote, untamed places like Canada can work for fancy San Francisco tech startups. But that also means I’m theoretically competing against thousands of other people for any given role.

Yes, the number of available jobs goes through highs (COVID-era ZIRP) and lows (immediately after that), but regardless of the quantity of jobs at any particular moment, there are always too many of us!

On the applicant side, it feels like you’re just throwing CVs into the void. On the hiring side, it’s literally a full-time job to try to sift through the thousands of AI-written applications. As a result, most people try to hire through word of mouth or by referral only.

To quote Charlie on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia:

So I hate to use the B2B marketing trope that something is “broken”—but hiring in content is clearly quite broken.

That’s always made more “closed” communities like Superpath a (relatively) better place to look for candidates and apply for roles than the open internet. It’s a smaller pool by default, and you’re more likely to find someone who knows someone. That’s actually how I got my job at Dock—via Superpath.

But one of the first things Alex Hilleary did when he took over as CEO of Superpath was actually to take the old job board down. But why? What a tyrant! (He’ll explain in a sec.)

Here’s some exciting news first:

The Superpath Job Board is back!

I did the unthinkable and did some “journalism” and asked Alex about why it disappeared in the first place and why it’s back.

Here’s my very short interview with Alex:

Me: Why did you take the old job board down, you big meanie?

Alex: I want every product we work on in Superpath to be best-in-class or on the path to being best-in-class. The previous job board was decent. Three years ago, that sort of job board was really helpful. But today the whole job search process looks different. Plus, there are a lot of other half-hearted efforts at curated job boards now. I didn’t think, in its previous state, it was helpful enough for job searchers to warrant the week-to-week upkeep, so I chose to focus on the community until I had a better vision for how the job board should serve people in this job market.

Me: So why bring the job board back now? What’s different?

Alex: As I wrote in this LinkedIn post, I can't white-glove an amazing referral network for everyone at scale, and I don't want to pretend this does that. But I do think there's a role to play here—helping people understand what content marketing jobs actually look like right now, and where they're headed. What I think our job board can do is help highlight the emerging buckets of content marketer roles and skills in demand.

I actually built this new job board structure a few months ago. But a couple of weeks ago, I stumbled into an API that I can use for sourcing and realized I could make this a reality with under an hour of work each week.

Editor’s note: you’ll notice on the job board that Alex is sorting roles into one of six buckets: Writer, Storyteller, SEO & AEO, Audience Builder, Content Engineer, and Content Leader.

Me: Walk me through the mechanics. How does a job actually get from "posted somewhere on the internet" to showing up in Superpath's job board?

Alex: We're paying $99/mo for an API service that pulls newly posted jobs. Then we built a Claude Code app that hits that API twice a day, running the results through a set of filters I built. It outputs whatever passes the filter into an Airtable database—usually 5 to 20 roles per batch.

Me: Is it fully automated end to end?

Alex: No, I put real human eyes on it. Out of those 5-20, I'm usually picking 2 to 5 that I think are an actual fit for the community, based on where people are located and what kinds of roles they're actually interested in.

I click a button, Airtable AI parses them, I double-check for errors, confirm, and Zapier posts it to our jobs Slack channel. Three days later, it shows up on jobs.superpath.co.

Me: Why the three-day delay?

Alex: I want to give Superpath Pro members first dibs. Maybe that changes down the line, maybe it doesn't.

Me: How did you decide what jobs make it through the filters?

Alex: Yeah, there's a handful of tricky calls in there, mostly developed through testing. It’s my judgment based on the roles I see folks searching for in Slack and my conversations with job seekers in the community.

Okay, that’s a very unsexy place to end an interview, but there you have it: Superpath has a job board again. It’s a work-in-progress experiment, so please send us your feedback.

Cheers,

- Eric

📆 Upcoming Superpath Community Events

To get the invitations to our member events, join Superpath Pro. You get 30 days free, so you can attend all these events!

🎙 New episode of Content, Briefly: The common pitfalls of LinkedIn ghostwriting (and how to overcome them)

I couldn’t possibly top this intro from Alex, so I’m stealing it:

“My relationship with ghostwriting is the same as my relationship with horseradish. I’ve tried it in several different contexts, but ultimately decided it wasn’t for me. Luckily for us, Ruth and Rachel feel differently.”

In this episode, Alex chatted with Ruth and Rachel, who've both ghostwritten for CEOs, founders, and execs across a bunch of different setups, to talk through why LinkedIn ghostwriting is so hard to get right.

Their shared takeaway: it only works when there's real trust between writer and exec—including a willingness to experiment and let things flop, and to let the person's real voice (vulnerabilities included) come through.

They also talked about:

Listen here.

💬 Great Slack Threads This Week

Here were some great discussions in the Superpath Slack community this week:

📙 The Reading List

Here are some links that got the Superpath Slack community talking this week:

🆓 Get a free 30-day trial of Superpath Pro

Superpath Pro is our paid community membership. On your free trial, you'll get access to:

👉 Sign up for the 30-day trial here

"Most professional groups boast about their member numbers. Superpath intrigued me for the opposite reason: they deliberately shifted from a massive free community to a much smaller, paid one - so they could focus on it, nurture it, and make it genuinely excellent. And they absolutely deliver."

— Farah Cormack, Senior Marketing Leader