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WinspiedinoPlaybook

I built one honest profile document and had Claude play a hard-to-please recruiter before interviews

I'm early in my career, in marketing and communications, and every interview circles back to the same four questions: tell me about yourself, why this role, what are your weaknesses, where do you see yourself in five years. A generic answer to those is always sitting right there, ready to say, and it always sounds exactly like what it is. What isn't sitting there ready is an answer built out of my actual history, delivered in a voice that sounds rehearsed a few times over rather than read off a script. So before a round of interviews I sat down once and wrote a single long document about myself: my education, each past role described as what actually happened rather than as a pile of adjectives, the specific skills and tools I use, a section on how I want to sound in an interview (professional, natural, concrete — explicitly not stiff or over-rehearsed), and a section naming where I'm genuinely weaker. I wrote that section as plainly and specifically as I could. A vague weakness gets a vague answer back — the more real the constraint, the more the AI actually has to work with instead of writing generic confidence around me. Then, before each interview, I paste that document into Claude or ChatGPT along with the actual job posting and give one explicit instruction: play a demanding recruiter for this specific role, ask realistic questions including the hard and skeptical ones, and when critiquing my answers, push back on anything generic or anything the document doesn't actually support. I ask it to be hard to please, not encouraging. What comes out is tailored answers to the standard set, anchored in real facts instead of a generic template, plus a live simulation I can run out loud before I'm ever in front of an actual recruiter. The steps I follow and the exact instruction I paste in are below, along with the three places this still isn't enough on its own.

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WorkflowspiedinoPlaybook

How I turn a nonfiction book into a Claude skill instead of a summary

I have a habit that predates this site, and it's actually the reason the site exists. When I read a business or nonfiction book, I don't want it to fade into "yeah, good book, can't remember much." I turn it into a skill for Claude — a small file of instructions the assistant loads automatically when the topic comes up, so I can go back and consult the book's actual decision-making process the way you'd call an expert, instead of trying to remember what they once told you. This is not the same as asking AI to condense a book into bullet points. A summary tells you what the book says, and it's nearly useless six months later because you don't remember which bullet applies to the situation in front of you. What I extract instead is what decision procedure the book teaches — the steps someone actually following that method would take facing a real situation, plus the judgment calls and trade-offs the book flags along the way. The test is whether you could hand it to a new hire who never read the book and have them apply it. When I went looking for other people doing this kind of thing with their own workflows — not "here's a cool prompt" but "here's exactly what I did and here's where it fell apart" — I found nothing worth reading. General AI forums bury this kind of post under news and memes. Prompt catalogs don't tell you what didn't work. And the communities built around this are paid, sitting behind a subscription wall. So I built this one. Below is the actual five-step process, and the file I feed to Claude at the step where the real extraction happens.

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