From Founder to Ghost Job Applicant: What Happened to My Career?
If you’re reading this, you’re either an ex-girlfriend checking in from a safe distance, or you’re in the same boat as me: experienced, capable, and still getting nowhere in the job market.
I think I may have worked it out. Here’s my uncomfortable conclusion: I’ve spent fifteen years optimising for doing good work instead of talking about it. In 2025, that choice makes you invisible.
I’m a British expat living in southern Europe. Earlier this year, I lost my job in a way I didn’t see coming.
For the first time since around 2010, I wasn’t building something of my own or being recommended for work through reputation. I was cut loose and in need of income. A jobseeker.
Not long ago, I was working. Fifteen years before that, I’d founded an online business that hit £800k in revenue and earned a reputation strong enough to buy out struggling competitors. Seven years ago, I started building a learning platform that eventually grew to 30,000+ users with over 100,000 course completions. Before that, a degree with honours, a place on a competitive graduate scheme at a major telecoms company, and becoming a parent at 22 and 24. Not too bad, eh?
By any reasonable measure, I should be employable. Instead, after 87 applications and counting, I’ve had rejection emails and silence.
This is the story of what happened. And why I think it happened.
The non-linear path
I didn’t start with advantages. Working-class background. First in my family to go to university. A first-class degree earned while already a parent.
My first child was born when I was 22, and by 24, I had two kids.
On paper, that doesn’t look like the beginning of a fast-tracked career. But I made it work. I landed a place on a highly competitive graduate scheme at a major telecoms company. It was prestigious, well-paid, and respected.
For a while, it felt right.
After a while (and despite success and a budding reputation), I realised something: the speed that corporations move didn’t feel right to me. Too much time in meetings, “engaging stakeholders”, too many people involved in decisions that should have been simple. Working in those conditions felt unrewarding. Meanwhile, my kids were spending most of their waking hours in childcare.
That realisation shifted something. So I left.
Building the first thing
What followed was risky but deliberate: we travelled as a family for a while, used that time to think, and then I started building.
The first business was an online sports shop focused on a niche that wasn’t well-served. I built it all from scratch: website, supply chains, customer service, marketing on a shoestring budget.
The business took off almost immediately. Within a few years, it had generated over £800k in revenue. More importantly, it became known for something: obsessive customer service, deep product knowledge, and a genuine community of loyal repeat customers. Raving fans! Reviews were stellar: we ranked at the top of industry directories that mattered. People didn’t just buy from us; they told their friends.
On the side, I launched a small B2B business supplying sports merchandise to retailers and major events. It taught me wholesale, logistics, and relationship sales.
Then the penny dropped: if we could build a beloved niche brand from nothing, why couldn’t we do the same in other industries?
My partner started a compliance-training business and I helped her build it. Within just a year, we’d grown it into something valuable enough that a larger company wanted to acquire it.
Not long after, I sold my own business and was thinking about what came next. The answer was: scale what I knew how to do, but for other people.
Building at scale (for other people)
In 2018, I joined a specialist training company to build something new: an online learning platform in a heavily regulated industry.
We started from scratch. Built the platform on WordPress. Worked with subject matter experts to create courses that were useful, engaging, professional. Launched with nothing and watched it grow.
A few years later, the platform had 30,000+ registered users, over 100,000 course completions, and a 98%+ satisfaction rating. We’d weathered a global pandemic, shifted content on the fly, supported stressed clients, and emerged stronger. The company was eventually acquired by a much larger training provider.
Next, I moved to a startup building bespoke learning platforms. I was part of a small team: other people did most of the heavy lifting on product, design, and engineering. My focus was testing, branding, content, course building, and writing. We built one platform from zero, scaled it to 50+ courses, then adapted it for another industry, then adapted it again as a white-label product for other companies to use.
Along the way, I wrote hundreds of articles, created marketing campaigns on minimal budgets, produced videos, built customer support systems, analysed data, and collaborated with teams across Europe, Latin America, and Asia.
It helped me get onto the property ladder a second time, in Spain where I now live. It also reinforced something important: I know how to solve real problems for real people, and that’s something I enjoy.
The fall
Earlier this year, I lost that job in circumstances that were unusual enough that I couldn’t have planned for them. At almost the same time, a property deal I was relying on collapsed.
Two big pieces of my life moved at once. Work and home both lurched.
For the first time in a long time, I wasn’t building something of my own or being brought into a project through reputation. I became a jobseeker for the first time since 2010.
The job search
When you’ve spent fifteen years being found—recommended by clients, introduced by partners, tapped on the shoulder because someone knew your work—the job market feels alien.
Honestly, to me, the whole job application process makes me feel like a peacock, carefully arranging my feathers to make myself appear attractive. There’s something about it that I don’t like.
I built a CV. Tailored it for each role. Started applying.
Eighty-seven applications later, I’ve had rejection emails and silence. Not a single interview request. Not a single screening call.
Some replies are familiar: “We’ve decided to move forward with candidates who are a closer fit” or “We’re looking for someone with more specific experience in X.” Once, I was told I was “overqualified”, which is particularly surreal when you’re applying for a role that’s basically a junior version of something you’ve already built and sold.
What makes this stranger is that I’m not applying wildly. I’ve gone after roles where the job description reads like a list of things I’ve already done: building platforms from scratch, growing niche online businesses, working across content, product and operations. In a couple of cases, I knew I was culturally a perfect fit too: small teams, practical mindset, bias toward getting things shipped. On paper, it should have been an easy “yes.” Still: rejection or silence.
The silence is harder to interpret. Are these ghost jobs? Are my skills too varied and confusing? Am I missing something obvious? Honestly, I don’t know.
What I think has changed
Underneath my own situation, there’s a bigger pattern.
Analyses of job boards and official labour data suggest that roughly a third of online job listings never lead to a hire at all—”ghost jobs” that exist to collect CVs, impress investors, or stay open “just in case”.
Hiring has shifted toward referrals and internal recommendations, and internal recruiter data suggests that referred candidates are several times more likely to be hired than people who simply apply through a job board.
The middle of the market is thinning out: junior roles demand years of experience, mid-career roles expect junior salaries, and surveys of workers in their 40s and 50s show around 80% say they’ve seen or experienced age discrimination, with most believing it gets harder to land roles as they age.
That’s the environment I’m applying into. But if I’m honest, there’s another factor that has nothing to do with macroeconomics.
It’s me.
The cost of choosing differently
This runs deeper than just not posting on LinkedIn.
Years ago, when I was running the online sports shop, I went off on a long-distance bike trip and decided a cut of sales during that time would go to a local charity back in England. It did. We raised a decent amount. And then nothing. No photo with a giant cheque. No press release. No “look how generous we are” campaign. Part of me felt that kind of thing was self-righteous, too “for show.”
That’s the pattern: I’m comfortable doing the work. Uncomfortable broadcasting that I’ve done it.
I don’t spend my time cultivating a LinkedIn following. In fact, I can’t stand LinkedIn. To me, it stinks—performative hustling, personal brand optimisation. It attracts a lot of arse-kissing opportunists, and makes me feel uncomfortable. The same with Instagram, Facebook—I don’t post. I’m part of a dying demographic: those who don’t feel the need to over-expose.
I wasn’t on a conference circuit. I didn’t post daily threads. I didn’t play the visibility game.
I chose something else: a solid work-life balance, time with my family, living in a place I actually like. I’d built businesses. I’d scaled platforms. I’d worked my way into a comfortable position. It felt reasonable to optimise for life as well as work.
I don’t regret that choice. But I’m also aware of what it’s cost.
While I was head-down building things, other people were getting very good at signalling that they build things. They were becoming easy to find in the feeds and the funnels where hiring now happens.
In a world where visibility is currency, refusing to cash in your own receipts is a strange kind of self-sabotage. I might be noble. I might also be stupid, professionally speaking.
Still building
I haven’t stopped building. That part of me is still working just fine.
Lately I’ve been experimenting with vibecoding tools, playing with ideas, building apps and small websites, and seeing what sticks. I’ve been an early adopter of AI tools too, using them to prototype and explore concepts I couldn’t have tested as quickly before.
But here’s what I’ve realised: being good at what you do doesn’t automatically make you hireable. The job market now runs on visibility, signalling, networks, and keyword filters as much as on outcomes.
I’ve deliberately taken a backseat over the years, preferring to keep myself to myself and prioritising privacy over publicity. I’m starting to share some of what I’ve learned, but I don’t see myself ever seeking the limelight, or ever brown-nosing on LinkedIn, or seeking precious ‘likes’ on Instagram.
I’m still confident in what I can do (I think, haha). I’m just not yet sure how to make that legible to a hiring manager skimming 200 CVs.
Where this leaves me
I’ve talked to people in their mid-twenties who are exhausted before their careers have even started. I’ve talked to people in their fifties who’ve been quietly eased out. The system is failing at different points for different people.
At 39, almost 40, I’m somewhere in the middle: experienced but not especially visible, a generalist rather than a neatly labelled specialist, capable but not matching the tidy pattern many companies seem to want.
The questions that keep circling are these:
Where has loyalty got me? I stayed in roles, built assets, delivered consistently.
What does it mean when someone can build a beloved brand, scale a platform to 30,000 users, and still struggle to get hired?
Is the job market actually broken, or am I just not playing the game right?
The answer is probably both. But there’s a third option I’m starting to believe in: maybe I’m not meant to slot neatly back into someone else’s org chart. Maybe the next chapter is another business, a partnership with another founder, or something I haven’t named yet.
And I’ve found more peace and excitement working on projects that could potentially blossom into releasable products. This feels like it has a far greater chance of giving me a role—either through my own company, an acquisition, or something else entirely—than these blind job applications. Instead of arranging my feathers like a peacock that will never fly, I’ll try to build a rocket.
What does bother me is the idea that the things I’ve built might stop counting. That months could keep slipping by until I’m in real trouble through no real lack of effort or ability, just a mismatch between how I work and how hiring currently works.
That’s sobering. But it’s also pushing me to think differently about what comes next.
So what do you do if you’ve optimised for substance over showmanship?
Dial visibility up one notch, not ten. I’m not about to turn into a “10 hacks to 10x your hustle” guy, but I am starting to publish what I’ve already done: case studies, small product launches, posts like this. It’s not performance; it’s leaving a trail of some sort. And maybe it’ll help me connect with other like-minded folk.
Treat small builds as signals. The apps, prototypes and learning products I’m building now aren’t just experiments; they’re proof. Each one is a reminder: “I’m still doing the work,” whether or not a hiring manager replies.
I don’t know exactly where this leads yet. But it feels closer to how I’m wired than pretending the job board lottery is a strategy.
One more thing
I don’t know how this story ends yet. I’m still figuring it out at age 39, days before turning 40.
But I know one thing for sure: I’m not unemployable. I’m navigating a job market that doesn’t quite know what to do with people like me, and I’m a lot like you, probably.
If any of this resonates with you, if you’re building something, if you’re hiring, if you’ve been through something similar—let’s connect. You can find me on LinkedIn (yes, even after everything I just said about it) or visit my website at leefirman.com.
I’m looking for work that matters, with people who care about results.
Let’s see what happens next.
