Help & methodology
How Grapevines works and how to get the most from it.
How Grapevines works
Most career tools are built for spray-and-pray. Optimize your resume, click apply, send it to 50 jobs, hope. That approach worked when there were a hundred applicants per role. It doesn’t work now.
The hiring market has changed.
- 3,000+ applications per role is common.
- About 30% of job postings are “ghost jobs” that aren’t really hiring.
- 85% of jobs get filled through warm intros, not the application portal.
- Cold outreach converts at roughly one-tenth the rate of warm outreach.
Grapevines is built around the way mid-to-senior leaders actually get hired. Pick the roles you really want. Research the company before you reach out. Find the humans around the hire. Build warm paths. Send formal materials last, not first. That’s the playbook the product is shaped around.
Six stages, ordered.
- Profile — Get your positioning, narrative, and stories clear before you do anything else. This is the foundation.
- Roles — Save the roles you’re considering. Each one gets a fit score and a strategic angle.
- Companies — Research each company. Not browsing, real research that informs how you approach them.
- People — Identify the humans around the hire. Decision-makers, peers, recent hires. Build your way in.
- Materials — Write resume and cover letter tailored to this role, drawn from your positioning and what you’ve learned.
- Interviews — Prepare answers grounded in your real career moments.
The order matters. Skipping ahead is the trap that makes job search feel like shouting into a void.
What deep pursuit means
Grapevines is built for users running two to five roles in deep pursuit, not fifty roles in shallow application. If you’re trying to apply to fifty jobs a day, this is the wrong tool. If you’re trying to land one to three roles that actually fit, this is the right one.
Deep pursuit means: research the company before you apply, find the people before you outreach, draft materials specific to the role, prepare for the interview before the recruiter screens you. It’s slower per application. It’s much higher conversion.
Habit change is part of the product. If you came from spray-and-pray, the first week feels weirdly slow. Stick with it. The math turns around quickly.
Key concepts
Positioning
Your positioning is the answer to “why you, for this kind of work.” It’s not your job title and it’s not your skills list. It’s the strategic angle you take to the market. What you do, who you do it for, and why that combination is rare.
A weak positioning sounds like a job description. A strong positioning sounds like a thesis. “Strategic product leader who builds great teams” is weak. “Former hospitality ops leader who pivoted into product, now scaling AI-native marketplaces” is sharper. The specificity comes from anchoring on the unusual pieces of your background, not the universal ones.
Bridge Story
The narrative connecting your past to your next. Matters most for pivoters. If you’re moving industries or roles, the bridge story is what makes the move make sense to a hiring manager. It turns “I’m changing careers” into “here’s the consistent thread, and here’s what I’m aiming at next.” Without it, you read as career-changer, which makes hiring managers nervous. With it, you read as deliberate trajectory.
STAR Stories
A library of real moments from your career, formatted as Situation, Task, Action, Result. Used to answer behavioral interview questions, fuel outreach hooks, and back up positioning claims. These are your evidence base. We keep them in one place so you can pull the right one for the right question, instead of inventing in the moment.
Fit Score
Each role gets scored against a 100-point rubric across ten categories (role alignment, outcomes, scope, experimentation, product sense, and others). The score isn’t “are you qualified.” It’s “is this role a strong fit for the angle you’re taking right now.”
90+: strong fit, pursue
75-89: stretch with a clear angle, pursue
60-74: stretch, pursue if you have a real warm path or differentiator
Below 60: probably not worth your time unless you have inside information
Calibration
The ongoing refinement work. As you research companies and talk to people, you’ll learn things that should reshape your positioning, your story, and your approach. Calibration is the loop of updating your foundation as you learn. Most career tools assume you “set” your positioning once. We assume you’ll refine it monthly.
The methodology by stage
Profile (foundation)
Positioning, Bridge Story, and STAR Stories all set the foundation. Most career tools skip this entirely. Grapevines treats it as prerequisite. If your positioning is generic, every downstream artifact will be generic. If your positioning is specific, every downstream artifact gets sharper. This is the highest-leverage hour in your search.
Roles
The unit of work in Grapevines isn't applications, it's roles. You save a role, give it a fit score, and decide whether it's worth pursuing. If yes, you commit to walking the whole sequence. If no, you don't apply. That single decision (commit or pass) is what separates deep pursuit from shallow.
Companies
Company research is more than "what does this company do." It's about challenges you can speak to, language they use, and signals about how they hire. The output is intelligence you'll use in outreach and interviews. Treat each company like a real opportunity, not a tab.
People
For each role, identify the people around the hire: hiring manager, skip-level, peers, recent hires. These are the humans who decide whether you get hired. Grapevines helps you find them, assess who's worth reaching, and figure out how to approach. The most leverage move in the whole product lives here. A warm intro to the hiring manager, prepared with what you learned in Company research, converts at orders of magnitude higher than a cold application.
Materials
Resume and cover letter come last, not first. They're shaped by your positioning, the company research, and any people-context you've gathered. A resume drafted before research will be generic. A resume drafted after research speaks to the specific challenges the company is facing. Same words, totally different effect.
Interviews
Interview prep pulls from your STAR Stories library and your positioning. The goal isn't to memorize answers. It's to know which stories to tell and how they ladder up to your strategic angle. Good interview prep makes you sound like the person your positioning describes.
About the methodology
About the process
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About data and privacy
About pricing
Troubleshooting
Strategic questions
Still stuck?
Send us a note from Account. We read everything and ship product changes based on what we hear. The product gets better when you tell us where it doesn’t work yet.
— MP