The Missing Manual Show

The fastest way to get more out of a conference is to build an AI game plan before you go. Julia Levy, co-host of The Missing Manual, built an app for the HR Technology Conference. It researched every exhibitor, matched vendors to her LinkedIn connections, and scheduled her days around meetings, booth locations, and breaks. Two to three weeks of outreach and follow-up lived in one place, and she w...

Halfway into a conversation about LinkedIn visibility, Jenny Cotie Kangas realized a month of posts had never reached her profile. Julia Levy had been tagging her as a collaborator on every Missing Manual post. LinkedIn collaborator posts only appear on your profile after you accept the invite, and Jenny never had. Worse, the Accept button stays on screen after you click it, so the only way to che...

AI agents and scheduled automations are not set it and forget it. The requirements you start with are an educated guess, and you often discover what you need only after the agent does something you don’t need. In this episode of The Missing Manual, Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas explain how to tune an agent once it is running, and why telling the AI where it falls short is the step most people...

AI in recruiting fails most often because companies apply it to the wrong problem. In this episode of The Missing Manual, Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas bring back what they heard at RecFest Nashville. Their main observation is that many organizations are using AI to get to the wrong answers faster. The clearest example of AI used well came from a team that pointed AI agents at its recruiting f...

Talent acquisition teams do not need more convincing to use AI. At RecFest 2026 in Nashville, most of the leaders in the room already had leadership buy-in and access to tools like Claude and ChatGPT. What they wanted was the actionable how: which use case to start with and how to build it. In this episode of The Missing Manual, Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas recap two days of hosting, speaking...

To get the most out of attending a conference with AI, have it interview you first. Define your goals, the problems you need solved and the tools you already use. Then send AI to research the sessions, speakers and exhibitors that match. On this episode of The Missing Manual, Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas explain how to plan any event around what you actually came for. Jenny Cotie Kangas start...

Can your applicant tracking system be gamed? Yes, and this episode of The Missing Manual shows you exactly how to check. Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas break down AI resume prompt injection, the practice of hiding invisible instructions inside a resume that tell an AI screener to move a candidate forward regardless of fit. Research out of Duke University found the pattern in roughly one percent...

Cognitive load—the amount of information your brain can track at once—is a real limiting factor in how much you can actually accomplish. When that load gets too high, you're not just tired; you're stuck. The Missing Manual walks you through how AI agents (systems built to handle specific tasks on your behalf) can reduce that load by doing the indexing work most people do manually. Julia and Jenny...

The fastest way to make AI agents useful in your organization is to map the work that never made it into a system in the first place. On this episode of The Missing Manual, Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas explain why every system leaves work behind, and why that leftover work, sitting in spreadsheets, inboxes, and people's heads, is exactly what has to get mapped before any agentic AI tool can d...

Conference season arrives with more invitations than budget, and the decision most practitioners make by default is the one that costs them the most. Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas open this episode of The Missing Manual with the question that should come before any registration form: what problem are you trying to solve this year. Everything else follows from the answer. If the problem is vend...

Most people run their job search the same way, opening a job board, typing in a title, and scrolling through hundreds of roles that almost fit. In this episode of The Missing Manual, Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas show a different way to do it, using AI agents that search for roles by fit instead of by title and build a resume that is one size fits one for each posting they find. The heart of t...

The forward deployed engineer is the new and hot role in AI, and most job descriptions ask for eight to twelve years of software experience. Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas think that requirement is looking in the wrong place. In this episode of The Missing Manual, they make the case that the person best equipped to get a forward deployed engineer role right is often a great recruiter who has ne...

Job posting errors cost employers more than embarrassment. Missing salary data in transparency states, template instructions published by accident, and dropped EEO statements create legal exposure and send candidates a signal about how the organization runs. In a world where LLMs read and rank job content, those errors also make employers harder to discover. On this episode of The Missing Manual,...

How to write better AI prompts is less about memorizing a framework and more about learning to have a real conversation. Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas break down what actually makes a prompt work and why letting the AI help you build the prompt is one of the fastest ways to get there. Most people either type into AI like it's a Google search or freeze up worrying their prompt isn't good enough...

Your Network Read is a tool Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas built to help people show up correctly on LinkedIn — whether they're actively job searching, building a personal brand, or selling into their network. This episode of The Missing Manual is what happened when Jenny Cotie Kangas stopped building it and actually ran it on herself. The output was immediate and specific. Skills tagged as Mic...

When life moves fast and nothing goes according to plan, most people don't need another framework. They need a map for the moment the frameworks don't cover. That's what this episode of The Missing Manual is. Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas (JCK) are bringing you into a real week.  Julia traveled to Florida for a short trip to help a parent through knee surgery and ended up staying through an IC...

What happens when you build something useful in AI and then life gets in the way for two weeks? Most people lose everything they built and start over. In this episode of The Missing Manual, Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas show you how to pick back up without losing momentum — using their own podcast production system as the case study. Julia and Jenny walk through re-grounding their Claude proje...

Welcome back to The Missing Manual with your hosts, Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas (JCK). In this episode, we are right in the middle of a multi-part series detailing the real, unvarnished work it takes to build a content engine and operationalize AI for daily work. Too often, people get frustrated with AI because they expect it to read their minds. Today, we demonstrate a core truth: you canno...

Documenting the Mess Before You Automate "Automating a broken process just breaks things faster."  In this episode of The Missing Manual, JCK and Julia take you behind the scenes of their own operational chaos. This is part 3 of our ongoing series on operationalizing AI for a specific, real-world use case: running this exact podcast. Julia does a complete verbal download of the current, highly man...

Two Brand Voices, One Show: How We Train AI to Speak for Both of Us When two distinct creators collaborate, how do you ensure the content speaks with a unified voice—without losing the hard-earned, earned beliefs of either host? In this episode of The Missing Manual, Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas dive deep into the mechanics of operationalizing their show using AI. This isn't about quick hacks...

In this episode of The Missing Manual, Julia Levy and Jenny Cotie Kangas teach you how to build an AI workflow for any repetitive task by working through a real example in real time. They use their own podcast production process as the case study, but the framework they walk through applies to almost anything clunky and manual that drains hours from your week. The three moves are simple: follow th...

"Hope is not a strategy." If your desktop is a sea of icons and your Downloads folder is a graveyard of unnamed PDFs, this episode is for you. Julia and JCK dive into a practical, day-to-day use case for AI that goes beyond the hype: digital organization. In this episode, we document the process of turning digital chaos into a streamlined system. We discuss the shift from "manual" organization to...

In this episode of The Missing Manual, JCK and Julia Levy go "under the hood" of their own AI experiments to discuss what happens when the tech fails to meet your standards. From Julia’s frustrating experience cloning her voice to JCK’s "agentic design" approach, they break down why AI is a "one-size-fits-one" solution. They explore the "Step Zero" of process mapping, the power of handoff document...

Tired of your AI losing the plot mid-conversation? Learn why Agentic AI requires Handoff Documents to prevent hallucinations and maximize your token usage in Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT. As we move further into the era of Agentic AI, the biggest hurdle isn't the AI's capability, it's its memory. In this episode of The Missing Manual, Julia Levy and JCK (Jenny Cotie Kangas) break down the "handoff"...

In Part 2 of our Agentic AI series, we get tactical. Julia and JCK discuss the Brand Voice Artifact—a project designed to ensure AI never misses your tone, style, or specific "guardrails" again. We explore how Julia used her book, transcripts, and frameworks to create a custom "Gem" in Gemini that acts as her professional voice clone, and how JCK uses "Usage Guardrails" to push back on the AI when...