Professional uncertainty hits harder when you're facing it without anyone who understands what it feels like — which is exactly what building Hurdle set out to change.

Nathaniel (Hurdle founder) sat down with Brainz Magazine to talk about something I think about every day: why job market uncertainty hits so much harder when you're going through it without anyone who actually understands what it feels like.

We covered what's driving the uncertainty right now, what I've seen work for people navigating career change and redundancy, and why building Hurdle came directly out of watching too many capable people go through this completely alone.

Read the full interview on Brainz Magazine. Read the full article on Brainz Magazine...

If any of it resonates, this is exactly who we built Hurdle for. Join the Hurdle waitlist.

Written by Nathaniel McAllister Founder of Hurdle. Building a peer support community for people navigating career change, burnout, and redundancy — after experiencing that gap firsthand. Connect on LinkedIn

A job search that has momentum beats one that's just motion - pacing and targeting matter more than applying to everything at once.

Every January brings the same wave of "new year, new career" energy — and also the same wave of people burning out on their job search by February because the resolution-style approach (apply to everything, all at once, right now) isn't actually how this works.

There's a real difference between a job search that has momentum and one that's just motion — and the do's and don'ts come down to pacing, targeting, and not mistaking activity for progress.

I broke this down properly in a piece for Brainz Magazine. Read the full article on Brainz Magazine...

If part of your 2026 plan is doing this with people around you instead of alone in a spreadsheet, that's exactly what we built Hurdle for. Join the Hurdle waitlist.

Written by Nathaniel McAllister Founder of Hurdle. Building a peer support community for people navigating career change, burnout, and redundancy — after experiencing that gap firsthand. Connect on LinkedIn

Many people did everything the traditional career path asked of them - education, loyalty, years of effort - and the promised stability didn't hold, not because of one bad decision, but because the underlying structure shifted.

There was a version of the career story a lot of us were handed: do well in school, get the right qualification, put in the years, and stability follows. For a significant number of people, that promise simply didn't deliver — not because they didn't hold up their end, but because the structure underneath it shifted.

That gap between what was promised and what actually happened is at the center of a lot of the career change, burnout, and redundancy stories we hear regularly — it's rarely about one bad decision, more often about a broken framework people were never warned about.

We explored this in more depth in a piece for Brainz Magazine. Read the full article on Brainz Magazine...

Hurdle exists because of exactly this gap — a space for people rebuilding their own definition of a career after the old one stopped making sense. Join the Hurdle waitlist here.

Written by Nathaniel McAllister Founder of Hurdle. Building a peer support community for people navigating career change, burnout, and redundancy — after experiencing that gap firsthand. Connect on LinkedIn

Neither extreme is true - AI is automating specific tasks and shifting certain roles, not eliminating careers wholesale, and the people navigating it well are adapting deliberately rather than panicking or ignoring it.

This question comes up constantly in conversations with people going through career change right now, and it deserves a better answer than the two extremes usually on offer — either "AI will take everything" or "don't worry about it at all." Neither is honest.

The real picture is more specific: certain tasks are genuinely being automated, certain roles are shifting rather than disappearing, and the people navigating this well are the ones adapting deliberately rather than either panicking or ignoring it.

We laid out the bigger picture - what's actually changing, and what's mostly noise — in a piece for Brainz Magazine. Read the full article on Brainz Magazine...

If you're in the middle of figuring out what this means for your own path, you don't have to work through it solo - it's exactly the kind of thing our community exists to talk through together. Join the Hurdle waitlist here.

Written by Nathaniel McAllister Founder of Hurdle. Building a peer support community for people navigating career change, burnout, and redundancy — after experiencing that gap firsthand. Connect on LinkedIn

Job searches routinely run longer than expected, and pacing, not speed, is what gets people through the middle stretch, where most people actually struggle.

Nobody warns you how long a job search can actually take. You brace for a few weeks, maybe a couple of months - and then it stretches on, and the hardest part isn't any single rejection, it's the sheer distance of the thing.

That's the marathon comparison, and it's a good one: pacing matters more than speed, the middle stretch is where most people struggle (not the start, not the finish), and doing it entirely alone makes every mile feel longer than it is.

Nathaniel the founder of Hurdle went into how he felt his London Marathon felt in comparison to the job search... and there are more similarities than you might think - in a piece for Brainz Magazine. Read the full article on Brainz Magazine...

One thing that piece touches on that we think about constantly at Hurdle: marathon runners rarely train alone, and job seekers shouldn't have to search alone either. That's the whole premise of what we're building. Join the App waitlist here!

Written by Nathaniel McAllister Founder of Hurdle. Building a peer support community for people navigating career change, burnout, and redundancy — after experiencing that gap firsthand. Connect on LinkedIn

LinkedIn was built as a social network but now runs like a social media platform - optimised for attention rather than connection. Hurdle is built the other way around.

Every time someone tells us Hurdle feels different from LinkedIn, it usually comes down to one thing: LinkedIn stopped being a network and started being a feed.

There's a real distinction between the two, and it's one we think about constantly. A social network is built around connection — people you actually know, or want to know, in a context that matters to you. A social media platform is built around attention — content optimized to keep you scrolling, whether or not it has anything to do with your actual professional life.

LinkedIn launched as the former. Somewhere along the way, particularly as it chased engagement metrics, it drifted hard into the latter — and anyone job-hunting, changing careers, or just trying to have an honest conversation about a hard professional moment has felt that shift.

We wrote about this in more depth for Brainz Magazine - what actually separates a network from a platform, and why the distinction isn't just semantic. Read the full article on Brainz Magazine.

It's also a big part of why Hurdle exists. We didn't want to build another feed — we wanted to build a network in the original sense. Join the Hurdle waitlist.

Written by Nathaniel McAllister Founder of Hurdle. Building a peer support community for people navigating career change, burnout, and redundancy — after experiencing that gap firsthand. Connect on LinkedIn