You don’t need to be an athlete to have a Coach and an Agent.
Every top performer has two people in their corner — a coach who develops them, an agent who gets them paid. Now you do too, and they work for you.
The job market is rigged.
The power sits with the employer. So does the information. And the machines that decide your fate have been theirs for years — your résumé ignored by software before a human ever reads your name.
Now there’s a machine working for you.
- Where ATS filter you out, we get you through.
- Where recruiters box you in, we find your niche.
- Where hiring managers ghost you, we make you impossible to ignore.
Here’s how it works.
It starts by getting to know you.
We start with your résumé. How do you present yourself, where have you worked, what have you achieved and where did you go to school? Coach then interviews you — your real history, your real strengths, where you really want to go next — building a picture deeper than any CV.
We go hunting — so you don’t have to.
Agent turns that picture into a search and runs it for you, drilling through thousands of roles down to the few that fit your skills, strengths and ambitions. You wake up to opportunities, not a search bar.
Spot one in the wild? Grab it.
See a role on LinkedIn or Indeed? One click with our browser extension pulls it straight in. Your team doesn’t just live in the app — they come with you, wherever you are looking. However a job turns up — found by us, or found by you — it gets the full treatment.
Then we tell you the truth.
Two questions matter — are you right for them, and are they right for you? Agent scores the real fit, both ways. Good news comes with evidence; bad news saves you a week chasing a job you are not going to get.
Sound like the answer.
When a role’s worth it, Coach helps you tailor your résumé to the words the employer actually used so you honestly describe yourself in their language.
And get past the filter.
Most applications die in an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) before a human reads them. We help you write a cover letter that shows the fit plainly, in language that humans and machines both understand.
Then we rehearse.
Before the real thing, Coach runs practice interviews — real questions for the real role — so you walk in ready, not rattled.
You versus the world, in real data.
How do your skills, target roles and salary expectations line up against the market? Make every move an informed one, not a guess.
Why I built Develop21
Hello, I’m Jeremy Penston. I built Develop21 to make AI work for you.
I founded Develop21 as the next move in my career, to help you make the next move in yours. When my last contract ended, I tried to use AI to help me find my next role — just like you might be doing now — but it was frustrating. I wanted a lot more than I was getting: I wanted honesty, for a start.
“Friendly, helpful AI” had been telling me what it thought I wanted to hear, polishing every idea until it shone. But this was not what I wanted, I didn’t want a cheerleader. I wanted the truth.
Especially about my résumé. Mine is a mix of everything I’ve done — Marketing, Business Development, Product Management, Consulting, Inventing, Data Architecture, Data Science, User Interfaces, and I’ve played with AI. To me, that path was interesting. To an Applicant Tracking System, I’m an 8-out-of-10 for every job and a perfect fit for none. I don’t even meet the requirements of the job I was doing for the last ten years.
Crazy, isn’t it? Machines decide who we are now — and all they do is put us in boxes. Develop21 is for the people who fit into many boxes.
I’m not saying this because AI suddenly got fashionable. I wrote about this broken system back in 2014 — when an algorithm quietly binning your résumé was already the reality, and nobody wanted to talk about it. Develop21 is the fix that has been coming together ever since, because it comes from all the pieces of my life.
I’m also “Coach Jeremy” to the young soccer players at Princeton FC, where I’ve worked for the last 12 years, in the evenings and at weekends. Coaching soccer is more than just teaching young people to kick a ball. It is a proxy for life: finding your niche in the group and on the field, owning your technical skills, being a leader in your moment. Progress isn’t a straight line — dealing with failure, your own or a teammate’s, the coach’s, the ref’s, or just plain bad luck. What do you do with that information?
I’ve learned the challenge — and the value — of honesty through coaching, so I’m building Develop21 to be honest. Bring a job in — from our search, or from anywhere on the web — and your Coach and your Agent give you a straight assessment, from different angles. Is it worth your time? And if it is, what do you need to develop to win it? Everyone’s afraid AI will take their job; so I built an AI to help you get one.
If you have a problem, there’s a help button on every page — and you can raise a ticket while keeping your conversation private. That’s the standard I’m building to: your conversations are encrypted from your browser, through our system, and decrypted only when they must be sent for AI processing — then re-encrypted the instant they come back. I don’t want to see your chats. Really, I don’t.
I will never sell your data, and you’ll never see an advert anywhere near Develop21. The law requires disclosure in exceptional circumstances — but unless you’re using this to do harm, your data is as safe as I know how to make it.
— Jeremy Penston, Founder
A career is a series of moves. Make good ones.
Develop21 is opening soon — join the waitlist and we’ll bring you in as we grow.