It’s very easy to obsess (and then burnout) during a job search. We try hard to get noticed and make a great first impression within a cold and mechanical system that’s stacked against us before we even submit our first application. My advice has always focused on how to protect and empower yourself in the shadow of an inescapable power dynamic.
In good times—when job postings are plentiful and you can take your pick or name your price—this power dynamic still exists. In bad times, it’s evident at every step that applying, interviewing, and getting hired is a circus.
Either way, the game is rigged. Losing is not an option, but you’re just one of many people in blind competition with each other, at the whim of a faceless organization. What this requires of an individual to succeed (or at least hold the line for many months) is often pitiless or unfair.
It’s even just breaking through the noise, most of the effort gets shot into the monolithic, deafening silence, and the few points of contact you have are automated rejections.
— repressionnap
In response, there’s no shortage of job search advice and coaching out there, and much of it is granular and dogmatic. It often feels like the only thing you can do is operationalize job seeking and turn the process into a full-time job of its own. This is superstitious yak shaving that can quickly lead to burnout.
Colleagues regularly ask me for job search advice. I’ve got opinions, to be sure, but I try to avoid being too prescriptive. I tend to resist a lot of traditional advice in favor of centering the individual, because nobody else will do that for you:
- Conserve your efforts
- You’re not an impostor
- Interviews go both ways
Conserve Your Efforts
I’m a big believer in being aggressively realistic about the return on investment (ROI) at every step of a job search.
With any job application there’s a tendency to worry about the end goal (e.g., “I have to get this job!”) when you should only focus on the next immediate step. Evaluating your ROI is a good way to remind yourself of this and help you conserve your time, energy, and stamina.
So, for any given job application, the amount of effort should be proportional to the current stage of the application. The work you put in should progressively increase at each new stage, and you should do very little work in the beginning. Each stage of a job application brings with it different circumstances, requirements, participants, and conversations. The ROI calculation will vary with each particular combination of these factors.
In my experience, this means that submitting an application should take minutes (yes, I’m serious) while prepping for a final round interview with the CEO might take a few hours.
Let’s use the initial application as an example. The prevailing wisdom is that you should tailor your resume to each and every job description. This means anything from stuffing in a few keywords to completely rewriting it every time to play up supposedly relevant info or suppress years of your employment history. This is a very dumb thing to do!
TFW you spend a great deal of time on a job application and it’s clearly rejected by HR before even going in front of a search committee.
— kvmfinn
This consumes a lot of time only for you to toss your resume into a pit of a thousand other resumes. Think about the ROI here.
Paradoxically, when everyone takes this advice for granted then all of the resumes in that pit start to look eerily similar. You’ve tailored a resume that still ends up looking like all the others. Someone on the other end has to sift through all of that, and you’ve failed to distinguish yourself on your own merits.
Later stages of the application process require more attention, but at least it’s less abstract. The applicant pool is smaller, you’re interacting with real people, and you’re guaranteed decent face time that you don’t want to squander. It makes sense to make more of an effort—the potential ROI is more evident.
Depends on the level of interview. Phone screen? Not at all. Hiring manager interview? I’m going to at least review the job description, think of answers to obv questions, consider my own questions, etc. Late round interviews I’ll spend more time prepping.
— shauna
An exception to this rule is any preparation you do that’s not tied to a particular job application, but is universally applicable to all of them.
For example, as I’ve said, don’t waste time tailoring your resume over and over. Instead, spend the time making a single version of your resume the best it can be—it should be uniquely about you and tell your story. Then, when you see an appealing job posting, you have it ready to deploy instantly.
Another example would be studying for coding tests. Personally, I lament that this is necessary at all, but I’m not one to judge if you genuinely enjoy this. Especially if it gives you even an ounce of extra confidence in your job search.
Lastly, it’s worth spending time doing market or industry research and studying up on companies that are hiring. A big part of conserving your effort is knowing which companies you’d never work for based on principles alone—that’s one less application to worry about because you know it won’t lead to something good for you. It’s OK to not want to work somewhere other people think is prestigious or cool. You’d be surprised at some of the names on my own Company Shitlist…
Some people reading my advice so far will be tempted to conserve their efforts by cleverly outsourcing it to “AI”. This is not a good idea. The game is rigged, remember? Scaling up means you’re still playing by those rules. And if everybody does it then all we get is hiring slop written and read by machines. Nobody wins. You need to be fully in the loop because anything less isn’t you, and that’s what you’re selling.
You’re Not An Impostor
Impostor syndrome really does a number on you during a job search. I find it helpful to remember that this feeling of inferiority is a combination of pernicious cognitive biases about knowledge. At the risk of sounding glib, it should be interpreted as nothing more than stage fright.
If anything, impostor syndrome should be less pronounced the further you get through the interview process, not more. Even in the earliest stages, the hiring panel wants to talk to you for a reason. They believe you show enough promise to justify their time and attention. They’re curious about you. They have a reasonable suspicion that you have the skills and expertise they badly need.
As someone that deals with imposter syndrome, the best interview advice I ever got was, “They’ve already looked at your resume. If they’ve asked for an interview, then you’re qualified for the job.”
— mitchwrites
What hiring panels aren’t doing is wasting their time only to trick you, mock you, or expose you as a fraud. They skipped over a lot of resumes before getting in touch with you, and they’re not reaching out because yours is the worst they saw!
Rely on this perspective liberally. You can’t know anything about the other applicants’ qualifications. You can’t control what skills or experience your interviewers have. You are qualified, end of story—how are you going to demonstrate that?
This is a significant mindset shift that helps you to answer confidently when interrogated. As a bonus, you can then channel what would otherwise be nervous energy into interrogating them in return.
Interviews Go Both Ways
Given all of the above, every stage of the process becomes your next best chance to turn the job interview power dynamic on its head, ever so slightly. This is important because getting the job is only the beginning. As Dan Moore says:
[Y]ou’ll never have as much leverage with an employer as you do before you are an employee. You are going to spend a lot of waking hours working on behalf of this organization. Learn something about it.
Whether either side realizes it or not, interviewing is a mutual transaction. This is where I remind you again that the game is rigged. The side that’s hiring holds the power, no matter how good you are.
So, you need to level the playing field in any way you can, and avoid letting the interviews consume you. They want to know if you’re the best person for the job, and you want to know if they deserve you.
Let me tell you about this client of mine who was stuck in a job interview loop for months. He kept getting to final rounds but never landing offers, and his confidence was hitting rock bottom. One day, I suggested something crazy - to approach his next interview like he was the CEO interviewing them. Completely flipped his mindset from “please hire me” to “let me see if you’re worth my time.”
— alex_shark_777
You’ll passively observe a lot during the application process. How a given company structures and conducts their hiring will provide clues about their other processes or work culture.
Pay attention to these signals and always trust your intuition. Be prepared to scrutinize the tiniest of details if it triggers you. Ask follow-up questions or do more research. There won’t always be a giant billboard telling you to GET OUT NOW—but if anybody ever says they’re, “like a family,” then run and never look back!
You need to be OK with exiting any given job application process at any time and for any reason. You know yourself better than industry peer pressure or third party career advice ever could. You are the best predictor of whether this job might be a good fit for you. If you’re not feeling it, add that company to your Shitlist and move on.
Employers aren’t inclined to freely divulge much about themselves beyond what you can observe. So, you have to dig and actively ask questions. The more questions you can put to a hiring panel, the better. Look for any opening to do so, aggressively.
Again, your timing matters here. Don’t send out 100 probing questions right after your phone screen but if you have the hiring manager’s ear definitely make use of that. The chance to ask even one question the hiring manager has never been asked before can alter the course of the entire process for you. At the very least you’ll have more information than you did before the interview, which is the point.
Hi, hiring manager here. I love this. I always look forward to questions that are presented during interviews. One of my favorites to ask about is the culture that is cultivated within the company. The way an interviewer receives that question is often very telling as well. I always tell my staff that interviews go both ways. They are being interviewed as a potential employee but it’s an opportunity for them to interview the company as well.
— theappeldocktorisin
The irony of this advice is that you’ll also stand out as a candidate. You’ll be seen as prepared, confident, observant, insightful, and unique. When an interview ends, the hiring panel will still be thinking about a distinctive moment or two, and they’re more likely to scramble to get you into the next stage because they don’t want to lose you.
Enjoy My Titanic Deck Chairs
The subtext of my advice is that you do you. You know who you are, what you’re capable of, and what you do best. I will always recommend you focus on that and try to detach as best you can from the pageantry of the modern job search.
But I also recognize that this advice is hard to give because jobseekers just aren’t conditioned to hear it. Who can blame them? If you’ve been looking for a job for months the last thing you want to hear are aphorisms like take it slow, be yourself, or just say no. You need a job, and you need it now! Sadly, this humble essay won’t overhaul the system.
Jobseekers often feel like they have no choice but to play by the rules, which is a sure sign that the rules might favor the other player. The best I can do is remind you of that and supply you with a few “house rules” that tip the scales a bit. You’re a player, too, and everybody loves a good underdog story, right?
