#037 - How To Outsource Your Job Search

The Best Job Search Links This Week

• CV/Resume Tips For Avoiding Ageism by Kristen Fife (link)

• This Job Market Is No Joke by Leah Dillon (link)

• CTO At $152 Billion Firm Embracing Boomerang Hiring by Eleanor Pringle for Fortune (link)

• The Launchpad: Liftoff your career with weekly strategies delivered straight to your inbox (link) (sponsored)

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How To Outsource Your Job Search

You know what’s great?

Crunchy nut cornflakes. My goodness.

But you know what else is great? And maybe even slightly more relevant to you?

Outsourcing your job search.

Not all of it. Not your interviews. (Unless you made a clone of yourself.) But there’s plenty you can outsource to make sure your job search is still ‘active’ while you’re out to dinner, relaxing, admiring some scrimshaw, or toilet training your puppy.

(Getting there. Slowly but surely.)

So.

Here are some ways you can (and should) outsource when it comes to your job search:

1. Sign up to any & all relevant job boards.

Sign up, fill out your details, and let the job boards get their job board on. That means they’ll send you relevant roles instead of you having to trawl through their website and find them yourself. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

(Remember that meme? What a time to be alive.)

There are job boards for tech roles, startup roles, remote roles, software engineer roles, marketing roles, ‘green’ roles, non-profit roles, senior roles, junior roles, specific company careers pages, and on and on and on.

Search for something like this: “[role] job boards [remote/your location]” and see what comes up.

For example: “marketing job boards united kingdom”

Yep. Just double-checked it. Much like a wonderful CV, there’s loads of relevant results.

2. Sign up for LinkedIn job alerts.

And when you do, make sure you include all possible job titles.

For example, if I was applying to Lead/Senior Recruiter roles, I’d enter all kinds of job titles:

• Lead Recruiter

• Senior Recruiter

• Recruiter

• Talent Acquisition Specialist

• Senior Talent Acquisition Specialist

• Lead Talent Acquisition Specialist

• Recruitment Manager

• Talent Acquisition Manager

• Senior Talent Lead Recruitment Acquisition Manager Specialist

• … and whatever else I could think of

You don’t want to miss out on a great role because of a weird job title.

3. Use LinkedIn to ‘signal interest’ in working for a company (even when there aren’t any live roles).

How?

• Search for the company on LinkedIn

• Go to their ‘About’ section

• Scroll down a little

• Click on the ‘I’m interested’ button

Once you do that, recruiters will be made aware and have the option of messaging you if a relevant role comes up.

You can do this with up to 50 companies but not every company has this feature. Guess they’ll just have to be like all the banks you’re not with and miss out on your interest.

4. Let some industry-specific headhunters & recruitment agencies know you’re available.

You can use LinkedIn to search or you can use Google, Bing, or DuckDuckGo (turns out there are other search engines) to search for the below:

“[industry] industry [recruiter] LinkedIn [country / location]”

Or:

“[industry] industry [recruitment agency] LinkedIn [country / location]”

For example: “gaming industry recruitment agency LinkedIn London”

I just tried it and much like when you search for ‘toy poodle puppy’, loads of good stuff comes up.

You can then message recruiters at these agencies and say something like this:

“Hi [name]. I’m currently a [role] at [company] and I’m looking for a [role] in the same industry. I’m looking for a salary between [x] and [x]. I’ve attached my CV and you can check out my LinkedIn too. Do you have anything that would be a good fit for me right now? Even if not, maybe we could have a quick catch up for any future roles? Thanks for reading and talk soon!”

As the great Jerry Maguire would say: help them help you.

(Also, feel free to ask their advice on salary. They should have a good view of the market and what numbers you should be looking at given your role, experience, and location.)

Job Search Q&A

Imagine if, when you were a kid, you fell off your bike and it really hurt. In fact, it hurt so much that you became too scared to ever get back on a bike again.

This is irrational, of course, but also understandable. We often go out of out way to avoid pain, after all.

Then imagine that you make a new friend at school one day. You get on really well, they invite you to their house for dinner, and you have a lovely old time. “I made a new friend!” you say to your parents later that night, all excited.

The next day, your new friend asks you if you want to play after school. You, of course, say yes. They say they’ve just got a new bike and that you should bring yours round so you can ride really fast around the park.

You panic and say, “No, I don’t want to ride bikes with you.”

You walk off.

Your new friend feels hurt. They wonder, “Why don’t they want to play with me?”

They feel anxious. They wonder, “What did I do wrong?”

They feel rejected. They wonder, “Maybe I’m just not good enough any more.”

But.

Was the fact you didn’t want to ride bikes anything to do with your friend? Or was it all about you?

It was nothing to do with your friend. It was everything to do with you.

In this example, knowing both sides of the story, would you advise the new friend with the new bike to take it personally? Of course not. It was about the other scared little kid’s view of the world.

Or, as Don Miguel Ruiz writes in The Four Agreements:

“Whatever happens around you, don’t take it personally. Nothing other people do is because of you. It is because of themselves. All people live in their own dream, in their own mind; they are in a completely different world from the one we live in. When we take something personally, we make the assumption that they know what is in our world, and we try to impose our world on their world.”

I’m not sure you can avoid feeling hurt completely - and I’m not sure I’d advise trying to do that, anyway - but if you want to avoid taking it personally, remember the above example and remember that how other people behave is about them, not you.

(And yes, this might take a tremendous amount of practice. Not that I’m speaking from experience or anything.)

How They Got Their New Job

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PPS If you missed last week’s edition, read it here: Not Getting Interviews Or Offers? Read This

PPPS The Referral Program is coming soon. Long story short, you’ll get a nice little reward for referring just one person to this newsletter. So, if you were thinking of referring someone, first, you’re the best, and second, WAIT. I want to make sure you get your reward. I’ll let you know when you’re good to go.

PPPPS By the time you read this, Teddy will have just met his cousin, Trudy. I’ll update you next week. *laughs in nervous*

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