#044 - The 8th Ever Job Search Q&A

Announcement!

In case you hadn’t realised, I want you help you get a new job.

While I hope I’m doing that on LinkedIn, in this newsletter, the course, or in the 1 to 1 strategy sessions, I want to do it both at scale and in more depth. (A toughie, I know.)

Think weekly live Q&As, direct introductions to companies that are hiring, and knowing your salary expectations will be matched before entering into any recruitment processes.

Not bad, right?

First, I want (and need) to build a community of the best talent on the market.

(Hey. That’s you!)

So, if you’re looking for a new job right now - whether actively or passively - and I imagine you probably are - click below and take roughly 59 seconds to fill out the below form:

All I need is the following:

• Current job title

• Desired job title

• Desired industry (optional)

• Actively or passively looking

• Desired salary (there are loads of salary-data websites available online and a bunch of the best ones in the course)

• Whether you’re open to remote, hybrid, onsite, or any

• Earliest start date (an estimate is fine)

• Your CV / resume

If you want in, here you go: take me to the survey.

More info to follow soon. For now, onto the protein:

“How should I approach the job search? Not just tactically and strategically, but mindset-wise?”

I think there are four helpful mindsets to have while job-searching:

1. Impatient with actions, patient with results.

You’re not going to get a new job overnight. (At least, it’s extraordinarily unlikely. Saying that, I know of someone who got two new jobs in the past year - they got laid off twice - and both times they got a new job within 2 weeks. Expert-level stuff.)

What you can do overnight is many-fold: you can write your CV, you can update your LinkedIn,  you can reach out to your network, you can start applying to some roles, and you can outsource some of your job search (sign up to job alerts on LinkedIn, job boards, and let agency recruiters know you’re available).

Will the results of that come the next day? The next week? The next month? Maybe. Maybe. And maybe. (If you do all the above right, you’ll definitely be seeing some results within a month.) While you have no control over when the results come, if you ‘impatiently’ do all the above right - if you follow everything in this course - the results will come.

So.

Allow yourself to have some patience with it.

2. Control what’s in your control and let go of the rest.

• Here’s what you can’t control on your job search:

• Whether or not your CV/resume gets chosen

• Whether or not you get through to the next interview

• Whether or not you get an offer

• What salary & package they offer you

• Whether or not recruiters reaching out to you on LinkedIn 

• The other candidates

Here’s what you can control:

• What roles you apply for

• How much you tailor your CV/resume to the role

• How much you prep for your interviews

• Your salary & package negotiation

• Having a fully-filled out LinkedIn profile

• Who you take job search advice from (doing a great job with that, clearly)

If after reading all that you’re thinking to yourself, “That sounds hard. How am I supposed to do that?”

One, yes, it’s not easy. And two, well, how are you supposed to learn to do anything?

Practice.

And if you’re currently job searching, you will have many, many opportunities to practice.

How lovely.

3. Appeal to their self-interest.

When writing your CV, appeal to the hiring manager’s self-interest. They want and need to know if you’re worth interviewing.

When interviewing, appeal to the interviewer’s self-interest. They want and need to know if you’re worth an offer for the job.

When negotiating, appeal to the recipient’s self-interest. So instead of saying you want a bigger house and a 5-star all-inclusive holiday (even if that’s true), reiterate the skills, experience, and value you’ll bring to the company.

However.

You shouldn’t appeal to someone else’s self-interest at any cost.

Speaking of which…

4. Set boundaries.

With the people you take job-search advice from (I’m flattered, thank you), with the jobs you apply for, with whom (how fancy) you network, with what salary range you’re willing to accept, and with how much time and energy you spend job searching vs how much time and energy you spend not job searching.

And once you’ve set those boundaries, enforce them. Don’t be tempted to sacrifice them because you feel bad about setting them. Well, actually, you probably will be tempted to do exactly that. But take a moment, breathe, do a yoga pose, pet a puppy, and then don’t sacrifice them.

(This might feel uncomfortable and take a lot of practice. Just saying.)

“How do you not take rejection personally? I've been job searching for over two years now. I've interviewed for roles that I thought I had stellar chances for (thanks in part to feedback from the interviewers) but have been rejected every time. I'm interviewing for a role now that I want more than anything and the anxiety between rounds is genuinely crushing me. Given my past luck, getting an offer doesn't seem likely, no matter how qualified I am. Everyone says that when you get rejected it's not a reflection on you, but I don't believe them. How can I avoid feeling hurt when that rejection letter comes in?”

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.

“What’s something the typical job searcher is missing?”

The following knowledge: getting really, really, really good at what you do - and showing that you’re really, really, really good at what you do - will make your job search easier.

This topic has been talked about by Robert Greene (Mastery), Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers), Cal Newport (So Good They Can’t Ignore You), Leonardo Da Vinci (purported to have written the first ever ‘CV’), Steve Martin (legendary comic), Jerry Seinfeld (legendary comic), Michael Jordan (decent basketball player in his day apparently), and probably others I’ve forgotten or don’t know about.

Why has this topic been talked about so much?

It’s important, that’s why.

And if it’s not the most important thing for your career it’s certainly in the top few. As Cal Newport has written:

“Basic economic theory tells us that if you want something that’s both rare and valuable, you need something rare and valuable to offer in return—this is Supply and Demand 101. It follows that if you want a great job, you need something of great value to offer in return.”

Most people, in case you hadn’t noticed, are not really, really, really good at what they do. Most people aren’t even close. Most people aren’t even thinking about getting really, really, really good at what they do, let alone actually working towards it.

The fact you’d even be conscious of it and working towards it will put you ahead of probably 99.9% of people. Maybe even more than that. Maybe 99.99%. Hard to say.

The second part to this is showing you’re really, really, really good at what you do. And if you are really, really, really good at what you do, really, really, really good results will be but a simple byproduct of that. (Michael Jordan averaged 30 points per game, after all - not 3.)

Then, you take those really (gonna stop using three 'really’s’ now) good results and put them on your CV and your LinkedIn, thus showing you’re really good at what you do and making it way, way more likely you’ll get an interview.

Then, when you’re in said interview, you’ll have multitudinous crackerjack results and achievements to talk about. (Cool words, right?) That means you’ll be more likely to get an offer.

And when it comes to said offer, because you have what Cal Newport calls ‘rare and valuable’ skills, you’ll probably have more negotiating power because you’re as close to the whole package as you can get. An ‘A Player’, as Steve Jobs (in)famously called them.

As for deciding what to get really good at, I’ll leave you with one last insight from Cal Newport:

“First, when you focus only on what your work offers you, it makes you hyperaware of what you don’t like about it, leading to chronic unhappiness.” Instead, he says, embrace the craftsman mindset, in which you ask, “What can I offer the world?””

“How can a job-seeker protect himself from bias against unemployment in hiring? I was laid off as part of a company reorganization very recently, but I'm concerned about my prospects if it takes more than a couple months to find a position.”

Some hiring managers will be biased against unemployment no matter what. Even though there have been literally hundreds of thousands of layoffs in the past 18 months or so, they’ll still find a way to be like, “Yeah but if they were laid off they can’t be very good, right?”

This, of course, is puerile. (At best.) (Cool word.) They’re blaming the individual rather than the company, for some reason.

I’ve spoken to a lot of candidates who’ve been laid off and they’re some of the most kind, skilled, experienced, genuine people I’ve ever met. So. You know. Let’s let go of this unemployment bias, okay?

Anyway, you don’t want to work for someone who has this kind of bias. And thankfully, in my experience - and it’s the same for many recruiters I know - this kind of bias seems to be dying out.

(Slower than we’d like, perhaps, but still.) 

First, as always, control what you can control. If you do all the things we talk about in this course and treat getting a new job like it’s your job, that’s your best chance of getting a new job as quickly as possible (meaning you don’t have to worry about unemployment bias). 

Second, as part of the above, stay up to date with your industry. Take a course to refine your skills. Work on a personal project related to the roles you’re applying for. If you get asked, “So what have you been up to since your last role?” it’s best to have a good answer.

(I’m not saying you should be asked that, by the way. I’m just saying you might be.)

PS Once again, here’s that survey: https://forms.gle/XZFqXz91CQM2YqSo8

PPS Teddy turned 7 months old on Friday! Please feel free to wish him Happy Birthday and I’ll show him.

PPPS If you have any questions about the survey or what I’m building, hit reply and let me know.