Question
You’ll call me a Gen-# whiner so I won’t tell you what Gen I am! Why is looking for a new job so hard? Maybe the economy isn’t so hot, maybe some companies can’t afford to hire, maybe A.I. is taking the jobs. But there are loads of jobs going begging on LinkedIn, on Indeed, on ZipRecruiter. Seems to me the odds should be with the job hunter, not against them! So why is this so hard and what do we do about it?
Nick’s Reply
The older and more experienced I get, the more I’ve come to realize the best response when people express an opinion or ask for mine is, Are we stupid?
It isn’t my aim to belittle or offend anyone. My epiphany is founded in the solid science of behavioral economics, which reveals that we humans are generally lousy when it comes to making judgments, estimating probabilities, making prudent choices, or guessing the value of something. (If you’re not aware of the compelling research in this field, I recommend Bill Poundstone’s Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It) and Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational.) In other words, to one extent or another, our behavior reveals we’re…well…stupid!
How much hard work is it?
And so it is with job seekers. People may be great at doing their work, but their discernment seems to vanish when they look for new work.
I have a rule of job hunting I wish job seekers would try to follow — if they want to stop being stupid:
That great job you want will be a lot of hard work. So why aren’t you doing at least as much hard work to get it?
But, how much work do you really need to do to land a job? After all, the employment system’s entire business model rests on this marketing promise that virtually every job seeker swallows every day: “We make job hunting easy, quick and painless. And we count on you to swallow this!”
This is the very same marketing job boards like ZipRecruiter deliver to employers: “We make it so easy and quick!”
No one has to tell job seekers or employers this is unmitigated bullshit. So, why doesn’t everyone gag in their job-board feeding frenzy?
Do you understand the work to be done?
When I transitioned from being a headhunter to also preaching about how to find a good job (or a good hire), I set a test for myself. If I couldn’t express the essence of my advice in maybe five or six basic rules of job hunting, then I should not attempt advising anyone.
I came up with The 4 Questions a job seeker should ask themselves before pursuing a particular job. The first question is relevant to how easy your job search should be:
- Do you understand the work an employer needs to have done?
Answering that question is hard.
I’ve tested this question in workshops, presentations and one-on-one coaching sessions I’ve done with thousands of job seekers at all levels of work. Without fail every job seeker points to “the job description” as their touchstone when deciding which jobs to apply for. It’s how they understand what the work is. If they believe the job description, including required credentials, skills and experience, match their resume, then they will probably apply.
But, how do you know?
When I press them just a bit — How do you really know? — their confidence in their judgment fails.
An especially good example is executive MBA students for whom I’ve done workshops at top schools like Cornell, UCLA, Harvard, Rutgers, University of Chicago and Wharton. These “EMBAs” are managers that have been running companies for 7-15 years and have returned to school to earn “working” or “executive” MBA degrees, attending a program usually twice a month on weekends for two years, at a cost of $200,000 to $250,000. (I was stunned to learn most of these EMBAs themselves — not their employers — pay the fare. However, most tell me the ROI is worth it, but that’s another discussion.)
I always stop at some point during my presentation:
“Please raise your hand if, six months after you started your current job, the work matched what was in the job description when you accepted it.”
I’ve never seen a hand go up! I always hear laughter and loud guffaws and exclamations like, “Never!”, “Are you kidding?!”, and “The job was never what the description said!”
This is not an issue with just executives and managers. Attendees at pro bono presentations I’ve done at the local library and YMCA with audiences from all kinds and levels of work respond the same way.
A job is always changing: the work, the tasks, the deliverables, the tools, the other employees, the obstacles, the necessary skills and experience,
So, I ask them all — “If that’s the case, why do you choose jobs based on the job description?”
The answer is simple and silly: Because that’s what HR, job boards, ATSes and recruiters require!
Feeding the databases and A.I.
Everyone relies on job descriptions because we need to feed the automated systems something they can chew on and process. That makes it possible to “process” thousands of jobs and the millions of applications job seekers submit.
But enter the one job interview you get from one of those job descriptions and you find you’re woefully unprepared because you don’t know enough about the work to show you can do it.
And you wonder why you cannot get hired.
There aren’t 400 jobs for you
There probably aren’t even five or even ten jobs for you, regardless of how many you apply for. It’s not a game of odds. More applications are not better. Making the right application is.
Do you see the problem? If you want a great job that you know will be hard, you must first do the hard work to pick the right job and do the hard work to find out what the work in that job really is — even as it quickly changes.
Learning enough about the work forces you to select jobs carefully and thoughtfully because you cannot rely on the job descriptions you encounter. You learn about what the work is today, what it will likely be next week and how it may evolve over a year by studying and understanding the business. This takes a lot of time and effort, not the brute force an ATS invites (and wastes).
This is why an employment system that lures you to apply for more and more jobs is bullshit. Job boards and their ilk don’t make money when you land a job. They make money when you (and the employer) keep coming back again and again to keep looking!
Do the work to win the job
How do you do what I’m suggesting? How do you avoid dumpster diving in the job boards and learn enough to answer the question, Do you understand the work to be done?
How can you prepare yourself to show you understand and can do a job that will quickly evolve?
- Pursue the best companies, not job descriptions. The best companies have all kinds of jobs, and one of them — even if it’s not the exact one you want — can lead you to the one you want.
- Triangulate to meet as many people as you can that are connected in any way to the company, the department, the employees and the manager you think you want to work for. It’s the old six-degrees-of-separation. Identify their employees, current and past. Talk to their vendors, customers and consultants. The goal is to meet the next closest insider by working from the periphery to the decision maker.
- Talk shop with these people. Learn what they do and how what they do changes with time.
- Learn what problems and challenges a department and its manager and employees face now and expect in the next year. Figure out how you can help today and in a year.
- Ask for their advice and insight about how you can best prepare to pursue a job there. That’s where personal, insider referrals come from. That’s how managers hire.
The problem is that applying for jobs is too easy
The great job you want isn’t easy. Forget about finding an easy path to get it. Start doing the hard work now, because if you don’t, you have no business in an interview for that job.
How hard should it be to find a great job? To what extent can job boards and related technology help you? Are employers so snowed by HR technology that it’s costing them the best hires?
: :
Yep. Easy apply is so seductive. And the big advertising budgets of the job boards are dedicated to leading job hunters down that ‘mostly failure’ path.
Even smart, exec level job hunters I meet have, for example, little idea of their job search ‘eco-system’ – who are the players, who’s doing what, what are the challenges and trends, what are the opportunities, where do they fit in, what are the problems they solve. And when I raise the point: there’s clear reluctance. They don’t know how. It’s uncomfortable for them. And any form of self-promotion is cringy. They just want to apply and get the job.
“Even smart, exec level job hunters I meet have, for example, little idea of their job search ‘eco-system’”
Bingo!
And if that is the case…
Then they certainly don’t see any value participating in any form of “networking” which results in the rest of us “peons” wasting precious time putting in the “hard” work trying to get noticed outside of the ATS/AI blackhole.
@Gerard: More troubling is that these managers are also responsible for recruiting and hiring people. Where they fail themselves as job applicants, they also fail their companies when dealing with job applicants.
BINGO!!!
I’ve never understood how supposedly intelligent, capable senior managers and executives are unable to make the mental connection between the experiences they have that fail them and the behaviors they have that fail both their organization and any prospective job applicants for positions they are trying to recruit.
From the employer side, HR and hiring managers seem to think they are in the marketing department for their organization. That they must present a rosy view of the organization and the job in order to attract applicants. If they create and disclose job descriptions at all, the descriptions are basically equivalent to fiction prepared for a creative writing class.
Big advantages of honest, accurate posted job descriptions would be a lot fewer applications to review and greater level of employee satisfaction because the new hire knows what to expect and is not disillusioned by the eventual reality.
@Richard: It must be the most glaring example of gullibility in the business world.
“Big advantages of honest, accurate posted job descriptions would be a lot fewer applications to review”
How can managers believe “More applicants are better!”? While promoting this stupid idea serves to justify the HR profession’s existence, it’s destroying managers’ careers and their companies.
Last week’s discussion taught me that not bringing a latte to the interview is the most important thing in job hunting. ?
@Mike: Yes, let us never forget what really matters!!
I really learned not to bring either an iced or hot latte to an interview. Read what Nick said as read it on several web sites. It’s best to leave it in the car or have it afterwards when you’re debriefing at a coffee shop.
I have said it before and say it again: doesn’t matter how many business or engineering degrees you have, can’t learn common sense or that “gut feeling” in university. It comes with years of good parent example, on the job experience, both through failure and success.
Nick,
I always come back to your observation that no one really knows the placement rate of job boards. If it truly was very high (let’s say over eighty percent), every company would publicly boast about it. I find it analogous to companies that put JD Powers survey results in their ads. That’s a fairly unbiased source that tells consumers something about the company and their product. The silence from the job boards is deafening.
@Larry: What other business can you think of that generates billions in revenue — whose products don’t work? Well… dietary supplements??