How to Get Ahead of 99% of People in the Job Search

I have seen what job seekers are doing at scale, and with the widespread use of AI, they are looking more similar than ever. You know me. Which actually means you don't have to do a ton to be different, such as my client Diane, who had failed 30 interviews before we met, only to make these changes and land 2 offers within weeks. Or Nestor, who had applied to over 500 jobs, got no interviews, and got job shopping coaching and quickly landed interviews and pivoted from research to corporate organizational development with a $35,000 salary increase. So these things work, and I'll share 7 strategies to elevate you above 99% of job seekers. Because check this out, I see on LinkedIn these posts from job seekers all the time who blame the job market. Yet within these posts, there are the glaring reasons of why they're not getting interviews, such as this post here. Immediately you see they're doing a high-volume job search by applying to over 300 jobs, which doing more of something that isn't working isn't going to yield you different results. Next, the wide variety of roles is an instant opportunity killer, and being open to more opportunity actually really narrows the likelihood that you'll get anything. And they say that they've listened to career gurus. And now I don't know who those people are. There are a lot of people out there who give pretty poor advice, but this is deceptive because you think they're improving, they're implementing good strategies. But then I went to their LinkedIn profile and it was not properly optimized. There were a lot of changes I would make. Next, they qualify their worthiness for jobs based on the degrees they have purchased. A bachelor's in business and a master's in organizational leadership. Unfortunately, this does not tell the companies whether or not you've got the skills in the real world. And finally, they say they're not picky. And it sounds counterintuitive, but giving the impression on your application, when networking, and in job interviews that you will take any job is absolute employer repellent. They want people who are diehard for the exact job they're interviewing for. So be careful out there. When people post saying the job search is hopeless, they may be following the wrong strategies, and I will share with you the right ones. And stay to the end because you'll learn how to audit your own job search to know exactly what you need to improve. You have to be careful about falling for the discourse online that the current job market is impossible. It's not. I'm seeing my clients getting sourced for roles every day. Getting dozens of interviews a month and landing multiple offers at a time. And here is what they do differently. First, you need to get extremely clear about what job you are targeting, such as I help my clients zero in on their target job titles. And recently one of my clients shared this list with me: risk manager, customer success, operations manager. The list is all over the place. These are different functions, and professions. And ultimately, we zeroed in on operations manager, and he was off to the races. The reason being focused is so crucial is that people need to understand how to help you. And every conversation you have should make you smarter about the same market. So to get more job interviews, I want you to create a clarity statement. It answers 3 things. What role are you going for? What industry or company type are you targeting? And what value do you bring that matches that role? Maybe yours is, I'm targeting director of FP&A roles at large Fortune 500 companies where I can bring my background in strategic planning, forecasting, and finance transformation. Now your friend knows who to introduce you to. The recruiter understands what to call you about. You know which jobs to ignore. And after talking with 10 or even 20 companies hiring similar people, you start hearing the same skills, the same business problems, the same objections, and the same interview questions, which makes you increasingly dangerous in that job market. Compare that to the person applying to 3 different professions who learns little from one application to the next. Step 2, once you are clear, we need to make sure that your resume actually sells you. Sells you for that target. Because most resumes are still written like historical documents. But your resume is not really about you. I actually named an entire chapter of my book, Reverse the Search: Your Resume Isn't About You, because this is one of the biggest mindset shifts I want job seekers to make. Think about a good sales page. Okay, it is centered around what the customer wants, what problem they have, and why that product is the solution. Your resume needs to do something similar. Here's how you improve your resume in 2.5 minutes. Pull up a job description of a job you want and look at the first few bullets because job descriptions are written top-heavy, meaning that the most important responsibilities often appear sooner in the job description. So then look at that very first part of your resume, would you immediately assume that you have the right skills based on that? If not, get it right there, right there in your top 25% of your resume, of that first page. If the top of your resume isn't great, they will not read the rest. If the company says that they need strategic planning, financial modeling, forecasting, and executive reporting, but I have to excavate your resume like Indiana Jones to find that, then you are making the employer work too hard. And please focus on accomplishments rather than responsibilities, because being responsible for something doesn't really tell us if you're any good at it, right? I'm responsible for getting my booty to the gym, but that doesn't mean I ever go. Oh my God. If you want a deeper dive into how to create a high-converting resume, I will link a free resume workshop below. Now, once that resume is working, we have another huge opportunity that most job seekers massively underutilize, which brings us to step number 3, LinkedIn. Many of my clients report landing more than 50% of their interviews completely inbound, meaning they did not apply to the job at all. A company found them and asked them to to interview. Any way that we can reverse the search, we should do it. And recruiters' sourcing is increasing year over year for skilled roles. But job seekers focus on the wrong things. They'll spend half a presidential administration rewriting their About section while ignoring the parts of their profile that actually influence whether recruiters find them. Let me turn your attention to your headline, current title, and location. Your LinkedIn headline should contain the language that employers are actually using to find someone like you when they search. Such as, instead of saying something vague like strategic leader driving meaningful transformation, which could describe a CEO, a pastor, or someone rearranging a snack cabinet, use actual searchable terminology. For example, Senior Marketing Manager, Brand Strategy, Integrated Marketing, Consumer Insights, grew brand awareness 42% year over year. This headline is quite searchable. Your current job title is also extremely important. If your company has some sort of bizarre internal title that no one outside the organization understands, please translate it. Such as if your title is People Partner Level 2, but the market would call you an HR business partner, make that clear. There are also lots of other strategies to improve your job title depending on your unique situation. And make sure your location reflects the market where you want to work because recruiters frequently search geographically. And all of this is designed to make you easier to find and easier to understand. So if you aren't getting regularly sourced, On LinkedIn, I will link a free LinkedIn profile checklist below for you to work your way through each part of your profile. Now, step 4. Here is where I really want you to separate yourself from how most people conduct a job search. Stop only measuring your productivity in job applications. Start measuring interactions. If you email a former coworker asking whether they know anyone at a company and they respond, that's an interaction. If a friend introduces you to her boss and you have a 2-minute conversation, interaction. If you're talking to someone in line for coffee and mention that you're targeting something in the job search, interaction. If someone responds to a thoughtful LinkedIn comment and you start messaging back and forth, that's an interaction. And one of the easiest ways to unearth good connections is to ask specific questions in your conversations, such as, I'm looking to move into data science in the video game industry in Dallas. Do you know anyone in that profession or in that industry? This works because that person does not need to have all the answers, but they may know someone who might know something. Then when you get connected to someone, ask for advice instead of asking for a job. You can say something like, I'm exploring exploring opportunities in this industry, and I noticed X and Y about your background, and I'd love to hear about how you got to where you are. And if you're targeting a specific company, a question you can ask is simply, I've been researching your company and I think it could be a good fit for my next career step. I have expertise in X and I'm interested in Y. Who would you recommend I speak to about that? Now, I want to take this one level further with step 3. Step 5, because this is where you can get ahead of almost everyone who is technically qualified for the same job. Show the company what you can do. Now, I call these show, don't tell projects. And if you are in marketing, say you could create a short audit of the company's competitors' social media channels and show 3 opportunities you noticed. If you work in customer support, experience their support process and document your thoughtful observations. When I worked in HR, I came up with show-and-tells that involved studying these companies' open job roles, their Glassdoor pages, and their company blogs. And let's say you're in analytics, you could use publicly available data to answer a question that would be relevant to that company. Now, you're not building this company an entire strategy for free, and please do not emerge 3 weeks later Looking like Tom Hanks in Castaways because you created some 73-page deck. It's also not important for your findings to be completely accurate. After all, any information you utilize is going to be lacking, especially compared to what you would be privy to as an internal employee. Really, it should just demonstrate how you think and just shows you tried to understand the world. And then make sure a human sees it. Do not lovingly create this beautiful project and then attach it to an application field number 16 where it goes to live with all the other forgotten documents in ATS purgatory. Send it to someone, mention it in your outreach, bring it with you to the interview. For more details on this and other strategies that very few job seekers are using, grab my book Reverse the Search on how to turn job seeking into job shopping. I will link it below. And now that brings us to the part that many job seekers completely mishandle, even after doing everything right enough to get you the interview. And that is step 6. You have to know how to ace the interview, because if you are getting interviews but no offers, your resume is probably not the primary problem. The resume got you into the room. Now we need to look at what is happening once you get there. So one of the first things employers are judging you is whether or not you truly want this opportunity. And so if they ask, why do you want this role? Why this company? Make sure your answer couldn't simply also be said about their competitors or isn't a recitation of their mission statement. This is where your research and you talking to people at the company is going to really shine through. The next problem is rambling. Job interviews put your communication under a microscope in a completely unnatural way. And once you're qualified enough to get the interview, then how you communicate about your experience is nearly everything you're judged on. And the reason we ramble is because our nerves hijack our brain. So we aren't thinking as clearly, or we didn't quite know what to say. So we're actually trying to figure out the answer while we are talking. The interviewer asks, what's your biggest career regret? And your brain short circuits. This was not a question you practiced. Your nerves increase. Your answer keeps going and going. And now we are getting the director's cut, the prequel, and several deleted scenes. So it's important that your interview prep isn't simply thinking through answers and writing them down, but also actually saying them out loud without scripts. And I do mean out loud. The first time the words are physically leaving your mouth should not be while there are 2 strangers staring back at you at Zoom. Another massive interview issue, particularly for people with 10, 15, 20+ years of experience, is being too general. I see this all the time with senior leaders. They're they are asked specific questions such as, share a time when something went wrong in a launch and how you handled it. And the candidate looks at them and says, okay, I have done this a million times. This has happened so often. Things always go wrong. How am I supposed to think of one specific time? And so then they start to describe what they would typically do instead of giving an actual example. Huge whopping mistake. Now the employer can't picture you working there. You just lost the offer. Specificity gives you credibility. So make sure you have examples ready to go in the interview. And I will link a free story toolbox below so you can use that to have examples for nearly every behavioral interview question. As long as you're able to have a bit of creativity with adapting. Those examples. And step 7, the people who get ahead the fastest in the job search do one thing that sounds incredibly obvious, and yet almost no one does it systematically. They test what is working. Treat your job search like an experiment. If you sent 50 applications and got zero interviews, that's data. Review your resume. Your targeting, your application strategy, your skills, your networking. If you're getting plenty of interviews but almost never get past that first round, that's different data. If you consistently make it to final rounds and lose the offer, that's saying something different. Do not keep fixing your resume when your resume got you 12 interviews. Look at where the funnel is breaking. Which networking messages get responses? Which types of people respond to you? What kinds of companies keep interviewing you? What questions are you consistently struggling with? Where are employers showing hesitation? The job seekers I work with are so successful because together we treat each week as an experiment. We measure what happened. We even have a whole dashboard and everything, right, where we can adjust and improve. So by week 4, they are in a significantly better job search situation than they were in week 1. And we do a lot of the heavy lifting for them so that they really have to just show up for interviews. And that is how you get ahead of 99% of people. You become the person who understands exactly where they fit, makes that value incredibly obvious, creates actual human relationships, demonstrates what they can do, communicates specifically in the interview, and pays enough attention to the results to keep getting better. Because there are a lot of incredibly talented people in the job market who are basically standing in a very long digital line waiting to be chosen. You can stand in that line, or you can find another door. This takes a lot of effort, no doubt, and there is so much more to it and so much more nuance based on your unique career. And we do all these things For our clients to take this weight off of their shoulders. So I will put a link to our program below. You've got this. Wi-Fi high five.