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Some advice for job seekers wondering how to stand out from the crowd… 

There is no silver bullet.  If you want to be able to farm opportunities, you need to do the work to cultivate and care for your career environment.  Otherwise you’ll need to get out there and hunt.   

We’ve all been there… You’re happily employed and can’t imagine needing to look for a job any time soon:

• You find recruiters annoying. 

• Recruiters reach out to you about totally irrelevant roles.

• You joined LinkedIn at some point, but you don’t keep in touch with any of your connections and you don’t accept new invitations.

Then something happens, and you NEED to find a new job:

• Suddenly the recruiters aren’t calling anymore.

• Your LinkedIn network is a list of people you used to know and now you have to reach out to virtual strangers for help.

So if feels like your only option is to constantly apply for jobs online, even if they aren’t a great fit. HR teams are dealing with so many applications now that even good candidates slip through the cracks.  They’re overwhelmed because so many people are doing the exact same thing you are. 

(Sidebar: Don’t blame the HR teams, they WANT to find your perfect resume in that stack of 1,000.  That would make their day.  But they are overwhelmed and a lot of them don’t have the tools or resources to efficiently deal with so much noise.)

The problem here is that you aren’t alone, and suddenly your resume is a needle in the haystack and you’re hoping to be discovered.

Here’s the truth:

The best way to protect your career is to cultivate and maintain relationships you can leverage when you need them. 

The best way to be discovered is to be discoverable with relevant details on your LinkedIn and other profiles.

It’s simple, but it isn’t easy.

Here’s a commonsense approach to improving your odds when it matters most:

Instead of getting annoyed by those recruiters reaching out, take the call and hear what they have to say.  If you aren’t interested, you can still make a positive impression and tell that recruiter about your dream job.  Or maybe you have a friend in need you can refer?

If the outreach is always about roles that don’t match your experience, maybe your profile is sending the wrong message… If your title is Engineer and you have no other details about your work on the profile, you’re coming up in a lot of keyword searches – but 99% of them aren’t for the right kind of engineer.  Do yourself a favor and allow yourself to be filtered in or out with a few more keywords.  Are you a Python Software Engineer or a Mechanical Engineer doing Energy Engineering projects?  Be more specific and you’ll get better results. 

Mindset is also important:

• What if you looked at all of the above annoyances as keeping your options open?  These calls when you aren’t interested could be viewed as low-stakes practice runs.

• What if the job a recruiter called you about isn’t right for you, but you have an unemployed friend who would be perfect?

• What if you don’t need a job now, but a few months from now things change? That’s especially the case lately. Even “safe” jobs aren’t so safe anymore.

• What if you haven’t interviewed for a job in years and talking to that recruiter was practice? 

• What if that recruiter could give you instant feedback on your resume and your interview skills like a personal trainer?  Maybe you’d be better prepared when it counted?

• What if that recruiter had the perfect dream opening for you 6 months from now?  Will they even know it? Did you bother talking with them so they could keep it on their radar? 

• What impression did you leave? Will the recruiter remember the interaction positively, or was your blow off unmemorable or even worse?

Using health as an analogy… Think of the networking and professional responses to calls and emails as diet and exercise.  And think of the job search as preparing for a specific race or competition.  If you keep a baseline of general fitness through good habits (when you aren’t job hunting) you are much better able to follow a strict program when you need to actually prepare for an event (when you are looking for a new job.) 

Just like with health and fitness, it’s simple, but it isn’t easy. 

Having to do the job search version of a “couch to 10k” program sucks.