Why Job Searching Sucks
aka How to Get a Job You Actually Want

Preface: a job search is likely the most soul-sucking task you’ll do a handful of times in your life. Good talk. See you out there.

With that out the way, let’s attempt to answer the question “How can I get a job I actually want and have the most fun possible?” Glad you asked 🙂

Why Job Searching Sucks

Job searching sucks because for 99% of the process you have no idea if you’re making progress or not, or if you’re pointed in the right direction. It’s like running a race blindfolded. Should you speed up? Should you conserve energy? Is the finish line inches away, or miles? Am I even running in the right direction? Yuck.

Sadly, the solve here is not some super secret to actually making progress.

The solve is tricking your dumb caveman brain into thinking it’s making progress, and convincing your rational adult brain you’re pointed in the right direction.

How We Make Progress On Anything

Imagine you’re on a rowboat in the middle of the ocean on a clear day. Everywhere you look is water and sky, not a single landmark anywhere on the horizon. Let’s say you row for a while in a single direction, then stop to look around. Still just water and sky. What does your caveman brain tell you? Nothing is different aka no progress.

Now imagine instead you dropped a buoy where you started, and again rowed for a while in a single direction. Upon stopping and looking back at the buoy, you’d see you traveled some distance away from it. What does your caveman brain say now? PROGRESS, however your rational adult brain now kicks in with its own critiques “but are we going in the right direction?”. Gosh, you’re so difficult.

Finally, imagine you have a radio, and someone contacts you that was once stuck in a rowboat just where you are and afterwards found land, and this person tells you which direction to row. You drop a buoy, and start rowing in the indicated direction, looking back regularly to the buoy to understand your progress, confidently moving in the right direction based on the wisdom of someone that’s gone before. Day after day you row without seeing land, but you can be confident you’re moving in the right direction, and the buoy helps you understand you’re actually making progress. You don’t actually know how far land is away, you just know you’re going in the right direction, and you’re making progress. Given that, all that matters is your daily habit of rowing, knowing you will eventually reach land.

You’ve got two parts of your brain to satisfy: the caveman and the rational adult. The caveman wants progress. It wants to KNOW that its effort matters. If it doesn’t see progress, it’s likely to quit, or literally eliminate all motivation to keep going, making it really hard for the rational adult to make progress. The rational adult wants direction. It wants to KNOW that effort is pointed in the right direction. Without conviction on direction, the rational adult will most often not take any action at all.

Pain aka Why Companies Hire Anybody to Do Anything

Companies hire people for jobs because they have a problem or opportunity they can’t solve without that job, and that causes them pain. If they could solve it, they wouldn’t create the job. They’d save the money, time, effort and energy and just keep doing their thing.

They don’t want to be in pain, in fact they don’t even want to job search, they just want the solution. They may not even be sure that the job they listed is the right one to solve the problem. Even worse (for you), they may not even have posted the job yet because the pain is still coming to a boil.

This means you have a single focus in job searching: be the pain reliever.

How We Make Progress On Job Searches

Conventional wisdom says to fire up LinkedIn or Indeed and apply for as many jobs as possible. Honestly you might as well burn your oars. You will feel you’re making progress (”man, I applied for 15 jobs today”), but it is the absolutely wrong direction, and leaves you in a position to take the job offered to you (if you even get an interview), not the job you want. Why? Remember why companies hire people: to solve pain. If you’re one more application on a pile of applications, how will that hiring manager have any idea you can solve their pain any more than the next person. They will be highly uncertain in fact, and uncertainty creates risk, and risk creates more pain. You’re literally making their problem worse. Stop that.

So if we punt conventional wisdom, what’s the alternative for direction? Let’s return to your single focus: be the pain reliever. (“But how can I be a pain reliever without applying for jobs?” Quiet caveman, the adults are talking).

Every leader that’s hiring, and every hiring manager, is sitting there with a spear in their chest shaped like a job opening. They are desperate for someone to help them shortcut the process and just have a great person hired and in that seat. Though the job may be posted on LinkedIn and Indeed, they are soliciting their network and anyone they TRUST for referrals. Trust is key here. Trust reduces risk. Risk reduced = pain reduced.

So what do you do with that information? Create valuable connections with AS MANY PEOPLE AS POSSIBLE (for help, see How to Network), where “valuable” means you’re adding value to THEM, not just looking to get a job.

Why as many people as possible? Two reasons.

First, every person you meet will help you refine what you ACTUALLY want to do. Why? Because humans are pretty terrible on average of knowing what they actually want, and sometimes we just have to talk it out. Every time you meet with someone, you’ll share what you want, and they’ll have feedback based on their story, experience, point of view etc. That feedback will refine you over time and help you really hone in on what it is you actually want, and in turn your subsequent connections will be even more focussed. It’s a virtuous cycle of sharing, refining, sharing, refining, etc.

Ironically, if the person you’re meeting with has a job they are hiring for, this may be true for them as well. As they talk to you, and hear how you solve problems, they may even shift the nature of the job to fit YOU, because you’ve given them a clearer vision of how to remove their pain.

Second, think of this like setting up a series of nets to catch fish. A person you create a valuable connection with is like a net now set up for you: they are aware of your goals, your skillsets, the types of problems you can solve. And likely, if they took the meeting with you, they are a helpful person. A helpful person looks to reduce pain if they can (just like your job searching focus). Now let’s say this person hears from a leader that’s hiring or a hiring manager that they are experiencing a pain that just happens to fit with your skillset. Guess who’s top of mind? You, friend (caveman brain and all)! They are motivated to make the connection to you, because by doing so THEY can reduce pain, THEY are part of the solution. You are literally making them a HERO by networking with them, because now they can refer you. This is actually how it works.

This even works if the job’s not posted yet, or not even created yet! A leader might mention a pain to a friend you connected with, and that friend might say “hey you might want to connect with this person, they actually might be able to solve that for you!”. Guess again who’s the hero? The connector! Sure, you’ll ultimately solve the problem, but there is great value in that connection, and that’s why they are motivated to do it.

How Can I Find a Job I Actually Want and Have the Most Fun Possible?

Let’s land the plane… err… boat. You’re back in the ocean. I’m on the radio, and I’m telling you where the land is. Let’s put it all together.

Direction :: Create valuable connections with AS MANY PEOPLE AS POSSIBLE.

Progress ::

1. Set a goal to make 20 outreaches a week (yes that’s a lot) to people that trust YOU.
2. Take every meeting you can, with a goal of getting at least 1 additional referral from that meeting.
3. Every 20 outreach, or every 5th meeting, do something you love: get ice cream, watch a movie, go on a date, whatever. Reward progress.

#3 is the kicker here. The recipe above is a habit, not a project. I can’t tell you if this will take 13 days or 13 months (or longer), but I can promise you that it will work. #3 is what keeps you in this game. It tricks the caveman into ongoing goal attainment for the cookie, instead of the binary focus of either having a job or not. You’re building a job searching habit for the long haul, and your caveman is going to need the support to keep you in the game.

The numbers in #1 and #3 actually aren’t that important. They are speed limits for you. Do more, do less, it doesn’t matter, just repeatedly take action.

Job searching is the law of big numbers. The more people you talk to, the more valuable connections you make, you exponentially increase the number of people who might become aware that you can relieve their pain.

We Become What We Repeatedly Do

An unhelpful author once said a job search is likely the most soul-sucking task you’ll do a handful of times in your life. But that’s not all it is.

Aristotle said “Virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions”. A job search is an opportunity to “do the actions” of pain relief and creating value. The longer you navigate the season, the more reps you get at this, the more impact you will have as a pain reliever and value creator when you inevitably land that job you really want. There is gold in these hills, one way or another.

It won’t always be like this. Seasons come and go, but consider what opportunity you have before you to become a new kind of person as you explore what might be next.