661: Job Search and Career Change Myths: Why ‘Apply Everywhere’ Fails — 7 Unconventional Strategies to Land Multiple Job Offers and the Right Career Fit

Scott Anthony Barlow: Everyone says job search is a numbers game. Apply everywhere; you've got a network with everyone. But what if I told you that's completely wrong? Instead, let's flip the script. Let's use strategies that lead to not just any job but the right job. And by the way, what if the goal was not just one job offer?

But what if it was multiple job offers to choose from? I want you to forget everything you think you know about job searching, because in this episode of the Happen to Your Career podcast, we're diving deep into counterintuitive tactics that career coaches won't share. Strategies that could completely change how you land your ideal career.

And if you're ready to ditch those old rules and unlock a job search that actually works, we're gonna go over seven specific strategies that you can use beginning today in your job search, plus one bonus at the very end.

For the first strategy, I want you to target an astounding fit, not everything. But what does that mean? Meet Stephanie. It just felt like something is not working. She's now the head of operations at a successful FinTech company, but not long ago, she was racing against a ticking clock. With Visa challenges looming after she was made redundant, she was waiting for the other shoe to drop, and her 60-day deadline to begin where she needed to secure a new role or face leaving the country.

Okay, so if you're in her shoes, then panic’s probably gonna set in, and that's what many of us would do. And consequently, she did what also many of us would do, cast the widest net possible, applying to 145 different jobs, only to face almost all of them rejections and lots of silence. But something fascinating happened when Stephanie narrowed her focus.

Instead of applying everywhere, she got really specific about the role she was going after and began networking with intention. The result? Well, two job offers within a week. Her journey perfectly illustrates what we've seen with thousands of clients. Getting hyper-specific about what you want almost always leads to better results than casting an incredibly wide net.

So how do you do this differently? Well, for example, I've personally had a lifetime application success rate of about 70%. Meaning, 70% of my applications have turned into interviews, and I've been on more than a hundred interviews, well over a hundred interviews. Many of our clients have had similar stories.

For example, Tanya and Jenna are two people whose stories we shared on the Happen to Your Career podcast, that both went after just one company. I'll link those episodes in the description. Okay, so even if you're not gonna go after just one organization, the secret here is that focusing on fewer but higher potential fit companies and or opportunities are going to get you better results.

It turns out that you can devote more energy toward less opportunities, which feels less stressful for many people. But what if I told you that's completely wrong? Strategy number two. Job search strategies aren't one size fits all and should absolutely be tailored to you and your situation. For example, applying for jobs on company websites it's great for someone with specific experience in that area.

But what if you're lacking experience, or let's say that most of your experience, as an attorney, but you want to shift to learning and development. This means that a better strategy will likely be getting in through the back door by building and leveraging relationships. This can create opportunities that you wouldn't be able to get through a normal, traditional application process. In all cases, you have to modify your strategy to what is actually going to make sense for your situation, not just do what everybody else is doing.

Number three, never ever just apply and wait. So what should you do instead? Well, if you are going through that traditional application process, then you might as well get someone from the inside of the company to pull your resume out of the stack. One of the reasons that many of our clients get such great results for interviews is because they're not just applying and then waiting. Instead, we teach them how to leverage marketing and sales psychology to get far better results. But what if I told you that's completely wrong?

An example of what that looks like. Well, before you apply, you can literally call up the hiring manager and chat with them. “I saw you had an opening for an HR director. I have 15 years experience working in HR and operations and all types of different organizations. I was trying to figure out if your organization might be a fit beyond what I can find on the company website. I'd love to ask you a few questions about what you're looking for. Do you have a few minutes right now?” Okay, so that's what it can sound like. But at the end of the conversation, if you loved what you heard and you think it actually might be a fit, you're not just chasing a job, then you can thank them profusely and ask who else would they recommend that you connect with to learn more about what it's actually like to work there. They might be able to even introduce you to that person.

This allows you to do two things. One, find out if this company or people is actually what you're looking for. But it has that simultaneous benefit of beginning multiple relationships inside the organization, all people who can now help you or hire you if you decide you want to keep moving forward. And if that company or role is what you're looking for, you can go back to the hiring manager and say, “Hey, this seems like it could be a really great potential fit. If you feel the same, how would you suggest we move forward?”

Okay, moves like this, where you get to have direct conversations with decision makers, can get your resume pulled outta the stack before you ever even submit an application. They can definitely up your percentage rate of interviews, too.

Number four, you own the process, not the company. One thing I've observed after getting to help with thousands of career transitions are the candidates that do get multiple offers are not just qualified, they also own the entire process. While everyone else is passively waiting to hear back after each interview, you can create your own advantage by taking control of the follow-up at every single stage along the way and making it easier for all the people involved. What you can do– stay on top of next steps. I want you to be specific and make it easy for them to say yes. Ask, “What are the next steps? Who will be involved with that decision? What's your timing for this decision? Is it okay if I make it easy on you and contact you if I haven't heard back next Thursday? Okay, cool. Do you have a card with your contact info? I'll give you a call then. You'll hear from me by Thursday. Thanks so much.” Okay, so two keys here are, one, asking permission, and two, getting all the information to truly make it easy to then have them say yes and move you on to the next stage.

The asking permission part, “Is it okay if I call you on Thursday?” It's the difference between helpful and pushy. If they say yes, they're now requesting that you take control over a piece of the process, whether you're in an interview or you have an offer on the table. Psychologically, you've now shifted roles. You've moved from job candidate to partner in getting the work done.

You're also signaling to whoever you're working with that you can move things forward, and chances are high that nobody else is doing that. So you're further positioned as a high performer by comparison to everybody else they're talking to. Okay, lastly, and most importantly, getting their permission sets you up for the second key reason we do this. It allows you to have reason to get much more information than you would otherwise, and it creates a natural environment to do so. You can now ask for their contact info and get it organically. “What would be the best phone number to reach you on Thursday? Would it be better if we just scheduled an exact time to check in?”

I promise you nobody else is going to have a personally scheduled time to review their decision. Not only does this eliminate the interview and wonder what happens next, it also has that side benefit of letting you feel more in control in the process, which is less stressful. Taking control of the plot process also allows you to pave the way to more yeses and eventually more job offers.

If you haven't already figured it out by now, we're heavily leveraging sales, marketing, and even user experience best practices and embedding them into the process of career transition and job search. We're leveraging psychology, like removing cognitive friction and signaling that they can trust us by offering to take the work off their plate.

Okay, speaking of leveraging marketing psychology, this next strategy will save you potentially many months and many thousands of dollars, and potentially make your applications much more effective. I developed a resume and application process in 2009 to create a shortcut and reduce my workload while I was out of a job without sacrificing results.

I didn't have a lot of time then, and it was important that I was getting a lot done in a short period of time. So that leads to this next strategy. Don't pay for a resume that isn't going to be effective. Earlier, I mentioned, we all know that when we think of job search, most people think of updating the resume.

Let me be clear, we often work with people who we don't update the resume at all, and then they still get job offers. So it's not always a requirement like we think it is. That said, there's an opportunity here where many people are not wanting to update their own resume, and paying somebody for that perfect resume is often a complete waste of money.

At best, it's costing you interviews, and at worst, it's throwing money away that could be better spent elsewhere. And what I'm not saying, I'm definitely not saying, never pay for resume help. The issue here isn't whether or not you create it yourself or hire someone else; it's about making sure that any resumes that you are creating or having created for you are actually effective.

Now, this is where those marketing best practices and psychology come back into play. Your resume is fundamentally a marketing document. Its only job is to get you an interview, not to get you hired. The way it does this is by creating immediate relevancy for recruiters and hiring managers. If your resume clearly matches exactly what they're looking for, they'll consider it relevant and worth their time.

And if not, they'll move on in seconds, unless of course they're desperate for candidates, then you know, they're probably not gonna invest more time trying to figure out if you might be a fit miraculously. So, how do you make a resume relevant? Well, this means that every single resume that you send out needs to be custom-tailored to the people who are going to get it and the job, and the situation. How else do you think we get such great results? Okay, so then the question is, how do you tailor to the job every time without having to spend all your time forever redoing your resume endlessly over and over and over again? And that's where this master resume concept that I developed in 2009 comes into play.

The way this works is you have just one copy of your resume that you continually add to and improve forever. Every time you develop a new bullet point or achieve a new result or a new milestone, you put it on the master resume. And as you can imagine, this can cause your resume to grow to five or 10 pages in length.

That's okay. The idea here is not that you want to submit that five or 10-page resume every time. You don’t. That would be ridiculous. But instead, you make a copy of that resume, and then what you do is delete everything that isn't relevant or directly related to the job posting and company that you're applying for.

It's far faster to delete a lot of items than it is to create a new, custom-tailored resume every time. And this makes it possible to deliver a highly relevant resume and application very, very quickly. By the way, a new trend that's emerged on the internet where people share their resumes, claiming, “This is the resume that got me the job. Feel free to copy it or learn from it.” I've seen it everywhere. Everyone's hunting for that magic resume template, but let's be real. One job offer from a single resume. Hmm, not exactly groundbreaking.

I think what's truly impressive is seeing that someone got five or seven, or nine job offers. But here's what I think you'll find. When you talk to those people, those people did a phenomenal job tailoring every single resume to the job, or they're highly specialized and skilled at building relationships in the interview stage, which leads me to the next strategy. As you can tell, it's never just one thing that causes someone to make a wonderful transition here. It's never just one magic bullet. When we have a client who has multiple job offers to choose from, they are, of course, making better decisions. It's allowing them to negotiate easier. It's allowing them to make an improvement in their career in every single aspect. You can also bet that they're doing these things differently at every single step of the job search or career change.

What I mean here is that when we start to stack these strategies together, it leads to disproportionately different results, compounding results, compared to the average person who's bubbling through job search. So stack strategies, you'll be glad you did. That is a strategy in itself. I'm sharing all of these, not because any one of them is magic on their own.

It's not. But instead, because when they're done together, you can get a very, very different set of results. So all of these strategies that I mentioned and all these techniques, they're learnable, but not everybody wants to take the time to learn them. And I'm just giving you a sampling of just a few.

I've been living and breathing this stuff for 20 years. And if you don't wanna learn or do this on your own, I would suggest getting expert help. But here's the challenge with that. When does it make sense to leverage support from an expert? It's a normal reaction to say, “Well, I should be able to do this myself.”

It's also a normal reaction to think, “I need to conserve every dollar as I'm getting ready to make a career change. That feels risky.” And what I find is that this mentality may not serve you very well. I tend to go to the math to keep me logical and help me evaluate decisions. So here's some of the math.

From our data in over 13 years, an average person who wants to transition to fulfilling work has spent anywhere from eight months to about three years trying to do it on their own. This is hundreds, many hundreds of hours of their time, usually, with no success, or they've accepted the first seemingly good job offer that came their way, only to find it hadn't solved the problem.

Now the question is for you. Is it worth it to invest in expert help? The same way that you might hire an electrician or an accountant or someone to build your dream home, to help you cut down that time, or get a very different result. I want you to think about it another way. Could someone help cut months off your time, or even help you negotiate many thousands of dollars more than you would be able to do by yourself?

Most of the time, the answer is yes, as long as you are looking for an expert that's done it over and over and over again. Then what you can do is say, “Okay, is it worth it to me to spend X amount of dollars to save months of time,” or to make, say, 10% more or 30% more, or 40% more? That can help you evaluate what would be worth it for your budget in your situation.

All of these strategies work individually to either lead you toward jobs that are a fit, or they reduce your stress along the way, but the real value is, of course, when you stack them together, like I mentioned earlier. But I wanna give you one last bonus strategy that you can use. This is super simple, but it's important if you want to make momentum forward, if you want to make progress.

What I want you to do is just capture progress with one thing a day. Progress isn't about huge, crazy leaps. It's just about doing little things that add up over time. Small wins build momentum. Progress also equals reward circuits in the brain. When we experience something pleasurable, like achieving a goal or receiving a reward, well, the brain releases dopamine, a neurotransmitter associated with pleasure and motivation. This, of course, creates a positive feedback loop. Accomplishment, celebration, dopamine release, increased motivation, more action, more accomplishments.

If you're ready to stop believing the stories that are actually keeping you stuck and start creating the career and the life that you want, drop me an email directly, scott@happentoyourcareer.com. Put “Conversation” in the subject line. We'll connect you with the right person on our team, and we'll figure out the very best way that we can support you.

Happen To Your Career - Meaningful Work, Career Change, Career Design, & Job Search