698: The 4 Job Search Mistakes Killing Your Search: How to Fix Them and Find a Job You Love

[00:00:00] Scott Anthony Barlow: The job search alone can become a full-time job, but only if you're doing it the wrong way. Here's what doing it the wrong way looks like; You open LinkedIn, you browse through job listings and quickly realize that most positions require outrageous years of experience. And for the ones that sound even remotely interesting, over 300 people have already applied within the first 10 minutes.

[00:00:22] So you try a company website instead. You spend an hour crafting the application. You hit submit. And either you never hear back or you get the "Thanks, but no thanks." email. "The position has been filled." Hours invested, nothing to show for it. Here's the thing, there are two kinds of job searches. One, lands you a job. The other, lands you a career you actually love.

[00:00:43] And the difference between them isn't luck, connections, or having the perfect resume; it comes down to 4 mistakes most people are making without even realizing it. Today, we're walking through all four and exactly how to fix them.

[00:00:58] I'm Scott Anthony Barlow, and this is Happen To Your Career. I want us to start with the one mistake that sets everything else in motion, because if you get this one wrong, then none of the tactics matter.

[00:01:11] It's not your resume, it's not your LinkedIn profile, and it's not even who you know. It's an absence of the right mindset. Okay. So, particularly, this is having a reactive mindset that you bring to your job search from day one. And for most people, it's the biggest thing that's working against them before they've ever sent a single application.

[00:01:31] What do I mean by that? Well, let's take Amelia as an example. She spent eight years as a median communications director at a company that she loved, but then she got laid off and within a week she was scrolling through layoff horror stories and interviewing for positions that she didn't actually want. She wasn't looking for the right job. She was looking for any job.

[00:01:52] Amelia Johnson: Like, stop scrolling and reading everyone else's horror stories about being laid off because that does cause panic, and that did cause me to interview for a couple positions that just were not right.

[00:02:06] Scott Anthony Barlow: Amelia's mindset for job search directly impacted her decision making. And there's a reason that this happens almost automatically.

[00:02:13] When you lose a job, your brain registers it as a threat. Not a setback, a threat. In the moment it happens, the part of your brain responsible for rational decision making goes quiet, and the part responsible for survival takes over. You're no longer choosing. You're reacting.

[00:02:30] Psychologists call this avoidance motivation. Moving away from pain as fast as possible instead of moving towards something worth pursuing. And avoidance searches almost always produce avoidance outcomes. You don't land somewhere great. You land somewhere that isn't where you were, and sometimes it's even worse and you just don't know it yet.

[00:02:50] That panic creates urgency, and urgency creates action bias. Which is well-documented psychological tendency to prefer doing something over nothing. And even when doing nothing is actually the smarter move. Now, this happens to people, not just when they're laid off and lose a job, but even when they think about making a change.

[00:03:11] Every application feels like progress and every submission feels productive. But none of it is moving you towards something; it's just moving you away from something. And the faster you move, the more likely you are to land in a version of the same place, different names, and just the same version of problems over and over again.

[00:03:31] Scrolling layoff horror stories makes it worse. The brain's negativity bias means bad news lands harder and sticks longer than good news. Surround yourself with other people's worst outcomes long enough, and your sense of what's possible quietly recalibrates downward without you ever noticing it happened.

[00:03:50] Our team worked with Amelia to stop, not to stop searching, but to stop searching from fear. Before she touched another application, we had her answer different questions first.

[00:04:00] Amelia Johnson: You can't apply for jobs until you know what companies align with the values that are your priority.

[00:04:07] Scott Anthony Barlow: That's the shift from avoidance to proactivity. Instead of running from a layoff, you're moving towards something specific. That type of search looks different from the outside, but it also produces completely different results.

[00:04:19] Four months later, Amelia took a marketing manager role at her dream company, and for the first time in months, that anxiety was completely gone, not because the search got easier, but because it got clearer.

[00:04:31] Changing your mindset doesn't help if you start your search in the wrong place. Which is exactly what the second mistake is all about.

[00:04:38] Mistake two, the wrong order. Stephanie had built her career as a senior operations manager in London. One day, she had a job. Next thing she knew, that job was gone. But she wasn't just dealing with a job loss.

[00:04:52] She had a visa tied to her employment, which meant she didn't just need a new job, she needed one fast or she'd have to leave the country entirely. So she did what almost anyone would do under that kind of a pressure. She applied to everything; 145 applications, different industries, different job titles, different company sizes. Some she wanted, but most she didn't.

[00:05:16] All with the same assumption; more applications means more chances. Volume is velocity. Spread wide, and something absolutely will hit. But it doesn't. Nothing hit. Stephanie endured months of rejection and silence, and every rejection made the clock much louder. This is the second mistake, and it's the one that keeps job searches alive for so many months longer than they actually need to be, it's searching in the wrong order.

[00:05:42] Most people start the search on the outside. They scan job boards, they scan LinkedIn, they try to match themselves to whatever is out there. That's searching outside in. You are looking at the landscape and you're trying to reverse engineer yourself into whatever opening looks remotely close.

[00:05:58] It sounds logical, but it's not. The correct order, one that's much more effective at least, is inside out. You figure out what fits you first, and then, and only when do you look at what's available.

[00:06:11] Our team walked Stephanie through what we call the Ideal Career Profile. Not a vague version of, you know, what I want and where I'm looking. A specific version. Not just a, "head of operations role, wherever I can get it", but a, "head of operations role at a company under 250 people. Hybrid– three days maximum. Commute well under 45 minutes. With people that fit a certain, very specific type of culture and had similar values."

[00:06:38] These weren't wishes. These were requirements. The moment that she flipped the order and the priority, the search changed. She went from those 145 applications with really nothing to show for it to two offers within a single week.

[00:06:51] From application to accepted offer at a company that matched every line on her ideal career profile, that timing was eight days. Eight days after months of nothing. That's a perfect example of the second mistake. Searching outside in is the longest path to the wrong job. It's ineffective. Inside out is the shortest path or a far more effective, at least, is it your goal is work that fits you.

[00:07:17] But even when people flip the order, most of them are still measuring against the wrong things, which brings us to mistake number three. Having the wrong criteria. Jenna had been a criminal prosecutor since law school and she loved it, and then at some point she didn't. She knew she needed out and she knew what she wanted instead, or at least she thought she did. She wanted flexibility. She wanted freedom to be with her family, better life. Those are the criteria that a lot of people have.

[00:07:44] They sound right. They feel like values. And they collapse the second a real offer shows up. Because mid search, Jenna was offered another attorney position. More money than she was already making. Exactly the kind of offer that would be very easy to say yes to.

[00:08:01] If her criteria had stayed vague, she would've taken it. Most people do. Most people see a good offer in front of them, and of course they take it. It's a question of, "Do I take this or not?" Very narrow decision making. But in this case, our team advised Jenna to do something very specific before any offer arrived.

[00:08:21] Behavioral economists call this pre-commitment. Making the decision in advance before the pressure hits, so your exhausted future self doesn't have to make it from scratch. This is a little bit like going to the grocery store with a list and only when you're not starving hungry so that you don't come home with everything you didn't want in your basket.

[00:08:42] In this case, for Jenna, being fully remote was a non-negotiable, so was school drop-offs for her boys and working with a company that aligned with her Christian faith. These weren't preferences. They were conditions.

[00:08:53] When higher paying offer required office presence with no flexibility on days, the decision was already made. Even though it was the same kind of role with more money, she actually turned it down because that decision had already been decided before that moment arrived.

[00:09:09] We consider this to be the third mistake because most people evaluate jobs and offers and opportunities using criteria that lack specificity. Then they collapse under the pressure because they were never specific enough to hold on to what they truly wanted in the first place. When you're tired of searching, tired of waiting, tired of your current job, you tend to make different decisions. You'll take whatever feels close enough unless you've already pre-committed to what actually fits, a lot of times, in writing, before any other offer can pressure you into settling.

[00:09:41] Two months later, Jenna landed the right role as a senior paralegal at a fully remote faith-based company. She even found out on our onboarding call that the company's Christian values were actually aligned with something that she'd written on her Ideal Career Profile. Pretty crazy, right? But get this, because she was so well aligned with the organization, the people in it, she was promoted within a month. Vague criteria can feel sufficient until the moment it's tested. Pre-commitment is what protects you when that moment arrives.

[00:10:10] But even with the right mindset, the right order and the right criteria, there's one more mistake that determines whether any of it actually works, and that my friends, is mistake number four, operating in the wrong mode.

[00:10:23] Natalie had spent five years as a trust officer in wealth management, and by the end of it, her values no longer aligned with the work. She knew she had to leave, and she also knew in theory that networking was important, and then she sat with that knowledge for two months and did nothing. Two months of paralysis because the word networking makes people freeze.

[00:10:46] It sounds transactional, like using people, like, walking into a room with your handout asking for something. But the truth is, most job searches in the normal way are transactional. You see a posting, you tweak the resume, you apply through a portal, you wait, you get an automated email or nothing at all.

[00:11:05] Every step is designed to reduce you to keywords on the page, and even when that kind of searching works, it works for often the wrong reasons. Natalie's breakthrough came when she switched modes and reframed what she was doing. She stopped thinking about networking to get a job and started thinking about talking to people that she was curious about, building relationships with people that she wanted to know more about them. That was it. No ask, no agenda, just a conversation in a space that she wanted to understand.

[00:11:36] So she reached out to a college friend at a company she was interested in, and a curious conversation turned into a role. And if you think that's an antidote, look at the numbers. Laura is another one of our clients who transitioned from flight attendant into instructional design. She literally tracked every application in her search.

[00:11:55] Laura MacDonald: The referrals that led to interviews, like 69% of the jobs I applied for with the referral, led to at least the first interview, versus my cold applications, where I was just applying through the career site where something like that was 8%. So...

[00:12:14] Scott Anthony Barlow: 69% versus 8%, that's huge. Her referrals converted to interviews at more than eight times the rate of cold applications. That's not just a small edge. It's a completely different game.

[00:12:27] Laura MacDonald: Now, I didn't know anyone in the department, but I reached out to the director on LinkedIn and he answered and said like, "I hope we get to meet in the second round." And now he's my boss.

[00:12:39] Scott Anthony Barlow: The right mindset, the right order, the right criteria, none of it matters if you're executing through the wrong channel. The mode is the thing that makes every other one of these fixes work together.

[00:12:49] If any of this resonates, the paralysis of wanting to leave and not knowing where to start, the months of applications that go nowhere, the vague criteria that don't protect you when the wrong offer shows up or two months of not reaching out because networking sounds like using people, we want you to know that you are not the problem.

[00:13:06] The way that traditional job search happens and functions and people think is expected, that's the problem. The harder you search the way that everyone has taught you to search, the faster you end up in another career that you don't love. The right kind of search does four things very differently, and it changes your mindset before you change your resume. This starts with you, not the job board.

[00:13:29] It allows you to get specific about what fits before any offer can pressure you into settling. And it stops you from sending applications into a void because you start having conversations with real people that you're actually curious about. Surprised that that leads to better opportunities, right? Not a surprise.

[00:13:48] But when you do these four things, the search gets shorter, the offers get better, and the role or the offer that you accept is one that you'll actually still want to be in three years from now. This process of finding work that fits you, it is really difficult. We understand that it is. So want to make that easier.

[00:14:05] So if you're ready to stop searching for jobs, the wrong way, and start creating the career and the life that you want, I would say drop me an email directly, Scott@happentoyourcareer.com. Put 'Conversation' in the subject line, and 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.

[00:14:23] Because the moment you take the first action, you stop letting your career happen to you, and you start happening to it. I'm Scott Anthony Barlow. This is Happen To Your Career. Let's go make it happen.