Do you belong to the many people who feel sorry for a friend, former colleague, or acquaintance who is known to be very good at his profession but hasn’t been able to find a job for too long a time?
Has your observation of the person’s situation just left you at a loss to understand the reasons for their lack of success as there is no obvious explanation for it (such as a high unemployment rate in the area, for example)?
In this article, I explain why an intuitive approach to job hunting is common but often doomed to fail and what your friend needs to change to become successful.
What your friend has likely been doing so far
An analysis of situations like that usually shows that:
- The job seeker regularly screens well-known job portals (such as Indeed, Google for Jobs, LinkedIn, etc.) and the career pages of companies in their industry for job listings matching the person’s core competence.
- The job seeker then applies for the vacancies found by submitting a CV / résumé with a cover letter by email or via a web page provided for it.
- Their CV / résumé lists their previous positions including a high-level description of the corresponding tasks for each of them.
- The cover letter states their great interest in the open position, lists a few positive soft skills, and repeats some of the information in the CV / résumé.
- The job seeker then normally receives no response at all or only a rejection without any meaningful explanation for it.
- In the rare case of a job interview, the job seeker tries to answer all questions of the hiring managers or recruiters in a way that makes the applicant come across as competent and motivated.
- If the job seeker hears from the company after the final job interview again at all, the result is just a rejection stating that someone else has turned out to be a better match for the position.
Is that what your friend has gone through repeatedly? Of course, such an experience is very frustrating and over a longer period depressing.
Quick but wrong explanations for the lack of success
Often, the frustration caused by the continued lack of success makes people come up with quick explanations using a sociodemographic characteristic such as age, gender, religion, race, etc. as the sole reason.
However, while a certain sociodemographic background can indeed sometimes make a job search a bit harder, there are too many counter-arguments to this reasoning in the form of the many people with a similar background who managed to get the type of job they wanted within a reasonable time anyway.
An approach that is doomed to fail nowadays
While the common approach described above seems to be the logical way to follow as it used to work more or less in the past, it unfortunately minimizes the chances to ever get a good job offer nowadays. Here is why:
- Searching for and selecting vacancies whose job descriptions may not match more than the job seeker’s core competence lacks the understanding that job offers are based on what is offered in addition to the required skill set. Identifying open positions that one has a real chance to be considered a top candidate for requires an awareness of one’s own unique experience profile and a focused search for vacancies based on that.
- Limiting the search for openings to recruitment portals and company websites misses out on 60 to 80% of the available vacancies as most of them never get advertised there. Smart networking strategies are needed to find them.
- Applying for jobs listed on well-known job portals means facing a maximum number of competitors as these openings can easily be found by anybody. Smart networking helps avoid that by finding “hidden” vacancies.
- A convincing CV / résumé can only be written with a focus on what’s relevant to the desired position. If such a focus has not been defined for the search in general as mentioned above, it cannot guide the creation of the application documents either.
- A CV / résumé cannot convince the hiring managers of the applicant’s competence by only listing tasks and responsibilities of the applicant’s previous roles in it. Only the presentation of the positive outcome of that work for previous employers, in other words, the applicant’s relevant accomplishments in their previous roles can create such an impression.
- Cover letters that only state unsubstantiated motivation and soft skills and don’t show how the applicant’s experience from previous jobs relates to the demands of the open positions do not increase the chances of getting invited for job interviews. Only cover letters with convincing arguments that build a bridge from the applicant’s past to the open position can achieve that.
- Limiting one’s commitment in job interviews to answering questions leaves the outcome to chance. Only an active presentation that shows a good understanding of the demands of the open position, what it takes to be successful in it, why the applicant’s background is perfect for it, and why the job is attractive to the applicant beyond the expected great remuneration will make a convincing impression on the hiring managers.
There are more aspects job seekers can get wrong but these are the most typical and the real reasons for a continued lack of success and the corresponding ways out.
How to break free of those problems and get a great new job soon
Your friend can easily change their situation and get their job search on the road to success in no time by profiting from the step-by-step guidance on the right approach that I provide on this website. Have them start here.