2024’s Best Job Search Strategy and How to Make It Work for You

Are you in a job search and you're frustrated because where you're spending your time isn't giving you the results that you want? Are you curious about if the tactics you're using are the right tactics that you should be using for your situation? I asked a question to my community of several hundred job seekers and asked them, what is the number one problem that you're having in the job search? Overwhelmingly, the answer was trying to understand if the strategy, the tactics that I'm using are the right tactics. Is what I'm doing right because I'm not hearing back what I'm expecting to hear back. Today I want to talk a little bit about job strategy and how to think about that for your own job search. My name is Morgan. I'm the founder of AllTheJobs.xyz. It's a job search automation platform and it's a way to bring the jobs to you and keep track of how you're applying for them. Although that's not what I'm going to be talking about today. Today we're talking about job strategy. So what is a job strategy? Well, a strategy really just means what am I doing to find a job and am I doing those things in the right proportion? And I'd like you to think about it like this. You don't know where your next job is going to come from. And so because of that, you'll have to do for most people, most of the time, have to do a couple of different things in order to make sure that you are putting yourself out there in these different ways because you're not sure which one is going to come in. And so we're going to talk about this. Most of the time for most people, a modern job search strategy for 2024 is going to be a mix of these three things. It's going to be a mix of cold applying, warm applying, or networking. Let me just quickly go over what those three things are and then we can kind of talk about kind of the pros and cons of each and how we put those things in proportion. Of course, there are other tactics that you can use to find a job, but these are the three main things that for most people, most of the time will be the big ingredients for what your job search strategy is. So let's talk about cold applying. For me, cold applying is where you send a resume to a job application without really much personalization, if any. This is where there's an application, you fill out the application, you attach a resume, maybe you change a line, maybe you change a couple of things, but you're really just spending a couple of minutes and you're kind of putting it out there. This cold applying tactic is really important because it keeps your numbers up and it makes sure that you're out there to a bunch of different people. My suggestion is that you cold apply for jobs that you are interested in doing, but that you would do, that you would be fine doing, that you would excel at, but maybe it's not your dream job. Maybe it's one out there. So the point of cold applying is that you can do a lot of them a day. I think a lot of people might be able to do 10, 12 of these a day, which is why they're important. They put you out there to a wide swath of people that are hiring. Warm applying, the way I'm defining warm applying is where you spend some significant amount of time to personalize or reach out. So if you're rewriting your resume for this job, if you are writing a cover letter and you're reaching out to the hiring manager or the recruiter or someone like that, or if you're looking within your own network and finding someone who works there and asking them for an introduction, that's what I'm going to call warm applying. Warm applying is good because it increases the chances that you'll get your first callback. And so it's really, really useful. I have definitely talked to many people that use this as their only strategy, and I think sometimes that is a mistake. I'll just give you one quick example. A couple of years ago, I came across a dream job, this job that I've wanted to work for this organization for a long time. It was perfect, and this was exactly the job that was exactly in my wheelhouse. I did everything I could to try to get an interview. I sent a message to the two people that I knew that worked there, I reached out to the hiring manager on LinkedIn, I rewrote every single word of my resume to get there, and I got the interview. And as I was in the interview loop, I realized, yo, this job is a nightmare. My boss's boss was basically at war with the CEO, and this person would come in kind of as a pawn, and there was this whole thing, and we were never going to really get anything done, and it was just going to be this whole mess, and I was like, wow. I spent probably eight hours, all told, spending time to get that interview, and I got in the interview, and within an hour, I was like, yo, this is a nightmare. And so, while personalization increases your chances of getting a callback, it does not increase the chances that the job is right for you. And so, that's why I suggest that it's not, should never, almost never be, we'll talk about this a little bit later, but it should almost never be the only tactic. This isn't the only way to go, again, because it wastes a lot of time, and you want to be very strategic with how you use it. The last tactic that I want to talk about is networking. That is, making sure that everyone that's in your community and in your network knows that you're looking for a job, and is there to help you. I think this works really useful if it's done in a consistent way. Most people, when they get laid off, or they decide they're looking for a job, maybe they go there and hit LinkedIn, or they might, if they're really ambitious, they'll send an email out to the people that they know in their community. And that's useful, but it's more useful the more you do it. So if you're on a job hunt for months, you want to make sure that you're consistently reaching out to people in different ways, whether it's on LinkedIn, whether it's through email and going out. The other thing about networking is that this is the one part of this that has a lot of benefits outside of just the job search. Talking to people and being in community with people is an extremely important way to keep your mental health and physical health, to be honest, up during a job search, which is often one of the most difficult parts of people's lives. So those are the three elements here. Now, of course there's other stuff. There's other stuff like working on your personal brand or doing marketing, creating content, stuff like that. That stuff is important, but it really, really, really depends on where you are. I think for some people, doing personal branding or going to job fairs, or again, there's other tactics like doing weird stuff like standing on a corner with a sign. I've seen videos of people standing on a corner with a sign saying, hey, hire me, and people being really impressed by that or other stuff like that. I think thinking of other tactics like that is important, but it's also very, very, very specific to you and your job and so on and so forth. So let's talk about this. So my suggestion or the way I want you to think about it is in your own job search, what's the mix now? What percentage of time are you spending cold applying versus warm applying versus networking versus doing all of the other stuff? Your strategy is going to look very different depending on the type of job that you're looking for. So if you're looking for, like for example, if you're a, let's kind of do an example like a bicycle mechanic or someone who's in a trade. Most of the time, if your job is geographically bound and there's a limited number of employers, you're going to want to warm apply and network your way in. Because there's a smaller number of employers, you're going to want to put more effort into each employer and you're going to want to get a find a way in. And a lot of those kind of smaller communities often will have, you know, it'll be really important that there's a personal reference there. So there's a lot of things like this, I think, trades, nurses, things that are geographically bound and have a limited number of employers. On the opposite end of the spectrum, think of a project manager, someone who does project manager, project managing for software or just business stuff, you know, business generalists. They will probably have a high number of employers and be non-geographic. Those job searches are really, it's really important for those people to put in a lot of cold applications in. You want to get that number of jobs that you're actually applying for really high because there are a lot of employers there. And you want to make sure that if you happen to be the right person at the right time, that you want to be kind of in front of those people. And you want to, perhaps, you know, in that situation, you would only want to really warm apply to jobs that you thought were dream jobs. So for people that have office jobs and you're looking mostly remote, it's really important to make sure that you're applying to, you know, many jobs a day and that you're keeping that number, you know, really, really high. Those jobs are also really competitive. And so you might want to get, you know, you might want to think about, okay, you know what I'm going to do, 60% cold applications, 30% warm applications and 10% everything else. Whereas if you were, you know, in a different situation, if you were a nurse or you were in a trade, maybe you would do 10% cold applications and maybe, you know, 40% warm applications and 50% networking or whatever it is. I want you to be, but I do want you to be very conscious of the amount of time that you're spending in each one of these areas because, you know, my last kind of main point here is that I want you to be iterating on your job strategy. I want you to make sure that you're doing the strategy that you're doing for a certain amount of time and seeing if you're getting the results that you want to get. And then maybe you're going to change that. For example, you know, two years ago when I was in a job search, I was doing a lot of warm applying. I was basically only warm applying to jobs and I was applying to, I don't know, five jobs a week. Warm because I was really warm applying. Like I was using every like lead that came in. I was really talking to my network. I was really personalizing my resume for each job. And I got basically crickets for a long, for a while. And when I started cold applying and making sure that cold applying was a big part of my, the big part of the number of jobs that I was applying to is really when I started to find success. And it's honestly kind of weirdly when some of those warm applications started to come into. So I want you to make sure that your strategy, that you're giving your strategy enough time to work, but then also you're assessing it. So my suggestion is maybe that you assess it maybe once a month and say, is this the right thing? Is this, you know, is this causing me, you know, is this, is this what's going on? And don't forget, don't sleep on networking. I think for a lot of people, especially the longer they go into a job search, the more that they leave it go for me. You know, I left networking behind a lot of times because I found it embarrassing or because I found it hard or just because I started to get depressed and I didn't want to be around people or whatever. And that's exactly the time when networking is going to be good for you. Not just outs, not just outside of the job search, but inside of the job search, making sure that you know that there's people around that are going to help you find a job and so on and so forth. So that's what a job strategy is. We didn't quite get to everything, but let me know if I, if there's anything else in there that I'd like to talk about. My name is Morgan. I'm a founder of all the jobs at XYZ. It's a job search automation platform. And next video, maybe we'll talk a little bit more about that. So yeah, thanks so much. You feel free to add me on LinkedIn or follow me here. It'd be very helpful. And if you're looking for a job, sign up at all the jobs at XYZ. You know, my platform is designed to, you know, help you stay focused and have the jobs come to you. All right. Thanks. Good luck.