It’s 2023, unemployment stands at 3.5% and everyone is seemingly hiring. Generative AI is the talk of the town, with ChatGPT turning heads, albeit so far without much business use. You graduate, or get laid off, or just feel like you need a new challenge/learning opportunity, or perhaps more money to afford buying the suddenly overpriced groceries, lease a new car, or afford an apartment not too far from where you work and play.
You put together a new resume, dusting off almost-forgotten terminology you haven’t really used in a few years; revisiting your GitHub contributions, from when you were more inspired, than overworked; and Googling hip new terms, which supposedly make you look better. You’ve read about Applicant Tracking Systems judging your resumes, before a human even looks at it; know about the in-demand buzzwords, and perhaps even wrote to your Senator about the overuse of AI in hiring. You are full of excitement, anticipating a new role, which will take you places. Maybe you are even ready for the ‘long breath’ approach of looking for a job for several months, being overly picky about a new opportunity.
Then, you start applying to jobs. Descriptions seem either overly general, or demand exactly what you know and use on daily basis. You fly into them, anticipating new employers fighting for you with competitive offers, boosting your ego, income and skills. Then, the reality begins to take hold. After being overly picky at first, you indiscriminately send your resume everywhere after some time, still unwilling to believe that companies don’t recognize you for the superstar, that you always have been. You begin to track sent resumes, analyzing results to improve your search. At first, every 3-4 applications cause a ‘thank you for applying, we didn’t pick you’ automated responses. You laugh at the imperfections of automated systems. Then, you start getting recruiter calls every 10-20 resumes sent. When it doesn’t go past the initial information gathering calls, you begin to ask questions, just to find out, that most posted jobs aren’t actually approved for hiring, but are ‘future hires’, otherwise known as ‘I’d love to hire someone like this, but right now just happy not to have been laid off myself’.
You reinvent your search again and find out about a common trick to get through the ATS filters. Using white font, you include irrelevant to you buzzwords on your resume, just to finally create some traction. Perhaps it creates additional activity for you this way, but the embarrassment of being unable to answer questions about non-existent skills shortly causes for you to stop that practice. You haven’t read as much after college, being busy with your job, and perhaps family, but lately you read what seems to be hundreds of pages of job and project descriptions, all to result in meager effects.
The answer to an effective job search has been talking to the right recruiters, at least for the last 2 decades or so, but recruiters suddenly barely have much to offer. The reasons are simple: companies can’t decide, if rising interest rates will cause a recession soon; public companies’ shareholders got too spoiled over the last dozen or so years and demand larger dividend payments; VC funds paused their investments in most startups; and the AI revolution will change everything, but in ways yet unknown to most; so companies are hiring, but slower, and opting not to pay recruiter fees to placement agencies. After all, companies, like Amazon, Google, and many others simply overhired and had to lay off too many, so why risk going through the same now, paying fees for it on top of that?
Finding the right recruiter is the key. While no recruiter can change the current uncertain hiring landscape, they CAN empower you in many other ways. After all, good agencies work with hiring managers all the time, so they know what’s in-demand and what’s not; what’s exciting to companies looking to expand, and what makes them ignore your application; and how to get through the ‘gatekeepers’ of the recruitment process. Properly preparing your resume, not by an automated system or outdated methodologies of free or inexpensive resume preparation services, but by an expert in the field, makes a huge difference. Knowing how to reach actual hiring managers, and avoiding endless resume submission, is a skill recruiters hone through the years, keeping it a secret, as that is how they make their money.
The difference between spending a few hundred dollars on your job search and doing nothing but apply to posted jobs, often equals $10K+ of lost income per month, potentially for many months. Accepting a wrong position, as that was all you could get, frequently results in a misrepresented job, or being laid off shortly after and going back to restarting your search. After all, you are who you are, and you can’t, and likely don’t want to change that. Taking a wrong job is no different from dating a wrong partner. A mismatch often only takes you further away from your goals, whatever they may be. A prolonged job search creates an unnecessary gap in your skills or on your resume.
Answers are all within your reach, as long as you approach your job search the same way you manage all of your other goals. Understand your goals and capabilities, learn about the mission you undertake, and invest in the desired outcome. Then, Lady Luck, or Fortuna, will smile onto you. After all, chance favors the prepared mind.
