Stop Falling in Love with Every Job: A Smarter Way to Apply

Job search fatigue is real. Learn how to stay in the game without breaking your heart.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

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The way that companies hire people has changed, but the way that people apply for jobs has not. This is a fundamental disconnect that harms job seekers.

The Traditional Way to Apply for a Job

The old way of applying to jobs was to create a resume that was a chronology of your work experience, starting from when you began working to the present day, including jobs that overlapped and jobs that might not be currently connected to what you do: contract positions, freelance positions, volunteering. Etc.

You would either send that resume out to the jobs you're applying for, or you might do a little bit of adjusting to match the job posting. When you got into the job search portal – LinkedIn, CareerBuilder, Indeed, etc. – you would read through the posting to see if it was a good fit.

As you read through the posting, you fall a little bit in love with the job. You start to see yourself in it. You get excited about certain parts of it. As you adjust your resume, you think, "Oh my gosh, I am such a good fit for this. They would be fools not to call me in."

You go through that whole process. If you're providing a cover letter, you do the same thing. You read the job posting, get a sense of how you're a good fit, and fall a little bit in love. Then you write the cover letter about why you'd be a great experience fit, how you could help them, how they could help you, and how you'd be a great cultural fit.

If you get an interview, you walk through a very similar process. You prep based on the job posting, the company website, their social media, press releases – all the while falling more and more in love with the job.

What used to happen for average people was this: a traditional job seeker would apply to maybe 10 to 20 jobs, get about 5 interviews, maybe end up with two offers to choose from, and off they go. For pivoters, they’ve always had to apply to more jobs than traditional job seekers. Let’s say they applied to 50 to 75 jobs, got a handful of interviews – maybe around 5 – and got one offer.

Why You’re Applying to 100+ Jobs and Still Not Getting Hired

Now, people are applying to hundreds of jobs. The average job search in the United States lasts six months. That means some people are below that, but it also means many are above. People are reporting job searches lasting a year or more. And that’s a lot more than applying to 20 jobs. People are applying to 5, 10, 20 times that – while still taking the old approach and falling in love with each job.

In this modern market, people get ghosted. Sometimes you apply and don’t even get a confirmation that your application has been received. You might get an email that the position has been filled, yet the posting is still up.

Let’s say you get into an interview. You could find out the position is closing, they’re not going to hire anyone, or they’re changing the title and restarting the search. Or someone else was just a bit more perfect – they had a certain kind of experience that you didn’t.

This happens over and over. And because of how many jobs you have to apply to in this market, instead of a little heartbreak like in a traditional job search, you are now brokenhearted over and over again.

What does that do? It makes it very hard to keep going. The only way out is through. The only way to get a job is to keep going. But if it breaks your heart every single time, it becomes harder and harder to do the work, apply, and go to interviews.

The old way served us for a long time – until it didn’t. Now, it doesn’t work anymore because it causes you to get too invested in the search without any potential for payoff, and with a lot of potential for heartbreak.

How the Market has Changed

So, what can we do instead? What’s the new way to search for jobs that will support us?

First and foremost, understand a couple of crucial things about what’s happening.

Understanding the Rise of Fake Job Postings

One: a significant number of postings on job sites are not real. These companies are not actually hiring.

What are they doing? In some cases, they’re collecting resumes for future searches. They could be collecting information for data harvesting. They might be pretending to their current employees that they’re filling open slots – restoring sanity – but have no intention of hiring. They may want to look more competitive to clients or competitors, appearing to grow when they are not.

So, not every job you see is real. When you keep that front and center, it becomes clear that you can’t spend three, four, five hours prepping a job application when you don’t know if it’s real.

I’ve run tests. I hired a few others, and we tried different strategies to determine whether a job posting was real. We tried only Easy Applies, only company sites using enterprise software like Workday or ADP. We tried Lever, Greenhouse, applying via email, and focusing only on postings shared directly by someone.

None of it worked. Not one thing we tried increased the response rate. The number of real versus fake jobs is pretty even across all those channels. Everyone trying to use these jobs to their advantage is using all the different methods of posting a vacancy.

By the way, that doesn’t mean I think someone who shares a job posting on LinkedIn is doing something wrong. I don’t think they know their workplace has no intention of hiring. They’re cogs in the machine, just like everyone else.

Hold that first point in mind: a lot of job postings are fake.

Everyone Wants to Hire Someone Who’s Already Done the Job

The second thing: everyone wants to hire someone who’s already done the job. This has always been true for pivoters, but now it’s true for traditional job seekers too.

You might think, "That’s fine – I have done the job." But they don’t mean it in that simple way. They want someone who woke up this morning wearing an "I’ve done this job" pajama set, went downstairs, ate it for breakfast, wrote a blog post about it, and posted on LinkedIn.

They want the job to be your identity.

Job Typecasting: How It’s Limiting Your Career Options

It’s like typecasting. When Hollywood stars aren’t in control of their careers, they get put in the same roles over and over. When they do take control, you see them break out – like Daniel Radcliffe after the boy who will not be named. He’s done wonderful, diverse roles. If you haven’t seen him in The Lost City with Sandra Bullock, it’s great. But before that, he was stuck in a type.

That’s all of us right now in the job search: stuck in typecasting mode.

Remember: not every job you apply to is real, and everyone wants you to have been born to do this job.

How to Present Yourself for Different Roles – Like an Actor

An example I often give clients is to think of it like performing. Let’s say you’re an actor going on auditions. You’re multi-talented, so you go in for all sorts of roles. For Abbott Elementary, your headshot says “teacher” and you wear a teachery outfit. For Law & Order: SVU, you’ve got your gritty leather jacket detective headshot and a different monologue. That’s how you have to think about the job search. You have to present the exact version of what they’re expecting – just like an actor auditioning for a type.

What to Do with Your LinkedIn Profile When You Wear Many Hats

The third thing: even if you present yourself in different ways in your materials, you only have one LinkedIn profile. If you present yourself in only one way, others will be confused if that doesn’t match what they’re looking for. But if you present all the variations at once, you’ll look scattered.

Instead, be ultra-specific in your resume – being the “type” they expect – and more generic on LinkedIn. That way, everyone who arrives gets a sense of how you could be a good fit, without being disqualified for seeming like a different type.

These are the ways we prepare ourselves to navigate this heartbreaking job search more effectively.

Adapting Your Job Search to Today’s Reality

When I took all these factors into account, I decided there was only one path forward – we needed to make our materials in advance – resumes, cover letters, and a unified LinkedIn profile. We needed to decide what role types in what industries we were targeting, and create for the bell curve.

The bell curve, also known as the normal distribution, is a statistical graph that shows how data is spread out around a central value. When we create to that central value, we pick up the majority of what we need to without having to iterate from scratch every time we apply or interview.

First, you must decide what roles you want to apply to. Then, you must study the roles, getting granular on what unifies them, while understanding the outliers, and create highly specific resumes and cover letters for each type. Your LinkedIn complements the resumes by speaking to their experience and skills generally.

This way, you don’t have to adjust everything each time you apply, falling in love with a job that might be more Casper than Casanova.

Same with interviews. Using an improv-based interview technique, job seekers can prepare ahead of time and then adapt to the prompts in the moment. This means you are highly prepared for interviews without engaging in the traditional process which gives you heart eyes for the job.

Final Thoughts: The Only Way Out Is Through

The old ways don’t work anymore because the job market has changed. If you want to keep your heart intact, you have to change with it. Understand how the market currently functions, and adjust your strategy so that you can function within it.

Any questions, let me know. And if you're interested in one-on-one support, I’d be happy to help. You can start a free strategy session with me, and we can talk about your job search right now, today.

They don’t just want someone who’s done the job. They want someone who is the job.