This post originally appeared as a 9-4 Weekend Issue of the Daily Job Hunt email. Sign up for kick-butt career hype in your inbox each morning.
Mindset for Success
Kill It With Fire. “I’m not good on camera.” “People will reject me.” You know who it is. It’s your subconscious voice preventing you from recording that 30 second video that would land you on top of the resume pile. This voice is standing between you and success. So tell it to shut up. Bring the fire, and kill it!
Got Game? A simple way to make the job hunt more fun is to make it into a game. E.g. challenge yourself to complete one pitch a day for a week, send follow-up emails under 10 words, or approach a hiring manager that seems way out of your league. Having fun is a great way to be consistent, and consistency breeds success.
Links worth checking out
- Get Hired in 10 Minutes (podcast)
- Video Pitch Building Tool (resume alternative)
- How to Research A Company Quick (podcast)
Quote of the Week
“All big things come from small beginnings. The seed of every habit is a single, tiny decision.”
— James Clear
If Dating Apps Were Like Job Sites
Sure, you can meet the love of your life on Tinder.
But we all know that this would be more of a happy coincidence than an intended consequence.
After all, the platform was not designed for this.
It was designed to be a simple, low-friction way of acquiring dates.
People make profiles showing a polished version of themselves, highlighting their most superficial qualities; and then proceed to get this profile in front of as many people as possible —people they themselves are superficially interested in.
The target audience then superficially browses through these profiles and quickly (i.e. in a matter of seconds) decides whether they want to go further.
Yes, clearly a low-investment, low reward approach here.
Actually, hold on…
Does this description remind you guys of anything?
Of course, I’m talking about job sites. And the title I chose for this newsletter is clearly a joke, because job sites are already exactly like dating apps.
Easy to use, for sure, but leading to tons and tons of absolutely nothing.
Employers get overwhelmed with hundreds of low-quality applications, and job hunters, in turn, get their inboxes flooded with generic automated rejection emails.
Nobody wins.
In fact, I would argue that the job hunt portal is one of the worst inventions of the last decades.
Our advice: do the exact opposite in every way.
Instead of approaching hundreds of companies, select only a handful.
Instead of sending something generic and low-effort, send something custom made (like a pitch).
Instead of filling out the portal, send your app to a human.
This is why we can boast an 80% success rate, where “apply-with-one-click” job sites barely make 1% on a good day.
Of course, you should do what you want. Feel free to “tinder it” if you don’t care too much about who you end up with.
But if you do, you might want to do a little more work.
Up to you.
Corné
and the DJH team
