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The Simple Truth About Job Hunting
Focus On These 2 Things To Prevent Distraction
Kyle Thomas
July 01, 2023
(Read time 6 min 17 sec)
When you start looking for your next job, the amount of information you’re hit with can be overwhelming.
It’s great that we live in a world with so many different tools.
But most of them are distractions.
Sure, they can contribute to your ability to land your next career-accelerating job, but they can also derail you from focusing on what really matters.
I see endless numbers of people fall into the trap of wasting hours testing out which online resume optimization tool works best.
The key to your job hunt will not be one tool that unlocks endless opportunities.
It’s understanding what is at the root of a successful job hunt and ensuring every action you take improves those areas.
The job hunt can be simplified into two things.
Relationship Building
Value Creation
That’s it.
It’s not anymore complex than that.
Other things can improve your odds of attracting attention, increase your access, and accelerate your job hunt, but when push comes to shove, you’re building relationships and delivering value.
Relationship Building
Why do relationships matter?
The average person will spend 90,000 hours at work over their lifetime.
That’s one-third of your life.
With so much time and energy spent at work, it only makes sense that you would want to enjoy the people you’re with.
Unfortunately, most people don’t have this at the top of their minds as they enter their job hunt.
They focus purely on the mechanics.
Update resume. Write cover letter. Submit application. Reach out to recruiter.
Repeat.
They take humanity out of the process.
The result.
A job search that takes longer because they’re not making genuine connections with other people.
Surprise that once the honeymoon phase wears off, they realize the culture sucks and don’t get along with their coworkers.
If someone knows you and likes you, they’re more likely to trust you.
And when a hiring manager selects you as the candidate for the role, they put all their trust (and their budget) behind you.
So think about establishing that trust upfront by building genuine relationships with people you want to work with.
It will make it easier to land the role, and it’ll make life in the role more enjoyable.
Creating Genuine Relationships
So if relationships are so important, how do we craft them?
Let’s take this back to the basics again.
In your life, who do you want to have relationships with?
I’d argue that the people you want to have relationships with are those you find genuinely interesting and who are interested in you.
So use that as a guide to understand who and how to reach out.
If you’re looking at someone’s profile on LinkedIn and debating how to reach out to them, ask yourself three questions.
1. What do I find interesting about this person?
2. What do I hope to gain from this conversation?
3. How can I help this person?
If you can’t answer question number one, do not advance to question number two.
It is a prerequisite that you understand the person and what they do and find something interesting about them.
If your answer to number two is, ” Get a job,” you’ve missed the mark.
You should be 100% ok to exit the conversation with nothing more than information about that person, insights they can provide about their career path, the company they work for, and the problems they are working on.
If you enter with the sole purpose of using the person to get your next job they will sense that.
If, instead, you approach them with genuine curiosity and interest, you will be more memorable than anyone that person has spoken to all month.
Relationships aren’t built with your hand out.
They’re built by showing up, asking good questions, making the other person feel listened to, respected, and important, and lending a helping hand.
Why Value Creation?
Now the area where most people get hung up.
Value creation.
People struggle to share their unique value because they’re blind to it.
You assume everyone knows what you know, so you keep your mouth shut.
But here’s a secret.
They don’t know what you know.
No one has had the unique set of experiences you have had.
No one has the web of connections you have made over the course of your career.
Openly share what you know and you’ll be seen as someone who offered value, insight, and resources to help and asked for nothing in return.
If you provide value, you’ll trigger the social psychological feeling of reciprocity.
When that happens, you’ll make it far more likely that the other person will look for ways to provide value to you.
Maybe that will be in the form of a referral for an open role, an introduction to another person they know who is hiring, or the sharing of a useful industry resource.
It will show your genuine interest in them as a person and the mission their company is working toward.
There’s a second reason too.
Resumes can lie.
Work doesn’t lie.
Showing someone that you have solved the problems they’re tackling today goes the extra mile to prove to them that they don’t need to worry about whether or not you can do the work or if you have the dedication to their cause.
The proof is in front of them.
Creating Value
So how do you create value?
If you have done your research ahead of the conversation, you will know the department the person works in, the products the company offers, and the company’s focus and goals for the next year.
You can enter the conversation with:
Connections from your network the person might find useful
Case studies of how you reached some of the same goals in previous roles that they can plug and play
Resources that you have found helpful to execute or gain information on a subject
Offer those to the person during the conversation.
But there’s one additional way to create something of immense value.
Ask about their problems and opportunities.
What is the thing that keeps you up at night?
What are the most annoying things you have to do everyday that you wish would go away?
What is the biggest opportunity that you think the team needs more help to tackle?
Once you get the answer to these questions use your prior experience to create templates, playbooks, and other useful tools that help show them the way to solve those problems today.
The End Result
People hire people they like.
People hire people they respect.
People hire people they know can get the job done.
If you start your interaction with a company by building relationships and delivering value you will accomplish all three.
You’ll have them saying, “The team loves you and it’s clear you can do the job so it’s a no-brainer to get you in for an interview.”
📈78 Companies Who Raised & Are Hiring Now
June is in the books.
Last month 146 companies raised over $4.5 billion.
I scraped each of their careers pages for you and found 78 that are hiring now!
***A REMINDER OF HOW TO USE THIS DOCUMENT***
Just because there aren’t jobs posted yet doesn’t mean the company isn’t looking to hire soon. After a company raises money is a perfect opportunity to reach out to team members, congratulate them, start building relationships, and offer value you can provide.
There you have it, it’s not overly complex.
Seek to build genuine relationships with people you find interesting at your target companies.
Seek to deliver value to those people by being curious about the problems they are solving.
Focus on those two things and don’t get distracted by the hot new thing that just popped on your LinkedIn feed.
Stay consistent, stay hungry, and let’s become career champions together 🏆
Kyle
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