14 pieces
Why job searching feels the way it does.
Most advice about job hunting is written by people who are not currently doing it. This is the other kind.
Applications
You are worse at describing your own work than you think
Everyone undersells themselves on paper, and it is not modesty. It is a predictable consequence of knowing too much about your own job.
3 min readEveryone says tailor your application. Nobody says how to do it forty times.
Tailoring works. The advice to tailor is also quietly impossible at the volume a real job search requires. Here is how to resolve that.
3 min readYour applications should tell the same story
Small inconsistencies across applications are easy to create and surprisingly expensive. Why one source of truth matters more than clever wording.
3 min read
Staying organised
Did I already apply here? Keeping track without a spreadsheet
Every job search produces a tracking problem, and every tracking system gets abandoned around week three. Why that happens, and what to do instead.
3 min readTwelve tabs and a spreadsheet: searching is its own full-time job
Finding roles and applying to them are different tasks with different failure modes. Treating them as one is why evenings disappear.
3 min read
Strategy
Applying early beats applying perfectly
The same application sent on day one and day nine gets read by two different people in two different moods. Here is why timing outranks polish.
3 min readHow to job hunt when you already have a job
Searching while employed means competing for roles during hours you do not control. What that actually costs, and how to work around it.
3 min readThe real cost of an application is not the twenty minutes
Applications cost more than the time they take. The expensive part is what the hours were taken from.
3 min readSwitching careers means applying more, not applying better
A career change lowers your hit rate for reasons outside your control. The usual response is to polish harder, which is the wrong lever.
3 min readThe uncomfortable maths of a job search
Most people apply to far fewer roles than the process requires, then conclude the market is broken. The arithmetic explains a lot.
3 min read
The human part
Momentum is what keeps a job search alive
Most searches do not end in a decision to stop. They taper. Understanding why makes the tapering visible before it finishes.
3 min readYou should not have to perform enthusiasm forty times a week
The quiet indignity of the application process is rarely discussed and does real damage. It is worth naming.
3 min readRejection fatigue is real, and it is not a character flaw
Sending applications into silence wears people down in a specific, predictable way. Understanding the mechanism makes it easier to keep going.
3 min readJob searching on a deadline, when severance has an end date
Searching with a countdown running is a different problem from searching at leisure. What changes, and what to do first.
3 min read