One thing I'm realizing from talking to job seekers lately:
A lot of people are not taking the job search nearly seriously enough.
I don't mean that in some motivational-speaker way.
I mean literally, mathematically.
If you tell me you've been unemployed for four months, you're stressed about money, and then I find out you sent seven applications this week…
What are we doing?
Seven applications is not a job search.
For a normal, broad white-collar search — and I'm not talking about a CFO trying to a perfect $300k/year job — there are enough qualified roles out there that you should be doing a hell of a lot more than that.
And if you're unemployed, finding one is now your job.
Not the thing you do for an hour on Monday before you get discouraged and close LinkedIn.
Your job.
This is one of the things I'm building into Unfair Careers right now, and I think we're going to be pretty aggressive about it.
Once your positioning is fixed — your resume, LinkedIn, story, proof, all of it — I want the first five active search days to be a mad sprint.
100 qualified applications.
That's 20 a day.
Even if each one takes 15–20 minutes, that's a 5–7 hour workday.
Which sounds like a lot until you remember:
If you don't have a job, and you need a job, what exactly should rank above getting one?
Then after that initial sprint, the target is 50 qualified applications a week.
And importantly, I don't want 50 on Monday and then nothing Tuesday through Friday.
I want a consistent daily cadence.
Not because there is some magical law that says 50 applications = job.
There isn't.
But because I don't even trust the conclusions people draw from tiny samples.
If you've applied to seven jobs and heard nothing, you don't know if your resume sucks.
You don't know if your positioning is wrong.
You don't know if you're targeting the wrong jobs.
You barely have data.
Once you get enough qualified applications into the market, now we can actually start seeing something.
How many replies?
How many screens?
How many interviews?
Where is the funnel breaking?
Now we can diagnose the actual problem instead of sitting around saying, "The job market is terrible."
And yes, the job market can be terrible.
But if you're sending seven applications a week, I don't think the market is the first thing we need to diagnose.
Maybe the first thing we need to diagnose is your job search.
We will do exactly this for you — from A-Z, with our Unfair Careers system.
Click here to learn more: