Why applying for everything usually gets you nothing
Every so often someone mentions, slightly sheepishly, that she's been keeping a spreadsheet. It has the company, the role, the date she applied and a column for what happened next, which is almost entirely empty.
She's usually applied for a lot of jobs by this point, and they're not all the same type or calibre. There'll be a head of something at a big corporate, a smaller role at a charity she admires, a couple of interim contracts and something slightly left field she applied for at 11pm because the advert made her feel something.
Her conclusion, very reasonably, is that the market's terrible, and sometimes it is. After 25 years in recruitment I'm not going to pretend there aren't stretches where good people struggle to get a reply from anyone.
What I usually see on that spreadsheet, though, is somebody who hasn't decided what she's going for, and it shows in every application she sends. When you apply for everything, your CV has to work for everything, so it ends up describing you as capable and experienced, which is true of almost everyone applying.
I've read a lot of CVs from the other side of the desk, and someone working through a big pile of applications is looking for a reason to put you on the shortlist. A CV that could be for any job gives them nothing to hold on to, however good the person behind it is.
Picture someone who's spent fifteen years in operations at a big retailer. She's applied for head of operations roles, a programme manager contract, a job running a charity's volunteer network and something in sustainability she spotted on LinkedIn, and she's heard back from almost none of them. When she finally sits down and looks at the roles that actually excited her, every one of them involves fixing something that's broken that nobody else wants to touch.
That becomes the sentence at the top of her CV, and suddenly her applications read like they were written by one person who knows exactly what she's for.
The standard advice when nothing's coming back is to treat it as a numbers game and send more. If your applications aren't saying who you are, sending more of them just adds to the silence, along with a lot more evenings lost to cover letters.
The part nobody talks about is what the silence does to you. Every application that disappears feels like a small verdict on whether you're any good, and after enough of them you start applying for jobs a level below where you are, just to hear something back.
If this sounds familiar, stop applying for a week. Open the spreadsheet and highlight the two or three roles you'd be excited to get, then look at what they have in common. It might be the kind of problem you'd be solving or the size of the organisation. Write it down as a single sentence and use it to decide what goes on your CV and which adverts you don't bother with.
Fewer applications take longer to write, and they're a lot more likely to get you a reply. With any luck the spreadsheet ends up with far fewer rows and, finally, something written in that last column.
If you can't find anything the roles have in common, that's useful to know too, and it's exactly the sort of thing a clarity call is good for.
Sally
If you'd like to talk about your own situation, my Clarity Calls are a free 30 minutes, just the two of us. Hit reply with the word CLARITY and I'll find us a time, or fill out my Clarity Form below.
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