Keep Your Lines in the Water
Stacking career websites to create personal passive leverage
Exordium
I love fishing...a nice day on the water interrupted by heart-pounding excitement. Create leverage within your job search and transform it into sport fishing.
Have you trolled for fish? Put multiple lines in the water while the boat is moving. You cover a lot of water and each line is rigged-up ...if you want the big fish, then use the big hooks. Sit back, relax, and wait for the pole to bend into that magical question mark to know you have a big one on the line. THEN put down your beer.
For too many years, I kept my head down, while beneath the surface of my awareness, who knows how many amazing opportunities floated by? But technology you can keep your lines in the water on autopilot, waiting for that big fish to hit. This is creating leverage through automation, and the rigor and discipline of setting it up will make you a more powerful being.
Don't waste your precious currency of attention on sporadically thrashing about and wandering aimlessly through the digital wasteland of job websites. Focus your energy and development of mastery of your current skills and career, but in the background, you are going to set-up little robots to do your bidding, and only raise your attention when you have one on the line worth reeling in.
Narratio
Let's level: your employer views you as an asset, but their job is not to optimize your net worth! In fact, their incentive is to get as much of your labor and talents for as long as they can, for as little money as possible. Highest ROI for them. Well, one of your highest ROI projects is career advancement, which often means taking new outside opportunities.
The best time to find a job is when you have a job. Nothing self-sabotages worse than the desperation of being jobless in a weak negotiating position. And having more options, is ALWAYS more power and leverage for you.
And are you even climbing the right mountain? Don't sub-optimize with tunnel vision by climbing in the direction of increasing slope to get to the top, when you zoom out and realize you are on the entirely wrong mountain.
Partitio
An active job search takes a lot of time and effort, so you are going to create a level of automation. This technique is not mutually exclusive to all the other ways you may find opportunities, which you should continue to cultivate.
Like income, lets divide methods of searching into active versus passive. You can only have so much active income, limited by hours in the day. The fabulous thing about passive income is scalability. But passive benefits take active work to initiate. Set up passive job filtering automation and create personal passive leverage. Trolling for the big fish is the analog automation you are going to recreate in your digital world for your dream career opportunity.
Confirmatio
The major career websites have written and refined the search & matching algorithms for you. You are going to use their free tools to your maximum benefit.
Create up-to-date profiles including a resume on LinkedIn, Indeed.com, Glassdoor.com, and all the other sites I reference below (and any others you desire). Then set up specific job search criteria so that they use their technology to deliver you only what meets your criteria.
How to separate the wheat from the chafe? Almost all these websites let you pick your own criteria or use your recent/saved searches to develop automatic job alerts, usually emailed to you. You will have to experiment with your settings to get the ideal signal to noise ratio. It's too easy to get spammed from these channels and waste your time and attention.
Set your sights high. Don't search for your current career level or only incrementally better. Look for the next step change in your career (e.g. Corporate Controller moving up to a CFO). Where salary is an input, don't be shy, set at least 20% to 30% higher than what you make now.
But don't fall into the attention trap. If you get too many emails, or not the right types of jobs, adjust your filters. I also recommend you turn off all notifications for these sites on your mobile device and set up an auto rule on your email to send them all to a particular folder (not your inbox) which you check only periodically. We are fishing for keepers, not browsing all the fish mongers inventory.
Don't be afraid to experiment here; test other areas that may be extremely fruitful. Want to live somewhere new and exciting? Look at completely different industries or sectors? Because you are setting up multiple websites, which all have different approaches, you can aim each one at different opportunities.
Here is my curated list in alpha order. Further posts will show you how to set up each one, as they are all a bit different:
AngelList (https://angel.co/jobs): I love what they're doing here to democratize startup funding and hiring
Flexjobs.com: great jobs for remote, flex, and work-from-home. Don't overlook this one
Getwork.com: this site actually harvests job opportunities directly off employer websites and has a pretty good matching algorithm
Glassdoor.com: love the company reviews and salary transparency. Look up your current company for kicks, then get to work and set up your automation
Indeed.com: BIG site, with lots of jobs, a must
Ladders.com: seems to get more of the higher executive jobs than the other sites. If you are white collar, a no-brainer
LinkedIn.com: your home base for career networking. But don't waste your time using this like crack social media
Monster.com: one of the originals and also a must based on size
Scouted. (https://scouted.io/): has a matchmaking style that looks beyond your resume and has a tech focus
ZipRecruiter.com: another one of the big ones that cannot be overlooked
Refutatio
I know what you're thinking, this advice is obvious. Use job websites to find jobs? Who would've thought?
However, using them in a strategic and disciplined way, and following through on the set-up, will deliver opportunities that pass by most people, who only look when they think they need to.
But what if my employer or coworker sees me on the sites? Will it adversely impact my career prospects with my current employer?
Make your own decision based on your situation, but almost no reality is as bad as the imagined. Many people hold themselves back in a prison of their own making.
But I'm happy where I am, why do I need to do this?
You don't. And most people won't. But I’m writing to the group that will, because you want to be better. And if you get too many fabulous opportunities, isn't that a good problem to have? At least it will develop your skill in turning down opportunities and flexing your powerful "No" muscle.
I'm already on LinkedIn, this all seems like a bit of overkill?
The various sites really do draw in many different opportunities and have their own niche, techniques, and algorithms. There is value in all of them and little downside, except the initial work to set them up and then filtering correctly to avoid inundation.
Peroratio
Most people's career changes depend on serendipity or circumstances buffeting them like a storm. Don't let the randomness of the Universe be the sole determiner of your future. It is all about improving your odds for positive outcomes and creating option value for yourself.
“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not: nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent.” - Calvin Coolidge
Most animals can be divided either into specialists or opportunists, and as the famous quote goes, specialization is for ants. In this world, where we are driven to ever deeper specializations in our chosen fields, make sure you're flexing your opportunist muscles.
In nature, opportunist equals constant state of awareness, but that has a cost. Spend the initial activation energy to set up machines, then streamline your passive tools! Break it down into small parts and make it happen! My next few posts will the nuts and bolts of implementing this.
Now go make your own luck!