Job Fishing

Table of Contents

I love the language of “landing” a job, I’m not sure if it originates from fishing lingo, but that’s how I hear it. Job-fishing seems so much more appropriate than job-hunting. When you are fishing, you often don’t know much about the fish, what kind it is, if it will be delicious, how big it is, if it exists! Hunting is so much more straightforward, you find the prey and take it, the prey doesn’t consider your value proposition and make a decision. I don’t mean to say hunting is easy, you may not find your prey at all, or they may smell or hear you coming, despite your best efforts. But fishing is almost an agreement with the fish, I’m offering this tasty morsel, will you accept it? The analogy definitely has some holes. The job-fisher is hopefully offering the real thing and not a hook wrapped in feathers, though to be sure there are some job-fishers doing exactly that.¹

I went through a phase where I was really interested in fishing. I went often, I read about it, I learned how to tie flies, I practiced casting. I also went through a hunting phase, though with less intensity and zero success. I eventually decided that I preferred all of the secondary activities better than the actual fishing. I liked camping and hiking and being in the wilderness. So, I quit fishing. Lately I’ve taken on a very different interest, job-hunting, or maybe I’ll start calling it job-fishing. The secondary activities involved in job-fishing are much less fun, but it has a lot of analogous activities, you go to the lake/job-board find an area that seems promising and put out your lure/resume. You don’t get good feedback, a fish/recruiter not biting doesn’t mean the lure is bad or good. Getting a bite/phone screen is a pretty good indicator that you are using the right lure, but it could just be a really hungry fish. Given the lack of direct feedback, it is necessary to research the experience of other job fishers and even job fishes (I guess that’s a recruiter, which doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny). This “research” is basically scrolling social media.

As a result, I have learned much more about looking for a job than I ever wanted to know. In the rest of this article, I will try to distill all of this “research” into some kind of helpful text. The way I see it, there are four important parts: scouting (more of a hunting term) or looking for the jobs; fly tying or refining your resume, application, and network; presentation or getting yourself seen, by applying, messaging, etc.; and setting the hook or interviewing. The one clear finding that resonates through all aspects is that there is no passive part in the process, using the worm and bobber approach is much less tiring, but in the current job market, it really has no utility whatsoever.

Make no mistake, these categories should not be considered steps, all of the parts of the job-fishing activity are constant, even though you may find activity in each wax and wane, you need to be paying attention to all throughout. Since feedback is very limited, there is value in tweaking things you may think are perfect, especially if you are applying to the same position or company more than once. Maybe something that seemed inconsequential the first time landed your application in the virtual dust bin, and with that changed, you get the job. Despite numbers people throw out for effectiveness of certain approaches (I have not even the smallest amount of faith that any of those numbers are well founded), there is always some aspect of let it fly and see how it goes.

scouting

This part of the process probably gets the least attention. I think because it amounts to shopping, for which we all have a great deal of skill. There is a big difference here, the product also picks you, so, you will need to find a relatively high number of jobs you want and companies that you want to work for. I have tried a few apps and spreadsheet templates for doing this, which one you pick will depend on your personal preferences and needs. I recommend trying this template from spreadsheetclass.com Job Application Tracker. When I started using a tracker, I thought the important part was knowing when I applied to what position, and the result. Now I realize that the most important part by far is the page with the list of companies. There are many companies and it’s not trivial to find out enough information about them to make a decision about whether or not you are willing to work there, you don’t want to look up the same company multiple times. You might think that can remember, but these company names can be very close to each other and may or may not have any relation to their industry. Keeping the list makes it easy when you see a job posting, check your spreadsheet before you even look at the job description. Over an extended period of job-fishing, this can save you many hours and headaches. You might be tempted to only save companies you are interested in, fight it, list them all.

I’ve made some changes to the template, that I really appreciate.

1. Every application I enter has to reference a company on the company tab
2. Add a column for the last time you checked their site for jobs, when the list gets big, it’s nice to spread out these checks a little. I also put conditional formatting on this one so if it’s yellow, I know I should check soon
3. Use a lookup function to get the last applied number, since I will never manually update such a field, and it’s useful to know when it might be time to reapply or not.

When approaching the search, it is clear there are a lot of ways to look. There are countless “hacks” posted on LinkedIn, many of them are simply other websites gathering job postings. For some industries or job types, there are sites that fit better than others. For me, I haven’t found that amazing job site, where I can check it and call it done. For the first few cycles of looking for a job, I started by looking for companies that stood out in my memory as great places to work. For example, GitLab published an article about how they get things done in a fully remote environment², I loved the concepts and it was all new to me. This really had an effect on my work life, so I sought them out and went to their career page.

fly tying

Just like in fishing, the fly-tying phase can take up whatever time you give it. Your resume is and always will be imperfect, as is everything else. But, just because it can’t be perfected, doesn’t mean that it isn’t deserving of care and attention. What I can surmise as the most important advice on resumes currently is that it should:

1. Have a short list of impact statements near the top, these should have numbers (often stated as “proof” but that term makes me anxious)
2. Be as simple as possible while still looking appealing. This is both to please the ATS and the human looking at it.
3. Be long enough to tell your career story, without being so long that the reader gets sick of you.
4. Be somewhat customized for the particular job posting. Too custom and it may seem suspicious, too generic and you might not seem to be a great fit.

Impact Statements

Impact statements are where you convey your ability to put your skills to good use. It’s great that you are have an advanced degree, but it’s even better if you used that to save your employer 7 million dollars in shipping costs. This is the section where you can really impress the person scanning hundreds of resumes. This is also the place where many job hunters will find themselves stuck. If, like me, you didn’t know that your resume would need this while you went to work every day for 20 years, you may have let your accomplishments go unmeasured and unrecorded. If your employer didn’t measure things before and after your project, and you didn’t either, you don’t have much hope of knowing your impact. This is unfortunate, but not insurmountable. Take some time to reflect on the project, think about why it was taken on and how it went. You will probably start to get some idea of the scope of the impact. That’s enough to get something concrete-like to put into your impact statement. Maybe you think you remember there was a 10x improvement but you aren’t sure if it was 8.5x or 11.1x, the truth is it doesn’t matter. If you are pretty sure 8.5x is the low end, say it, they aren’t investing in that company, they want to know what you accomplished, and 8.5 is great! If you are foggier on it, reduce to a number you are confident in, “greater than 5x improvement” is much more impressive than, “significant improvement.” The goal here isn’t a prefect recall of statistics, it’s conveying how much impact you had.

Simple and Appealing

The format of your resume matters. Unfortunately, there isn’t really an agreed upon format that you can count on to be best. The goals are conflicting, you want it to be good both for people and for machines, and people don’t want to notice that you are trying to make it good for the machines… and, you don’t know if there even is a machine to care about. Don’t litter the resume with keywords, don’t put a bunch of things in hidden text. Similarly, don’t rely heavily on graphics or fancy fonts. At the same time, don’t make it too plain, guide their reading by breaking up the information into sections. Find a template and make it your own, if everybody’s looks the same, it won’t help you stand out. If you are technology minded, I’ve created a Hugo module for resume formatting that might help you. hugo-resume

Tell Your Story

This advice seems nearly universal, your resume is telling your story. This one is hard for me because I haven’t crafted my career. I’ve tried to craft my life, and my career is part of it. But the career itself doesn’t really have a bold plot line. The idea is simple enough I suppose, show how each position builds on the previous. (I haven’t given this section justice, I may come back to it)

Customize

For me customizing a resume for a position is some of the most annoying advice I see. My resume is about me, if I change it for the job I am seeking, it seems like a betrayal. Having said that, it makes perfect sense to change how you present yourself to the audience at hand. So, while I have yet to take this advice, I’m passing it on because I fully believe it. Some important caveats are that you absolutely do not want to make up anything to give the appearance of a better match. But you might leave off irrelevant skills and highlight others for what is listed in the job posting, or things you know about the company. Also, under customization would be the cover letter. This is a different beast and could be entirely custom for each position. You could have one or more templates and just tweak it for any position that lets you add one, but it is probably better to make these as custom as possible, at least for highly desired or highly competitive positions. The cover letter is particularly demoralizing, because you have no way to know if it ever gets read, so the motivation to simply reuse already written letters is high. If you consider that they have requested this from you, it really might be your best chance of getting noticed, so it is worth some effort.

presentation

Presentation in terms of fishing is the way that you place the lure within site of the fish. In both fishing and in the current job market, this might be the most important part. Placing your resume in the virtual pile by applying to a job through the company website, is like casting your lure into the lake and hoping for the best. Chances are not zero, but they aren’t good either. You need to narrow your area, find a company where you are a likely fit, at that company find a role that fits and apply there. I haven’t found any consensus on dealing with the situation of several positions at a single company, some companies will urge you to only apply for one position. If they state that, follow that advice. I think generally for larger companies, try to avoid applying for multiple in the same team. This isn’t always apparent, so pay attention to the keywords and hopefully they are detailed enough that you can surmise that it’s the same team. During the interview process, they can steer you towards a different position if they think it’s a better fit. You can also judge by how many openings, if they have a small number of openings, it’s more likely that everyone knows about all of the openings and you don’t need or want to apply for multiple.

Now that you’ve found what to apply for, you need to get some attention. You might be able to get attention through your answers to the application questions, don’t skip those even if they are optional. More likely, you will need to make a personal connection. This can be through LinkedIn messages or post comments, etc. or maybe you can find an email, or even in-person through a meetup. Unfortunately this can be quite difficult, as well as unsatisfying. Just like the lack of feedback on the application, you will encounter quite a bit of silence trying to make these connections. On LinkedIn you have some tools to help your odds. When looking at people at a company, you can see how many connections they have, and their posts and comments. If someone actually shared the job you are interested in, that’s golden, comment on the post, or message the person, they are inviting this interaction. If someone joined LinkedIn 5 years ago, has zero posts and 3 connections, don’t bother, you definitely won’t hear back. The other great situation is that you actually have a real connection to a person at the company. Definitely reach out to anyone you previously worked with. If you remember them, they probably remember you. If you don’t remember them, maybe they still remember you, give it a shot.

setting the hook

You’ve got a bite, now you have to set the hook and land it. This is where you have to take the most care. Also, at this stage, it’s hard to remember that you can let it go at any time. You may find out very early that the job or company is not what you are looking for, you can save yourself a lot of trouble by pulling out of the running, definitely let them know you are doing it. There are two reasons not to simply go silent during this process. First, it’s rude, this person might remember you later, and do you want them to remember you as rude and unreliable? Second, they may respond in an unexpectedly positive way, they may direct you to a more suitable role, or even refer you to another company. You can’t expect these outcomes, but you can easily make sure they don’t happen, by ignoring their communications. Next, throughout the process, never be the reason for slowing things down. As best as you can, answer quickly, schedule soon, and deliver on promises and expectations. This is what everyone wants in an employee, and the sooner they see it the better. Do not rush anything though, if you know an interview won’t go well because you know you’ll be exhausted from plans you already had, schedule it for later. Put your best foot forward and let it show that you care and expended time and energy doing so. Know about the job, and the company, and maybe about the person you are talking to (avoid being creepy). If you are having multiple interactions with the same person pay attention and let it show that you talked to them before by remembering content from previous conversations. At the same time, don’t overdo the small talk, the conversation is always mostly about a job.

For different roles there will be a wide array of different hoops through which you must jump, obviously you will want to be prepared for these. During your search you should try to stay fresh on these things, practice frequently and try not to judge yourself too harshly, being stressed out and insecure will not be helpful. One of the most common mistakes I’ve seen during interviews is making something up, when the truthful answer is, “I don’t know.” It’s fine to say you don’t know, but include how you would find out.

best of luck!

I hope you found something helpful above, sometimes it’s helpful just to have things repeated, which is the selfish reason I wrote this post. Looking for a job is difficult when the market is good, when it’s bad, it’s extremely difficult. Right now it’s bad, all you can do is your best, good luck out there!