Unconventional Job Hunting: Grow Your Own Strategy
A candle in the darkness
Audience: Job seekers, the unemployed, human resources and hiring managers
Contents
Executive Summary
Introduction
· Who can make effective use of this article
Background and History
· Context: The 2023–2025 Job Market
· Macroeconomic Factors
· Conventional wisdom will not work
What job seekers can do
· Realign expectations with reality
· Positive and unconventional job hunting strategies and tactics
Unconventional Job Hunting Strategy, Operations and Tactics
· Grow your own strategy, operations and tactics
· Optimize your LinkedIn profile
· Optimize a generic CV intended to be easy to edit rapidly
· Devising operational campaigns
· Tactics: the daily grind
Authors’ Notes
Conclusions
End Notes
· LinkedIn
· Substack
Executive Summary
It’s harder than ever, in our memory, to get a high-tech, white-collar job. We experienced it, firsthand, ourselves, years ago, eventually gave up, and started Overlogix. We put up with extended unemployment for a long time, and now have as much business as we can handle. The business option is definitely not for everyone; that being said, self-employment is something every job seeker should at least consider.
Job hunters routinely complain about the bad job market on common platforms like LinkedIn; amazingly, companies likewise complain that they can’t find qualified people to fill their open jobs. Clearly, something is wrong with the whole process. Mass layoffs continue to happen, especially at larger tech companies, leaving us to wonder whether pursuing employment at any large company is worth the high risk of layoffs. Both younger candidates, such as recent college grads, and older workers (50+) are finding it nearly impossible to find jobs.
Fixing this requires a fundamental re-evaluation of assumptions on the part of job hunters. (We have scant hope that senior management in industry will change, at least not publicly.) First of all, given the poor hiring environment, getting a job (in other words, “success”) doesn’t look so good most of the time. Second, compared with other, more available opportunities (e.g., being a garbageman, a grocery worker, or starting your own business), high tech or other white-collar work appears increasingly unappealing. Salaries aren’t what they used to be, on-the-job abuse and toxic management is commonplace, and the risk of sudden, unannounced layoffs very high.
This article is quite long due to the complicated nature of the subject matter. We strongly recommend that job hunters experiencing difficulties with their efforts read it very thoroughly and carefully, and absorb the main points. While our suggestions here might seem far outside the beaten path (and they are), when compared with the poor results from conventional job hunts, we offer here a potential way to drastically improve job hunting success. Admittedly, there is a lot to unpack, but that is due to the nature of the current job market.
Further, given the “pay-to-play” condition of LinkedIn, the summary of this article we will publish there is unlikely to get much traction, and so few job hunters will see it. If readers like and agree with what they see here, we ask and recommend sending a link to this article to other job seekers.
We believe the job hunting paradigm described here is unique and very likely effective; we have been and will be using a modified version of it ourselves, optimized for a small business rather than job hunting. Most folks in this position will know plenty of others in the same boat. It’s high time that job seekers band together and form mutual self-help and self-protection societies, even if informal.
Introduction
When anyone online discusses a “bad job market”, there are immediate questions that come to mind. One is: “bad, for whom?”; for it is clear that hiring is still happening, albeit not in the same volume as prior to COVID, nor in the very temporary market recovery that happened after the pandemic faded.
We readily acknowledge that many job market segments have experienced slowdowns and greatly diminished hiring, and that white-collar, previously hot career paths such as software developers and system administrators, have seen a considerable cooling of both available openings and salary offerings. We also have noted the now tired and likely hollow trope that CEOs claim they can’t find enough qualified applicants for their job openings, while job seekers claim they can’t find jobs.
All of these complaints might be true, but we suspect that there are more important, less well-understood, and more subtle forces at work to frustrate both hiring companies and job seekers. One of these forces, and a very prominent one, is that the large online job sites have experienced both massive volumes of applications and strong filtering of incoming applications (on the part of the client companies, not the job sites) via applicant tracking systems, also known as ATS.
Both of these phenomena are present, and incredibly annoying, especially for job hunters, however, the statistics present a different story: the white-collar job market is cooling, in large part due to reduced demand. There just isn’t the same demand for white-collar workers now compared with before the pandemic.
As long-term participants in the DevOps market segment, we can testify that software is difficult and expensive to produce, test and implement; doing so in a secure, robust and rapid manner very difficult and expensive. Because of the difficulty and expense, it is no surprise that modern software must solve large-scale problems in order to be economically effective, demanding very high levels of knowledge and craft, and resulting high costs. At some point, most difficult to measure, much less predict, the balance between unsolved software demand, security, costs and profitability shifted from “the sky is the limit” to “we can’t afford that”.
Production of new software was at the core of the high-tech industry; hardware had already reached practical limits, as evidenced by the shift to multi-core CPUs some years ago. GPUs continued to advance. For a time, artificial intelligence looked like a panacea, and enormous investment, at the cost of other, more prosaic segments of the software market, gained the spotlight. But, AI, like all previous software, has strong limits. We have noted that there are very strong arguments in favor of densely trained, very narrow purpose AIs, often used in medical technology, manufacturing, and a few other niche purposes, that have been and are now profitable and consistently making continual progress.
Despite this, many billions of investment dollars, that might have significantly advanced marketable, useful, ordinary automation and basic, profitable, narrow AI, instead chased after the elusive and so far futile dream of artificial general intelligence (AGI). The hypesters running the “Magnificent Seven” succeeded in fooling big money, and have since 2022 when ChatGPT was first made available. None of their AGI operations are even close to profitable, and are unlikely to become so at any time in the future.
Who can make effective use of this article
For those in a hurry
Readers seeking or needing extremely rapid results are advised to contact every local staffing company that places similar skill sets, and try to have detailed conversations with at least one of the salesfolk at each company. They’ll need a generic resume (see below for optimization advice), contact information, and availability.
We strongly recommend asking about the going hourly pay for your skill set and experience, and stick within the range they give. Ask several agencies, not just one. NB: salary ranges from such sites as Indeed and GlassDoor are typically out of date and not often updated, so take the information provided there with a pound of salt; it may be BS. We strongly suspect that cost is the most important determining factor in speed hiring.
Getting a job fast is really about getting any available employment rapidly, less about desires, ideals, pay or enjoyment of the job. In a sense, contracting gigs are about white-collar prostitution; one can expect at least some workplace abuse, so such job seekers are advised to be ready for that and practice extreme detachment: don’t worry about abusive behavior; collect a paycheck and look for the next position.
For those not in a hurry
For everyone else, seeking some sort of fulfilling and perhaps pleasurable work environments, patience is key to getting hired at the right company. Hard work is necessary to define one’s skill set as objectively as possible, put that skill set in perspective in the marketplace, define probable pay scales and research a list of best companies to pursue.
While contracting companies can certainly help a great deal, they should be viewed as likely temporary solutions at best. Job seekers hoping to score a great job at a good company should steel themselves to a long, hard search, rigorous and numerous rounds of interviews, large amounts of competition, and many, many rejections, often on flimsy or superficial grounds (like age).
We chose with this inaugural article to focus on how job seekers can craft their own, personally customized employment strategy (and resultant operations and tactics, explained below) rather than list multiple, possibly disconnected and perhaps inappropriate methods, saving the latter for a future article. We believe that a few day’s diligent work with a few artificial intelligences can indeed substantially improve job hunters’ chances of success.
This notion leverages the viewpoint that the available AIs are very much like a large “council of experts”, and that most of the AIs we have used are in fact well-suited for this purpose. Additionally, we feel strongly from our own industrial experience that companies rarely know what they are doing when it comes to hiring, and often simply shoot in the dark.
One of the most important principles we discuss below is very thorough research of companies; in particular, any company that practices layoffs, under our theory, by definition does not know what they are doing with hiring, is unlikely to be experiencing business growth, and is very likely a toxic company populated with nasty, incompetent, toxic managers.
That being said, reputation does matter, and toxic companies occasionally will offer jobs with relatively high salaries. These offers can in turn be used to persuade better companies to sweeten their job offers; timing is important, and rarely optimal, but the notion is sound when it can be used, and is recommended.
Background and History
Many authors believe the current bad job market is the culmination of trends that have been decades in the making, and we largely agree. Mass layoffs have been a feature of high tech employment since at least the 1980’s, if not earlier. Offshoring, nearshoring and outsourcing have been with us for a long time, with mixed results.
Conglomerates, holding companies, venture capital firms have bought company after company and subsequently chain-sawed employees right and left. Government interventions, in the form of regulations, tax codes, subsidies, incentives, inflation, interest rate manipulations, and outright corruption, have materially added to the market confusion, and have been harmful on balance.
It’s no surprise that the job market is now trashed, possibly beyond repair. However, we strongly suspect that the end is in sight for the power brokers that perpetrated these evils on the people; we hint at the coming backlash below and may cover a few predictions in a future article. Our feeling about this is informed by the pendulum analogy; once the economic pendulum swings too far in one direction, the forces on it reverse and swing back; we believe the time for the reversal not too far in the future.
Context: The 2023–2025 Job Market
The job market since mid-2023 has been unusually tough, particularly for white-collar professionals. Key factors include:
Reluctance to hire: Since mid-2023, the U.S. job market has cooled from its post-pandemic highs, with job gains slowing and unemployment ticking up to just above 4%. Most new jobs are concentrated in health care, government, and hospitality, while white-collar and tech roles have stagnated or declined. Employers are cautious about hiring due to economic and geopolitical uncertainty, including tariffs, trade policy, and the disruptive potential of AI and automation.
Slowdown in employer demand: While ATS filtering and over-application create frustration for job seekers, the core issue is a broad-based slowdown in employer demand, especially outside a handful of resilient sectors. Labor force participation remains subdued, further complicating the picture. The result is a more competitive, slower-moving job market, with fewer opportunities and higher barriers to entry for many candidates.
High Competition: The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported 6.8 million active job seekers in January 2025, with a ratio of 1 unemployed person to 0.9 job openings, indicating a tight market. There were 7.7 million job openings at the end of January 2025, according to the BLS Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS).
Ghost Jobs: A 2024 survey found 40% of job postings were “ghost jobs” (posted without intent to fill), wasting applicants’ time. We found more recent studies confirming a high fraction of job postings with no intent to hire.
Mental Health Toll: 72% of job seekers report negative mental health impacts from prolonged searches, with anxiety exacerbated by lack of employer feedback.
The upshot is that hiring, except in a few sectors, has stagnated, but the overall job market is still considered healthy. It simply feels broken.
For job seekers outside of health care, government, and hospitality, these conditions demand strategies that go well beyond traditional applications, focusing on differentiation, direct access to decision-makers, and leveraging networks or unconventional channels. Further, and likely more important, job seekers need to be on the lookout for toxic companies. We find little purpose to applying to known toxic companies, beyond supplying wage competition and giving the job seeker some ammunition to persuade good companies to open their wallets at least a little more.
Macroeconomic Factors
The challenges faced by white-collar workers are the result of macroeconomic shifts, AI / automation, and evolving employer practices.
Pervasive and ongoing mass layoffs, a few examples: Chevron, 8,000, early 2025; Microsoft, 6,000 (May) + additional in June; Walmart, 7,000, early 2025; Meta, 3,600, early 2025; Disney, 3,500–5,500, early–mid 2025; many, many more …
The perception by senior management, if not the reality, that AI can replace human workers
The rise of contract and gig work over traditional employment
Geographic shifts in hiring (e.g., growth in hybrid-friendly or lower-cost cities)
The “experience paradox” for new grads: needing experience to get hired, but unable to gain it due to lack of entry-level roles
There are many more than is practical to even list here; one long-term recruiter even went so far as to label senior corporate leadership as psychopathic. While we will stop short of such an extreme evaluation, we see the desperate posts on LinkedIn, the many articles in reputable journals and news sources, the government data collections and studies, that all point to a long-term, horrible job market, one that is likely to persist for the foreseeable future.
Conventional wisdom will not work
Never let desperation make decisions for you. There are always things you can do to improve your situation; we will cover many such in an upcoming article. A friend once said to us: “you can always get behind a cash register”, meaning that there are almost always menial jobs available with a low barrier to entry that one can take for survival purposes. While less than desirable, some income is better than none, and everyone can choose what they record on their resumes. There is no shame in taking a survival-level job, and the presence of such jobs should give people confidence - survival is always possible, if not necessarily palatable. Remain calm, and live to fight another day!
We documented the conventional path of job hunting advice some time ago. Job seekers should know this material very well, since they will still have to use it from time to time. We covered the hypothetical case of an ideal candidate applying for an ideal company, mostly to show that, even when the stars are all aligned perfectly, getting hired is still an uncertain crapshoot.
We are aware that LinkedIn is currently full of so-called job hunting coaches, entrepreneur coaches, upskilling “opportunities” and other predators and scams; this linked article contains everything such hucksters could possibly teach that might actually work, for free. It is insane for an unemployed person to hire a coach for anything; if you need a job, your local staffing companies might just be able to keep you working so you can pay your bills, and are certainly much more likely to be effective than any coach.
Working contracting for a living is entirely possible, and many people have done it for years at a time, including the author of this article. We can testify from personal experience that contracting is likely to be long-term uncomfortable; contractors are the first to be let go in a downturn and are hired specifically because they are abusable and expendable. In a way, it is a form of white-collar professional prostitution; played skillfully, it can also be lucrative and even fulfilling; but a thick skin is a career necessity. Freelancing, albeit risky and difficult, is always a possibility.
There is more high-quality training available for free from reputable institutions and companies than can be listed here, and consequently zero reason to pay for training. We happen to be on the fence with regard to upskilling; the old paradigm of certifications leading to more certain or better employment is rapidly disappearing, and current corporate management has such a short time span between 180° pivots that they are much more likely to change their minds about their needs faster than a job candidate can complete even a brief training course.
What job seekers can do
If the prospect of spending six to twelve months of almost completely ineffective, mass applications to listed jobs sounds unappealing, and it most certainly is, the alternative is to turn the entire issue on its head and flip the script. The first step is to unlearn unrealistic expectations. They are now gone and won’t return.
Realign expectations with reality
While we are clearly delivering bad news, we do see certain lights at the end of the tunnel, which we will describe in detail below. First, we feel it imperative that all job seekers immediately:
Drastically lower employer response expectations, regardless of experience, capability or past history. None of that matters right now, as senior management has in recent years adopted shorter and shorter time horizons in their most fundamental thinking about hiring, to the point where only the next quarter’s results matter, nothing else. There is no long-term for these decision makers. In particular, expectations of responses to job applications should be extremely low; we have read many accounts of people who have made over 1000 applications to jobs, with minimal or no feedback from companies. We ourselves have estimated and published that at least 500 applications are required to receive one job offer, a process that can easily take six months.
Drastically lower salary expectations. An extremely competitive employer’s market means that nearly all employers are low-balling offers, when they offer jobs at all. While some of this is normal in an employer’s market, the market since mid-2023 has been especially bad. Your goal is to get hired ASAP, to bring in money, while you look for a more ideal job. Most experts recommend white collar workers keep their current jobs as long as possible, on the strong chances that moving to another position at another company is likely to result in lower salaries and significantly deteriorated working conditions.
Research and keep lists of all companies that have done mass layoffs in the last five years. This list will include nearly every well-known, household-name company still in business. These companies should be regarded as fundamentally toxic workplaces, so much so that no job seeker in their right mind should bother to read their open job listings, much less apply to their jobs. These companies typically are well outside the growth phase of their corporate lifecycle, and are poor risks for employment. That they often constantly post new jobs should be taken as a sign that people hate working there, and the company experiences constant, high turnover. Their only possible value to the serious job hunter is potentially supplying salary competition that can be used to leverage better salaries from good companies. Multiple, simultaneous job offers have a magical effect on potential employers; they will almost always assume the candidate is high-value, and will often compete to hire them.
Age matters. The age cohort that finds it easiest to get hired in early to mid-2025 is the "prime working age" group, specifically those between 25 and 54 years old, with the greatest ease typically in the 25–44 range. Over 35% of long-term discouraged workers are over age 55, and older workers are overrepresented among the long-term unemployed.
Disregard big job boards almost entirely. LinkedIn, Indeed, Monster, CareerBuilder, GlassDoor and Dice are all massively oversaturated with desperate and largely ineffective, generic job hunters; it is nearly impossible to get noticed by applying from any of them, and even more likely that the company’s ATS system will route your job application straight into the bit toilet. Their only value to the savvy job hunter is who is hiring what at the moment. Make a list and go directly to the company job sites to apply.
Positive and unconventional job hunting strategies and tactics
Unconventional job hunting centers around several key concepts and practices: specific company targeting, research and intelligence gathering, preparation of attractive online portfolios showcasing skill sets and / or products, and careful and meticulous development of direct contacts with decision makers. While there is some overlap with conventional techniques and tactics, for the most part, the unconventional job hunter eschews job applications, (unless the company has already spoken with you and is expecting an application), as a near certain invitation for automatic ATS rejection, and so a hopeless waste of time.
Instead, unconventional job hunts are more like seductions, where the point is to be so attractive that the prospective employer makes the initial proposition, rather than the job seeker. In this manner, the unconventional job hunter resembles an entrepreneur much more than an employee.
Identifying quality companies and organizations
Create a profile of your ideal company, using as few assumptions as possible, but including that they need your particular skill set. A conversation with your favorite artificial intelligence model (e.g. ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini and others) might help with this process quite a bit. Note that these AIs tend to cater to the perceived wishes of the user, can hallucinate, and might not have up-to-date information in their training, so fact-check any and every assertion they make. Perplexity appears fairly good at fact-checking, and can dig up references rapidly.
Once the ideal company profile has been formulated, fact-checked and solidified, look for companies that fit that profile. Again, AI can help make this search much more rapid, but be very diligent about fact-checking. This process generates your target company list, in our view extremely important to unconventional job hunting. Note that this list might be longer than is practical to research, but see next item in the process.
Prioritize the list of target companies, with the most desirable companies first, less desirable later in the list. Use your profile as one of the deciding factors, purge the list of companies that have a history of layoffs, and consider company growth, both in monetary and hiring terms, as one of the most important factors.
Take the first few, most desirable entries on your list and begin researching them. We’ll say do the top five for a start. Create a directory in your computer for each company, and begin documenting the most important facts about the company: what they do, what products or services do they make / sell, why they would be interested in hiring you (vital!), when the company was founded, who runs the company, who works for the company (anyone you know?), are there any reviews of the company on GlassDoor, Indeed or elsewhere, what is the URL of their job website, where are they located, where can news items, company announcements, etc. be found. The notion here is to create a dossier for each company that can be added to as new facts are uncovered. Yet another conversation with an AI can help organize and standardize this process so that it is possible to compare companies for desirability, growth, ease of hiring, etc.
The research process for a particular company slows once most of the publicly available information has been accumulated, after which only small amounts of new information trickle in. At this point, it’s time to get on LinkedIn and start looking for employees of the company, in particular, decision makers (management and owners). This sets the stage for later contacts. Note that decision makers tend to be very busy human beings and may be harder to contact or to develop relationships with; these contacts must be handled with great care and subtlety. On the other hand, individual contributors, i.e., ordinary employees, might be easier to get to know and more approachable. Every employee at a company has a boss, who is a decision maker. Think about that carefully.
Details of cultivating and nurturing contacts with people at the target companies will be reserved for a future article specifically on this art; in the meantime, yet another conversation with an AI, with due recognition that decision makers might be very busy and difficult to cultivate, can help considerably with this rather delicate, but vital process. We have a list of carefully defined, gradual steps used to make new contacts and cultivate them into business; we believe almost anyone can do the same for themselves and avoid the clumsiness so commonly found on LinkedIn: a new contact essentially asks for business in the first contact, annoying and an almost guaranteed non-starter. Smart people get to know their potential customers first, and become so good at it that the customer proposes business as their idea - these are the best possible deal closures.
Prepare goods or services for sale
In our experience, employers are primarily interested in hiring people based on relieving their own pain points, also known as “Monday morning problems”, rather than on hiring specific classes of expertise. Considering this deeply helps the job hunter craft an online portfolio intended to show (a) that the job hunter knows about this particular pain point and has already solved it (b) the job hunter has a lot of experience solving many such pain points and can be depended upon to continue to relieve their employer’s pains. Thus, construction of an attractive online portfolio showcasing such solutions to common problems can go a long way towards closing an employment deal.
We are fans of online portfolios, and believe every job hunter should cultivate such a portfolio. Done well, portfolios can go a long way towards establishing mastery of one’s craft. The major skills required are excellent writing and story-telling. Using AI can dramatically improve one’s writing, especially if the AI is used primarily for content (subject matters), while the candidate takes the time and care to write the prose in their own, unique voice.
Use these “pre-cooked” portfolio articles (graphics, etc.) as permanent homes for already-solved problems. When a decision maker asks questions related to one of these portfolio items, send them a link, perhaps with an “already solved” comment. As the portfolio gradually takes shape, there are more and more pertinent items in the portfolio, and the entire collection can be used to show subject-matter mastery, answer typical questions, and tacitly help perform interviews without actually interviewing. The goal is to eventually show solutions to every question an interviewer might ask.
Unconventional Job Hunting Strategy, Operations and Tactics
Grow your own strategy, operations and tactics
This is likely to be the best of the methods we present here and in future articles, since it is automatically customized for each individual. Long story short, gather your generic resume, not tweaked for any particular position, the URL of your LinkedIn profile, and a Word document specifying where you live (neighborhood / quartier, city, state / province / canton, country), a brief history of your past employment (resume should have more details), what you like to do best when working, what you can do (not favorites) whether you like it or not, your date of birth (important since very young and older workers must market themselves differently than mid-career professionals) and a list of ideal companies you’d like to work for.
Also, in a text editor, tie the above all together with a brief prompt asking the AI to digest all the information and design a job hunting strategy just for you and your current situation. Any of the following AIs are free and will work for this; there are others we haven’t tried: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, etc. We tend to use Perplexity for digging up references, used to really like Copilot until M$ dumbed it down. We haven’t tried Apple AI nor Meta’s Llama; they may work just fine for this purpose. We advise using at least three of them, and save the results. Were we to pick, we’d use Claude, Gemini and Grok. Your mileage and preferences may vary. Ask follow-up questions to the AIs until satisfied the picture is complete.
Read the results carefully, one AI at a time. Make a separate document with items you think the AIs missed and items they suggest with which you disagree or won’t do. Find the points all the AIs agree upon; they are likely very important. Each may contribute unique insights. Put this all together into a new document, titled something like “Job Hunting Strategy 2025”. Read it carefully, checking for details and also whether you feel comfortable using this as your guiding job hunting constitution. This is your high-level job hunting strategy, that guides everything else you will do.
N.B.: Understand that by using this method, you are essentially starting from scratch. You are developing completely new software to guide and implement your personal job hunt, and that software must be high quality, requiring great attention to detail, lots of testing against reality (did I get a job?), and a good amount of development before using it. Initial conversations with your own AI zoo will tend to be vague and unspecific; as the process is refined, subsequent iterations sharpen.
Spending lots of time prompting AIs presents challenges and opportunities for improvement. Talking with them often resembles speaking with a brilliant, but practically inexperienced, child. Be patient, and cover all relevant details thoroughly. Haply, reality is a harsh teacher, and so several rounds of testing against real-world conditions will sharpen the plan considerably. The beginner should not be discouraged if, at the beginning, he/she lacks the prerequisites to understand the prerequisites. This sophistication will certainly come in time, with sustained effort.
Optimize your LinkedIn profile
For better or worse, LinkedIn is still (almost) the only game in town when it comes to business networking. Most of the AIs mentioned above can and will give good to excellent advice on making that profile as professional and attractive as possible. Use several of them as a check against each other, and take the advice common to all the AIs used.
Make sure to “jazz up” opening stanzas via AI; conventional wisdom holds, and we believe it, that each of us had roughly 8 - 10 seconds of a recruiter or hiring manager’s attention. The language and presentation on the LinkedIn profile needs to grab their attention and keep them reading. It is very safe to assume that every last employer who considers your employment will certainly check out your LinkedIn profile, so working on that profile hard is absolutely a good investment of time.
If the decision maker doesn’t check out your LinkedIn profile, HR at the company will. Assume that someone will scrutinize your profile thoroughly, and prepare accordingly.
Optimize a generic CV intended to be easy to edit rapidly
Again, with the help of AI, put together a generic resume which will be used, with plenty of edits, as the basis for crafting a customized resume for each job applied for. Keyword matches should meet or exceed 90% for crafted resumes; use Jobalytics (free) or Jobscan (paid) for the matching process.
Moreover, there should also be a high meaning match between the job description and the customized CV. This is more difficult, but likewise important. Modern ATS systems are increasingly using semantic analysis to parse resumes for real meaning. We feel both keyword and meaning matches are very important and should always be done. This process takes between two and three hours per application; use AI to help speed up the process, but be careful not to lie nor exaggerate skills, as this can result in ghosting, sudden unemployment and diminished reputation.
Devising operational campaigns
Taking a page from military practices, we define three levels of job-hunting activity. Strategy is the biggest and longest-term overview, covered above. Strategies last for perhaps a year or two, and should be reviewed and updated annually, at least. Quarterly is better if time allows.
The next level down is operations, with a probably lifespan of three to six months. Think of these as personal advertising campaigns, with yourself as the product / service to be sold.
During an operation, for example, one might take a predetermined sample of 20 or so companies that appear from your research as desirable organizations, and concentrate marketing to just those companies. During an operational campaign, one might read the companies’ job websites directly, each day, quickly searching for relevant openings. Additionally, LinkedIn searches can be used to find HR and decision makers at these target companies; attempt to connect with and engage these people.
The point at first is to get them familiar with you, get to know them, what they do, and any and all postings they might make to LinkedIn and other platforms. We cannot emphasize enough that getting to know them first, so that they remember you and hopefully like you, is crucial prior to making any sort of propositions, such as asking for a job.
By all means, consult with AIs about designing these campaigns, find the advice that looks good, and follow it. Follow-ups are vital to the success of this process. Campaigns should be reviewed and edited based on results at least monthly. Comparisons with real data can sharpen these campaigns considerably.
Tactics: the daily grind
The third level of actions is at the tactical level, in other words, what one does with a specific opportunity on a specific day. Tweaking a generic resume to closely match a job description is a tactic; specific interviewing with a specific person is a tactic; salary negotiations after a job offer is a tactic.
We expect that regular, daily to weekly reviews of tactics employed when job hunting, and copious use of AIs to help sharpen those tactics, are imperative. A campaign (operational level) is a series of tactics (day-to-day level); a series of campaigns is the practical implementation of a strategy (year-long level).
For example, working out with an AI what should be said during a conversation, and, more important, what should not be said, is a tactical issue, one that can and should be worked out and rehearsed prior to conversations. This is positioning at its most basic level; the quality of tactics largely determines whether one makes it to the “maybe” pile of CVs as opposed to the “reject” pile.
Tactics can and should be disposable if they don’t work, editable, and highly experimental. Tactics are subject to change in order to match expectations held by individuals rather than classes of people. Determining expectations when it comes down to a specific position at a specific company is crucial to obtaining a job offer.
Finally, keep detailed notes of all actions, any responses from companies, engagements on LinkedIn and other social media, etc. The number of individual actions committed during a typical job hunt will grow large, and notes taken serve as a memory bank. Diligent notes allow one to focus on the here and now and forget even the near past; when necessary, the notes act as reminders when reviewing tactics and operations, and can also be used to inform revisions to strategies.
Authors’ Notes
Of all the many articles we have written, now approaching 300, this is by far the most difficult we have ever attempted, and has taken months to compose and fact-check. The job market has always had complexities, potholes and sudden turns; however, never since World War II has a job market been this difficult over such a sustained time, as attested to by legions of posts to LinkedIn, YouTube, X and many, many other platforms. It almost feels like the market itself is committing suicide, and in a way, it is.
The old ways of doing business gradually develop calcification (hardening, like arteriosclerosis = hardening of the arteries), which accumulates over time, and so become increasingly dysfunctional. We have written many times in the past about industry practices we observe that look to us unlikely to work, perhaps counter-productive, or just plain wrong and ineffective. Amazingly, these practices continue, as though the decision-makers cannot conceive of alternatives.
We believe this is a crucial time in industry, where the new, objective, nimble and committed players do battle with the old guard, now too old, tired and set in their ways to adapt. It’s not a decisive battle; like the war in Ukraine, it’s a battle of attrition; a long, drawn-out war that will take many careers, people and livelihoods in a senseless struggle for dominance. The real winners, we believe, will be the quiet and subtle players, who strive for objectivity in a world of noise and nonsense, find their niches, and soundlessly gain their footing amidst the confusion.
Towards solving these complex issues, we have already presented a pathway for employers to find the people they need and hire them. They are free to take this pathway (not new) or ignore it. This article, perhaps for the first time, concentrates the actions that job seekers need to focus on; we commented above that for a large fraction of job seekers, the job market is essentially closed forever. Those people desperately need to challenge their most closely-held assumptions, including whether they want to continue looking for a job. At some point, the pain of job hunting becomes roughly equal to the pain of starting a new business.
Finally, we (Overlogix) never charge money for career nor job hunting advice. We think it immoral and rotten to take advantage of people’s helplessness and desperation, and drain them of the dwindling funds they will need just to survive. We previously detailed the conventional job hunting pathway, and the very nasty scam vultures on LinkedIn and other platforms preying on the unfortunate and uninformed. There is little that anyone, resume writers, “job coaches”, “career architects” or any other self-appointed “experts” can constructively add to the principles laid out the linked article, nor the present one. Claimants otherwise should be regarded as charlatans until proved trustworthy.
Conclusions
We have outlined a process, free of monetary cost and only requiring time and attention, whereby job seekers can potentially and substantially improve their job hunting capabilities. The variable no one can control is the willingness of employers to make serious job offers. This issue is fundamental, and the market admittedly poor as of this writing. However, we know for a fact that at least some hiring is always happening; older workers retire, some people get terminated, some change jobs.
The purpose of this article is to help job seekers make the best out of a bad situation and mine all they can from the weak job market. At the end of the day, we are very confident that the market will turn around, if only slowly at first. Demographic shifts and ever changing economic factors favor the notion that the present employer’s market will swing into a long-term employee’s market in the not-too-distant future; today’s preparation, along the lines we describe here, will create tomorrow’s opportunities.
Job seekers in a hurry can usually turn to the contractor market in a pinch; while likely unpleasant, at least the bills can be paid. Those with more time available can put their efforts into a detailed, structured search for quality employment. Hard times have historically been followed by good times, so we conclude that work done now, to establish a firm foundation for customized, personal job search methods, will have a large effect when the job market turns around. Demographic trends alone point to a future with significantly fewer available job candidates, who can and will benefit from scarcity and will likely prosper.
Today is a challenging time, almost guaranteed to harden the sensibilities of the strong in heart. Tomorrow shows considerable promise, for the stalwart few who can take advantage of hard times to prepare for later good times.
We wish all of you good fortune!
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End Notes
Thank you for reading this article!
More information about Overlogix can be found at Welcome to Overlogix!
We currently publish on both LinkedIn (general interest articles, summaries, TL;DR’s: easier and faster to read) and Substack (in-depth articles, how-to’s, technical studies and new approaches to business).
LinkedIn:
· Why hire me? The elevator pitch
· Introduction: Welcome to Overlogix!
· The Overlogix Sunday Times Our newsletter, with occasional specials, published roughly every two weeks.
· Master Index All our articles can be found from here in two clicks.
· The Overlogix Table of Context All Overlogix articles in reverse chronological order
· Applied Artificial Intelligence: Index of Articles One of our specialties is Applied AI. This index lists all relevant articles on the topic, in reverse chronological order.
· Applied AI: Stories in the News Our semi-permanent, curated listing of interesting and important news from the world of artificial intelligence, from many different sources.
· Index: Getting a Job Up until recently, getting a job, much less a good job, has been a nightmare for most job seekers. We publish articles on how and why this is so, and what job hunters can do to find the perfect job for them. We also supply credible external resources, so people can consider their alternatives.
· Starting a B2B Business For everyone who can, we heartily recommend starting your own business. The tools are there, and there has never been a better time to do it.
· Building Our Own Robot We’re automating Overlogix from the start, and this series of articles tells exactly how we are doing it.
· Rebuilding the Linux Server: Index of Articles Running AI on your own machine (recommended) requires a modern, up-to-date operating system, and often a lot of additional software infrastructure. This series, dedicated to exactly that sort of system administration, details what we have done to build a powerful server that runs both databases and artificial intelligence, locally.
· The Gospel According to ChatGPT Conversations with various AIs and additional articles on the various challenges associated with actually making profitable use of artificial intelligence.
· TL;DR: Index of Fast Reads Brief, fast reads on various topics in artificial intelligence. If you are a beginner at AI, or a busy human needing fast and factual explanations of complicated technical topics, this is the place to start.
· TL;DR: Overlogix Artificial Intelligence Mini-Wiki Same Fast Reads as previous but arranged in a mini-wiki format some folks may like better.
Substack:
· Welcome to the Overlogix Substack
· Overlogix: Table of Context Index to our Substack articles arranged by topics.
· Criteria for Paid Content Rules for what goes behind our paywall.
Curated IT and AI Sources Annotated links to sites and YouTube channels we think are valuable.
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