At some point in your career, you may feel the need to look for something new. The biggest issue I’ve seen with friends and colleagues is building a plan to find a new job while being employed full-time in your current organization.

The lies we tell ourselves about job hunting

Before I begin, there are a few things I constantly hear that are important to keep in mind, and that you should consider while committing to a new job search. Let me list four of them in order of importance:

1. It’s a number game – like sales or recruiting: if you are in sales and your job is to find new customers, all it matters is your pipeline. Recruiting is similar (and it’s a sales job), if you need to hire a great software engineer or sales account executive, you need to have a strong pipeline and therefore as many potential candidates as possible. Finding a job is exactly the same: you need to apply and talk to as many people as possible. More in this article about this.
2. Even in bad times, there are amazing positions available: It might be more difficult to find them, but even today, I can name 10 companies I personally know that have 1) strong growth 2) are profitable 3) looking for a lot of different positions.
3. Don’t focus on requirements and titles to “match” your profile: This comes from direct experience. Companies and HR teams tend to write “unicorn-style” job descriptions where it looks like you will need to know everything. They end up hiring people who sometimes have just 50% of those requirements or less. It’s a good reminder of the fact that you should apply and try to talk to them anyway.
4. Don’t apply for the same job too many times: It reminds me of our HR leadership sometimes saying, “I’ve seen that person a few times in the past for other roles; she might be a fit for this one.” Companies receive thousands of applications, and decisions are not made the same way all the time.

Set up your job search

From LinkedIn to Indeed to other websites, there are thousands of websites where you can find a job, and you don’t need me to tell you how to start there.

What I think matters the most here is building a plan and a definition of what you are looking for:

1. Building a plan: This is as simple as putting 1 hour in your calendar every day to start searching for positions. Save them to a spreadsheet and make sure they fit your criteria.
2. Define role and companies criterias: small company, large company, startups? and in what roles? The best thing is to write all of this down together with your plan to make sure you can easily sort job applications and list them by priority in your spreadsheet.

Since you are working full-time, try to use morning/evening hours and commit to them every single day. It might take 2-3 months to find something new and you have to consider the time you will spend interviewing and managing the process for each application.

Let your close network know about your job search

This is a simple trick that not many people use. If your network knows that you are looking for a job, they will likely amplify your efforts and help you land opportunities much faster.

People tend not to say they are looking for a job because they fear their companies will discover that. In my experience, if you communicate this privately to your network – making calls/sending messages to your former colleagues, friends and LinkedIn contacts – it will work just fine.

Whenever this happened to me, I received pretty precise messages, along the way of “I am looking for VP Sales or Customer Success roles in companies up to 400 people, ideally fully remote” – I knew that person well of course and whenever I was meeting with other companies/customers I was thinking of him. If that was a message on LinkedIn from my network, I reached out to that person with something like “I know a strong person for that role, here is his linkedin: / want an intro?”. Now, imagine this multiplied for 10-15 people doing the same.

Many in your network will definitely think of your profile for open positions inside their organizations or will simply think of you when they come across companies looking for talent.

It’s really a number game: apply for hundreds of jobs

Back to my previous point at the beginning of this article: you need to apply for hundreds of jobs to build a solid pipeline of opportunities.

This is even more true nowadays considering that:

1. Remote positions expanded the pool of candidates by 10x for each position
2. ATS systems (like Lever, Workday etc.) are getting increasingly more complicated and have all sorts of automated filters (based on skills etc) to filter applicants.
3. Recruiters are not perfect: they miss amazing candidates, they are biased and sometimes they focus on very specific requirements missing out the big picture (in my experience this happens when the hiring manager did not spend enough time clarifying who they are looking for)
4. Timing: for many of the positions you see live there are already 3-4 candidates in the process and some of them might be already filled, you are simply too late in the process and it’s not your fault.

When we started building 1-click apply as our first product at Anthropos, we had exactly this need in mind: helping full time employees finding a job saving time while applying for 10x the number of applications they would send otherwise.

On a normal day, using Anthropos, you can send up to 100 job applications, spending as little as 15 seconds in each one. This is possible because we give you everything and you just need to fill out your Anthropos profile and use our extension.

We are working on giving you cover letters as well as part of this flow to make the process even better.

Send custom messages to your prioritized companies

Alright, in the last week you have applied to 200+ jobs. Great!

What about now? You might get some rejections already and some messages from recruiters to talk to you. I will let you manage them, it’s great and you know what to do.

But what about that job/company you really liked? If you followed the process, that’s in your priority list and I would send their recruiter or hiring manager a personalized message that explains why I am the right person for that role or what I would like to talk about in my interview.

This step requires a bit of work and a few hours to reach out to 10-20 companies. Do this ONLY for the companies that would really make a difference for you and use all your creativity for that. My suggestion is to use chatGPT as well to come with ideas for these messages and refine them a few times before sending.

Most people are too shy and don’t really go to this point. Why? They feel this is “too much” and worry about “what will she think about this? She might exclude me from the selection”…..well, the opposite is true, and I explained here how recruiters, C-levels and executives think about these messages, from my direct experience.

Take your time and assess your strategy every month

It might take you 6 months to find a new job and thousands of job applications sent. You know what? It’s ok – closing deals for sales people take the same amount of work (and more often) and so it does for recruiters and executives to find really amazing candidates.

What I think is important is to trust the process:

1. Don’t give up on this after 3 weeks or 2 months – even if the only thing you got are rejections. In the end you just need 1 yes.
2. Assess your strategy monthly – are you applying for the right roles for you? Look at the numbers and the responses, if you are not getting any type of feedback I would review that roles and your skills/ambitions. Ask a friend/colleague what she thinks based on your skills/path.
3. Change strategy: nobody will know and will judge you for that. Feel free to change strategy and find different roles, rebuild your resume highlighting different skills and experiences (and therefore deleting others).

I hope this is helpful – as usual – I am happy to answer specific questions in the comments!