The Strategy of Passive Job Shopping
Job searching takes a lot of energy. It’s often seen as a second full-time job, but nearly always landing your next job is easier if you have a current job. Now, of course, doing the more traditional job search methods, such as trolling job boards and company websites and applying online to dozens or even hundreds of jobs, is not a good plan. Then you get these atrocious rejection emails, often weirdly quickly after you apply or months later after you’ve even forgotten these companies exist. This is exhausting and can be extremely difficult to do while you have a full-time job. That is why you need to use other strategies like job shopping to make your job search more passive while you are currently employed.
Why You Should Start Searching Early
The Reality of Job Security
There are several reasons why you should start job searching before you actually want to leave your job. First, there’s no such thing as job security. Layoffs are rampant, and you think there’s no way that a company that I have dedicated years of service to would get rid of me, but they do. This has happened to many people and it’s devastating. But layoffs are an extreme situation. What is actually more common is that you get passed up for a raise or promotion, or your work starts to become demanding and causes you stress or sleepless nights, or your boss becomes toxic and it’s chipping away at your mental health.
Having the Upper Hand
You need to have the upper hand and have companies already interested in you so that you are able to step away whenever this role no longer meets your values. Life is too short to put up with all the BS that comes with suboptimal employers. The next reason is many employers prefer to hire employed candidates. It’s completely biased and infuriating, and managers consistently favor employed candidates as being the most successful in their careers. For example, about a month ago, in a room full of CEOs, there was a presentation on how to effectively hire great talent and one CEO spoke up and said matter of factly, in the end, it’s not that important to look at applications sent in because we really want people who are currently employed because those are the ones who are nearly always the most talented.
Modern Hiring Approaches
No one contradicted him, not even the executive recruiter who was presenting, and several people were nodding along with his sentiment. As a human resources leader and job search strategist, staying up to date with how companies are hiring is essential. The goal is not to regurgitate outdated tips but to stay entrenched in the most current approaches that companies are using to hire people and then provide strategies to stand out by reverse engineering them.
Insights from Industry Leaders
Finding Talent Directly
In Work Rules by Laszlo Bock, a book about Google’s human resources function and how they hire, Bock specifically instructs companies to focus less on reading online applications and more on finding talent themselves or building relationships with individuals. He says the very best people aren’t out there looking for work. This mass emphasis for companies to move away from focusing on online applications and instead move to other methods is the reason the job shopping methods were created, because old methods simply aren’t working.
Increasing Earning Potential
The third reason you should start interviewing before you’re ready to leave your current job is that changing jobs every few years leads to higher earning potential across your career. According to an analysis of the data, if you wait for a raise from your current employer, you can expect about a 4% pay increase per year. But every time you opt for a new job at a new employer, you can see that jump to 5.3%. Anecdotally, clients typically see an average of a $30,000 salary increase when they move to their next role. This helps put in perspective how normal it is for someone to make a substantial jump when they move jobs.
Becoming a Job Shopper
Assessing Your Current Path
How long do you typically stay at a role? Is it usually a few months, a few years, a few decades? There should be interviewing several times a year, and there are ways to make more opportunities come to you. Let’s review some of these approaches.
Step 1: Know Exactly What You Want
The first way to get more opportunities coming to you passively is to know exactly what you want. This means job title, industry, and type of company. The issue can sometimes be that you aren’t totally happy with the path you’re currently on and you’re not optimistic that if you switch jobs things will actually get better. The company you work for isn’t going to win any best places to work awards, but at least it’s the devil you know. Possibly you’ve considered switching careers altogether, but that feels so daunting, like you’re starting completely over and you worry that the path you go down might not be the right one and then it’s going to be such a massive waste of time and energy.
Escaping the Lazy River
If this is you, it means that you are on the lazy river of your career. You’re sitting in an inner tube and you’re letting your career happen to you instead of taking control and steering. You get promotions and possibly even former bosses or co-workers offer you positions at new companies, and even though you don’t really like your job or your career path, you take it anyway because it’s the next level up and you get more pay and you don’t really know what else you’d be doing.
Choosing Your Own Direction
So you just stay on this path that you don’t really like and then 5, 10, 20 years later you look back on your career as one that you regret in a lot of ways, realizing you didn’t really choose this path, you simply went with the flow. You need to hop out of the inner tube and start to understand exactly what you want to do in your career.
Driving Inbound Opportunities
Step 2: Attract Interviews Without Applying
The second way to get more opportunities is to have those interviews come 100% inbound from companies you didn’t even apply to. This process of pursuing open opportunities as a job seeker takes a lot of time, so it is best to have companies come to you without you ever having to apply to jobs. Many clients consistently get multiple recruiters reaching out to them each week. The first step is to start optimizing your LinkedIn profile, going through a step-by-step checklist of what to improve so you can start to attract more attention. While employed, turn on open to work on your LinkedIn profile.
Managing LinkedIn Privacy
There’s an option where it only shows to recruiters of companies that are not the ones you work for. Make sure that you’re making it private. Don’t make it public open to work to everyone because you could get in trouble at your current employer that way, but you can make it private. Third, you must keep your network nice and warm. Job seekers often say they hate being on the job market because they feel uncomfortable reaching out to people asking them for things. The solution is to talk to people when you don’t expect anything from them. Reach out now, before you need anything.
Step 3: Keeping the Network Warm
Customize outreach and include a bit of information about yourself to encourage the other person to share as well. Take an interest in people with no hidden agenda. Fourth, and this is a crucial one that only takes about two minutes a week — create a document where you track the different projects you do at your current job. Also, put screenshots of messages that people send complimenting the quality of your work.
Step 4: Tracking Your Projects
Quickly you’ll have a list of accomplishments that you would have completely forgotten if you had not written them down. For example, looking back at an old accomplishments document, there was a note about being praised for finally being the first person who could get an all-company meeting to end on time. Without that note, that memory and many others like it would have been forgotten entirely. Having these records makes it much easier to recall specific examples when needed in an interview.
Planting Seeds for Success
The Story Toolbox Method
To be really good at telling these stories in a compelling way, learning a story toolbox method will seriously amplify your chances of landing the offer. The bottom line is that the job search doesn’t have to be hard. When people hear that they should be interviewing a few times every year, they think of a version of the job search where they are constantly tweaking their resume and sending out dozens and dozens of applications and it simply does not need to be that way. This is more about farming rather than hunting. It’s about planting seeds and having the patience to let them grow.
A Bountiful Harvest
Following the job shopping methods, you are nearly guaranteed a bountiful harvest. Focus on your professional brand online, your long-term networking strategy, and opportunities will be ready as soon as you are ready to jump. Your biggest regret will be mourning the life you could have had had you made the leap sooner.