The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that there are currently 7.6 million job openings in the market. However, most job seekers – especially those with university degrees – are facing an increasingly competitive market as sought after roles often have hundreds if not thousands of applicants for a single position.
Competitive labor market conditions are of course nothing new. Job seekers have faced similar challenges during the 2008 financial crisis and during the dot com bust of 2000.
Still, approaching a job search strategy in a competitive labor market is fundamentally different from the market we experienced only a short time ago when the “great resignation” had employers scrambling for talent, often paying above market salaries.
As you’re thinking about how to optimize your chances of securing a role faster than the average 6 months it’s taking most job seekers today, here’s what you should keep in mind.
Avoid Making a Drastic Career Change
It’s okay to target a new industry or even a job with new responsibilities, but making a career pivot in an employer’s market is a lot harder when the market is flooded with experienced people competing for the same roles.
If you are looking for a change in your responsibilities make sure that you at least have some of the skills required for every opportunity that you’re considering. To test if you have the minimum requirements ask yourself – “can I be productive in this role on day one”?
If your answer is ‘no’, or “no, but I’m a quick learner and can learn it all on the job” then consider deprioritizing the opportunity. In an employer’s market, hiring managers are looking for talent that can add value immediately and are less likely to invest the time and money into training you to do your job.
Avoid Applying to Hundreds of Jobs
This might sound counterintuitive but if you’re mass applying to lots of roles you’re likely increasing your chances of being missed by the right employer.
Your only goal with a job application is to get noticed and to get an interview. For this reason you’re likely to see better results with a more targeted approach where you’re hyper selective on the roles you consider.
When looking for jobs every once in a while you likely come across an opportunity that just feels right. The culture fits, the industry is exciting, the responsibilities are interesting, and most importantly the requirements seem like a great fit for your skills. When this happens, spend an extra 5 minutes updating the most recent bullets on your resume or crafting a custom email to send to a hiring manager after applying.
This will not guarantee that you’ll get a reply but it will guarantee that you’ll land in the top 5-10% of applicants for the role, ultimately increasing the number of interviews you get invited to, which is the only metric of success you should be aiming for when applying.
Don’t Simply Quantify Your Past Experience
A common trend we see when reviewing resumes is the use of quantifiable metrics to show the results you’ve been able to drive in a previous role. While this concept is not fundamentally flawed, in practice many resumes end up with numbers that provide little to no context, making it difficult for hiring managers to interpret, or worse, believe what you’re saying.
Every single metric or number shared on your resume should immediately make sense to the reader. Avoid using vague descriptions like “increased engagement by 100%.” Add sufficient context to clearly show the work that led to the outcome, like “experimented with new event formats to double average event attendance to 50 participants.”
In an employee’s market employers often scramble for talent as they see fewer qualified applicants for the roles they’re trying to fill. This is when interviews are easy to come by as hiring managers simply want to speak to more people in the hopes of finding someone that might be able to do the work or could be trained on the skills required.
In an employer’s market however it’s your responsibility as the job seeker to make your candidacy make sense to an employer. Any doubts in your ability to do the role well quickly disqualifies you when there’s a whole pile of credible candidates waiting to be considered. Take these basic steps to clearly communicate your qualifications to employers and you’ll quickly find yourself landing more interviews and job offers by making it easier to hire you.