Job Boards Are Default Deny
I’m looking for a job. I quit my perfectly great job of 9 years in October because I wanted a change of scenery, and since I’m bad at job hunting and don’t like doing it, I figured I’d never make a change if I didn’t force myself out of my comfort zone and back on the market. So I jumped out of the plane, hoping to find I had a working parachute.
I took a few months off, then I hired a career coach to help me get my story, and my head, straight. She helped me figure out what I wanted to go after, write a 1 minute pitch, and put together a new and improved resume.
My career coach, friends and family, all said that applying for jobs on job boards, like LinkedIn, wouldn’t work. They said for the senior roles I’m going after, the only way in is through my network, bypassing at least the first couple filters, if not most of them.
I don’t like networking, but I thought I’d try it for a month and see what happens. After a month I felt it was working, but I still didn’t like it, and I was maybe 6 months or more away from building up a network that would get me my next job.
So I pivoted to applying to jobs I could find on LinkedIn and Indeed–in other words, job boards. After a month of doing that and getting mostly rejection emails or silence, I have a guess why my friends told me to network instead: job board jobs are ‘default deny’.
What I mean is, the recruiting teams that advertise jobs on job boards get too many (underqualified) candidates, and they respond by ratching up the filtering. They assume most candidates are not a fit, and in any case, they don’t want lots of people to interview, so they create a guantlet that filters most people out. They start with the assumption that I, the applicant, am not worthy. And they proceed on that assumption, looking for an excuse to disqualify me as soon as possible, with as little effort on their part as possible. If I manage to make it past the resume screen, I’m not home free, the interview screens are are also searching for reasons to say ’no’ rather than ‘yes’ and they can usually find some.
With effort I suspect I can craft a resume that will get me past the resume screen for some jobs I’m interested in. With practice and luck I can probably get past some of the interview screens and merit the occassional job offer. Its a sales-style numbers game. I can improve my odds through hard work and exposing myself to lots of opportunities.
But reading Hillbilly Eligy where JD talks about the interview process for the elite law students at Yale, I was reminded that ‘default deny’ is not the only game in town…networking is really about accessing my social capital to play the ‘default allow’ game. In that game, I’m presumed qualified and when a potential employer finds evidence that maybe I’m not a fit, instead of immediately reaching for ’no’ they look for counter-evidence so they can get back to the ‘yes’ they want.
That sounds like a much better game to be playing. It’s a different kind of networking than I was doing though. To play that game I need to approach people that are in a position of influence and are interested in going to bat for me because they like me and they know what I’m capable of. And I need to ask them for help. I need to stop trying to be so damn self reliant and have the humility to treat my career more like the team sport it is.
Unless I really want to play more of the ‘default deny’ game. Umm, nope.