Your Job Search Is a Sales Funnel

A designer I recently started working with had already been searching for a few months. He was landing interviews fairly consistently. But after the months of conversations, he still didn't have an offer in hand.

He assumed the interviews themselves were where he kept slipping up, and there was some truth to that. Panel presentations and final rounds were where he kept getting stuck. We worked on handling his nerves and rambling by practicing his pacing, giving himself a pause before answering, getting more comfortable with several people watching instead of one. 

But we started noticing a pattern showing up after looking at his interview history. Some of those companies were never going to be a strong match for what he had worked on, no matter how strong his interviewing skills were. Better pacing wasn't going to fix that.

That's when I asked him to stop thinking like a job seeker and start thinking like a sales rep.

Job seekers often track only one number, how many applications went out. Salespeople don’t usually think that way. The good ones don't chase every lead that comes in. They qualify leads first, and put their real effort into the ones that are actually a fit. Chasing volume without qualifying just wastes time on leads that were never going to close anyways.

When we looked at his search that way, the number of leads wasn't the issue. He was getting a decent amount of interviews. What he didn't have was any certainty that those interviews were with the right kind of company for what he actually did best, and whether his story conveyed that fit strongly enough.

Looking more closely, we found part of the problem in how he introduced himself, on paper and in conversation. He led with industries he worked in: fintech, adtech, education. This signaled a strong range. In reality though, it didn’t tell hiring managers what he actually knew how to do and whether this was a weak-fit or a strong one.

So we instead came up with a more focused version of his story. Complex B2B SaaS products, enterprise software, operational workflows, systems where a dashboard shows you whether something's stuck and an automation fires the moment something breaks. That's not a wider net, it's a sharper one. It tells the right hiring teams they're looking at a fit, and it tells the wrong ones just as quickly that they're not.

So we stopped leading with industry and started leading with the kinds of products he actually knew how to produce.

That clearer positioning changed which interviews he was even landing. Fewer of them were with companies where he'd have to talk up his relevance. More of them were with companies where the fit was obvious before he ever got on the call.

This shift didn’t necessarily make his search more active. But it did make the conversations more likely to convert.

A few weeks in, he accepted an offer. He had a start date. Around the same time, another company reached out to him about a different role. Fewer of his conversations were with companies who were never going to be a fit. More of them were with the ones that potentially were.

That's the sales lens I often suggest looking through. A good sales rep doesn't measure their pipeline by how many leads came in. They measure it by how many of those leads were actually worth pursuing in the first place. It's the same in a job search. More applications can get you more interviews. But if you're spending half of every one explaining why you're relevant, maybe that lead wasn't highly qualified to begin with. Maybe it was never going to convert efficiently, no matter how well you interviewed.

The question a lot of people ask is, "How do I get more interviews?" The one I sometimes prefer to ask instead is, "How do I get better ones?"

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Need help figuring out what's holding your search back?

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