“Every part of how we operate has changed because of the internet and mostly for the better. One thing that hasn't improved is the quality of our job candidates. People apply to our jobs with typos in their resumes, come dressed inappropriately for interviews, and what's amazing to me, don't know anything about our business when they get here. I mean why did you even apply to this job!? It's enough to make me want to hire a recruiter. Someone should teach a class on how to get a job. Society has failed these people.”
—Frustrated employer
Hi there. Let's have a serious talk. As a cofounder of ZipRecruiter, I have helped millions of people find jobs. But here's the truth. Most of you (I will generously put this at 95%) are terrible at searching for work.
It's not your fault. Nobody trained you to search for a job. Even worse, much of the conventional wisdom about the process has been flat-out wrong since job search went online. But there is good news. I can make you a modern-day job-seeking expert. It won't take weeks of training, or hours of homework and practice. We can do this in a day. I'm not just talking about finding the right jobs to apply to—I mean I can teach you how to write a resume that works, how to stand out when you apply, how to be awesome in every interview you get, and even how to negotiate your job offer to help you get paid fairly.
It doesn't matter what your situation is—I don't care if you are a recent graduate, coming out of the military, coming back into the workforce after a break, or have 15+ years of experience. The advice I am going to give you works for everybody. I am going to give you step-by-step, and specific, practical instructions for how to get the job you want and, better yet, how to do it with confidence.
By the end of this book, you're going to enjoy searching for work. I'm delighted to be on this journey with you.
No One Should Have to Be Good at This
It's an amazing time to be alive, with technology advancing at blistering speeds. We can talk to our phones, own a car that drives itself, and get medicine tailored to our unique genetics. Drones, 3D printers, electric cars, 5G, artificial intelligence, and smart homes are now commonplace, everyday realities.
All that is happening, and yet the 50,000 job sites operating in the United States today work basically the same way they did when job search first went online in 1999. Even Google, for all its engineering prowess, produced a job site that follows the traditional design—you are presented with a search box and asked to enter keywords in order to find work. When given this self-service search challenge, job seekers struggle to find the jobs for which they are well-suited. No wonder employers frequently complain about lack of “quality candidates” as their number-one issue in business surveys and Federal Reserve reports.
All of us are fundamentally bad at finding the right jobs. But hey—it's clearly not your fault. Does anyone train you to write boolean expressions to get better results out of a search engine? No. Do you even know what a boolean expression is? Probably not.
Why can Instagram and YouTube learn enough about us to serve content we find irresistible, but job search engines operate like choose-your-own-adventure books? Why is job search still so dumb?
The ZipRecruiter “Gulp” Moment
Let me tell you a story…
Before cofounding ZipRecruiter, I worked for a string of early-stage start-up companies that were too small to have HR teams that could do my recruiting for me. As a result I was the one personally posting jobs to multiple job boards like Monster, CareerBuilder, Dice, Craigslist, Hotjobs … the list went on and on. (Yes, I am old.) As candidates applied I would have to print out their resumes in order to review them all at once.
The amount of time (and paper) it took was stunning. If I had just three open positions to fill, no matter what my title was at the time, I was transformed into a full-time recruiter. In fact, it was while staring at multiple stacks of printed resumes on my desk, that the idea for ZipRecruiter first came into my head. What if there was a button you could push that would send a job to every job site at once? Even better, what if all the candidates who applied were stored digitally in one place for review?
Two years later, that's exactly what my three cofounders and I built. ZipRecruiter was born. We deployed a solution that has not only simplified the recruiting process, but reduced the time to hire for businesses across the country.
When we launched the business in 2010, I was incredibly proud of ZipRecruiter. Employers were getting better outcomes and signing up in droves. The company was winning awards for innovation, and I felt like we'd made a meaningful impact on the world. Hiring, which no one enjoyed doing, had suddenly become easier.
But a couple of years in, something that had been percolating below the surface became too big a problem to ignore. As much as we had transformed the recruiting process for hiring managers, the job seekers we spoke to still hated searching for work.
Job seekers didn't know which job sites to search on, which jobs to apply to, and worst of all, why they would send out countless applications and hear nothing back.
The idea of building a better job search experience was daunting. The more we researched, the more we saw it wasn't one thing that was broken—it was the whole process. I remember thinking “this will take years and a crazy amount of money to fix.” I don't think there was a bigger “gulp” moment in our company history.
Eight years later, with over $200,000,000 invested (yeah, you read that right), hundreds of dedicated full-time engineers working on the problem, and a series of first-of-their-kind features deployed, I am proud to say that ZipRecruiter is the number-one-rated job search app on both iOs and Android. Along the way we had to become experts not just on the technology, but the psychology of job search.
Building a better job site meant finding solutions for nonintuitive realities around things like: how job seekers self-disqualify from jobs they should apply to, what recruiters really do with your resume, and how speed in everything—applying to a job, responding to an employer's email, or answering your phone can matter as much to you getting hired as your professional experience.
Of course technology plays a big role. The reason Instagram and YouTube can keep you entertained for hours isn't because they have the best content. It's because they have enough data to know what “other people like you” enjoy seeing. This is “the wisdom of the crowd” and it is crazy powerful. ZipRecruiter deployed the same approach to bring you better job matches, and, lucky for us, it works. Software that “learns” is our new reality, and it is getting smarter every day.
But rest assured you won't need a computer science degree to read this book. What you're going to get is straightforward instructions for every part of your job search. You can read the science behind it to understand the “why” (it's all in there), but the important thing is to follow the prescribed advice.
If you were recently laid off or fired, are in school, are in the military, or are returning to the workforce after a gap in your work history, I have a list of things for you to do that are time sensitive.
Flip to the back and review the Appendix: “Before You Start the Search.”
That's it. No more setup. Let's talk about how to get you a better job.