Seeking out and eventually landing the job you want is an investment. Like an investment, you use currency (your time, effort, and often your emotional state) in an attempt to generate a return (landing the job you want and your financial wellbeing). Also like an investment, it helps to “diversify your portfolio”. Your portfolio in this case is where you allocate your time and effort. Picture it like a pie chart, with each slice of pie representing where you spend your time.

Too often, people focus on one path to finding a job and it ends up hurting them, especially if they choose the wrong path. For example, many people only look for jobs on job sites like Monster.com, CareerBuilder, or LinkedIn. As I mentioned in Why Job Sites are Bullsh*t and How to Overcome Them each posting on a job site receives an average of 250 resumes, meaning your chance of landing the job is 0.4%. That’s not zero but it’s close. Spending 100% of your effort on a path that yields success only 0.4% of the time is called a bad return on investment.

This doesn’t mean you completely abandon the job sites, but it does mean you need to be smart about how much time you spend there. The least amount of time should be spent on the lowest returning paths and, conversely, the most amount of time should be spent on the highest returning paths.
Portfolio diversification, as defined by Investopedia, “is an investment strategy that aims to balance risk and reward by apportioning a portfolio’s assets according to an individual’s goals, risk tolerance, and investment horizon”.

Let’s break that down into layman’s terms and match it to seeking a job.

Investment Strategy = Your strategy to finding a job.

You need to set a clear plan that leads to a specific desired outcome. Don’t “spray and pray” by blasting your resume at any job you can find. You need to be efficient with your time and develop a strategy

Balance risk and reward = Balancing your time and effort to give yourself the best chance of landing the job you want.

The risk is that your time and effort will be wasted and you won’t land the job you want (i.e. the reward). It takes a lot of energy to find and land a job so you need to make sure you are expending that energy efficiently. If you spend a year looking for a job and finally end up with a position that you don’t really want, you would have wasted a lot of time and effort. That’s out of balance. You need to identify a job you want and allocate the appropriate effort to earn that job.

Apportioning a portfolio’s assets = Splitting your time proportionately across several different paths.

There are several different paths to choose from when seeking a job, but all paths are not created equal. As such, you need to allocate your time accordingly. In other words, you need to dedicate the most time and effort to those paths that project the highest probability of return (i.e. getting the job) and dedicate the least amount of time to those paths that project the lowest probability of return. I will lay out those paths and identify which are best below.

An individual’s goals, risk tolerance, and investment horizon = The job you want, how much time and effort you are willing to put into getting it, and how quickly you want to obtain that job.

You need to determine what job you want and why. Don’t set out to land just any job, have a specific job in mind. I am not saying it has to be a specific role at a specific company, but at least have a general idea of what you want to do. An example would be “sales in the B2B technology space”. Otherwise you are going to be inefficient in your search and, worse, end up in a job you didn’t really want.
You also need to decide your risk tolerance, or how much time and effort you are willing to put into your search. Make no mistake, searching for a job is a time intensive investment. You can’t just lob in 3 resumes per night on a job site and expect greatness to fall in your lap. You need to put in the proper time if you really want to land the job you want. Ideally you would dedicate 2-3 hours searching per day if you already have a job and 8-10 hours per day if you are unemployed. How much time are you willing to commit to your future?

This feeds into your time horizon. How quickly do you want to land the job? If you want a new job ASAP then you need to amp up the amount of time spent searching. If you are looking for something 6 months from now then you can budget your time accordingly.

Now let’s dive into the different paths to finding a job and how much time you should spend on each.

Recruiters – 5% of your time

Recruiters can be great if they want to be. The problem is that they don’t want to be, at least not in a way that benefits you. Recruiters are paid by companies looking to fill a position so, of course, their primary motivation is filling that position regardless of the person on the other end. In other words, they could care less about the person that actually ends up filling the position. They are not paid to help you, they are paid to help the company.

The quicker they fill the position, the quicker they get paid. This means that they aren’t necessarily looking for the absolute best fit, but more so a good fit that can be put in the position quickly. The best way to do that is to find someone that checks all of the boxes of the job description. They aren’t spending time looking for outside-the-box candidates or diamonds in the rough. They are simply looking for cookie cutters that they can plug in quickly.

They are going to speak with you, get a few bullet points on your background, and then compare that to the open positions they are looking to fill to determine if there are any exact matches. If there aren’t, they will tell you that they will keep you in mind for future positions and then never think about you again.

Recruiters live inside the box and they do not deviate. You could be an undiscovered superstar but if you don’t have exactly 10 years of selling experience, a MBA, and a W2 of at least $300,000 they aren’t putting you in front of the company. You have a MBA, a W2 of $300,000, but only 5 years of selling experience – sorry you’re out. Forget the fact that you could be much better than the cookie cutter candidates they are putting in front of the company. You are more of a risk to get hired so they won’t spend the time on you.

This all means that you need to use recruiters sparingly and certainly never rely on them. If you count on a recruiter to find you a job you are going to be sitting around and waiting for a while.

You need to make the recruiters work for you. Find three of them in your field using either a Google search or a reference from a friend. Call them up and tell them what you are looking for. Then, walk away and don’t think about them until they call you.

They will of course look at open positions to see if you fit any. If you do they will call you. If you don’t you will never hear from them again. So, simply look at it as outsourced work that most likely won’t yield any dividends. But it helps to have a few more irons in the fire.

Job Sites – 15% of your time

By now you have probably picked up on my railings against job sites such as Monster.com, CareerBuilder, and LinkedIn. I don’t hate the job sites, in fact I think they are amazing tools that centralize open positions in one location and scale a person’s ability to search for jobs. In fact, they do such a good job of this that they have become saturated and individuals seeking jobs have been reduced to numbers.

You want to use the job sites but, just as with recruiters, you do not want to depend on them. They need to be a supplement to your search, not the primary means.

As mentioned above, the odds of landing a job posted on a job site are about 0.4%. So, to spend all of your time, or even a good portion of your time, on these sites is inefficient. You can go on CareerBuilder every day and apply to 100 jobs and you still may not get an interview. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve met that take this exact approach and tell me, “I’ve applied to thousands of jobs over the last 6 months and I can’t even get an interview!”

Do you know why? For one, you are one of hundreds of people applying and your only footprint is a virtual application that looks just like everyone else’s. Secondly, if you are blindly applying to that many jobs you probably aren’t a fit for 70% of them and probably wouldn’t want another 25% of them. You probably actually want only 5% of the jobs you applied to but instead of spending your time going hard after those 5% you spent all of your time blasting resumes into jobs that you wouldn’t want anyway.

Because of the small odds and the inefficiency, you are only going to spend 15% of your time here. And just like the recruiters, you need to use the job sites to your advantage and not let them use you. Determine how much time you are going to spend looking for a job each day and then dedicate only 15% of your time applying on the job sites. If you are going to spend three hours searching for jobs, then only spend 27 minutes applying to jobs on the jobsite.

In 27 minutes you should easily be able to apply to at least three jobs. But make sure they are jobs you want, because if by chance you do get a reply, you don’t want to have wasted your time on a job you never wanted in the first place.

We now have a second iron in the fire.

Family and Friends (Your Core Network) – 40% of your time

Family and friends, also known as your core network, can be a great resource for jobs. These people love you and want to see you do well so they will be more willing to make a connection and vouch for you. Leveraging friends and family also exponentially extends your network. If you know 10 people that know 10 people then all of a sudden you have a connection to 100 people.

In addition to finding opportunities it is also easier to land a job referred by a friend or family member. This is because people always prefer to hire someone they know or at least someone that knows someone they know. It minimizes their risk and gives them an insider’s look at the person. If a hiring manager knows you or knows someone you know it means you can’t fool them as easily in an interview. That gives them comfort.

The key on this path is identifying friends and family that can actually help. Typically you want to find those that have had a certain level of success themselves and that are well connected. Although, the “success” piece is not always as important as the connected part. I have family members that are blue collar workers that seem to know everyone.

Once you have identified those friends and family members, you need to have an open conversation with them to discuss their network. Let them know that you are looking for a specific type of job and ask if they may know anyone. Sometimes they may not know someone directly in that field but don’t let that stop you. Often you need to make a secondary connection to then make the primary connection.

For example, you may tell your Uncle John that you want to work in B2B technology sales but he doesn’t know anyone in that field. However, by digging a bit, you discover that he knows plenty of people in B2B sales in the pharmaceutical space. So, you connect with them to learn more about B2B sales in general and then perhaps they know someone in B2B sales in technology. This is called using the network of your network.

If you work the family and friends network hard enough, the probability of finding and landing the job you want is significantly higher than blindly blasting resumes on job sites or using a recruiter. But, you need to do the work. You can’t just mention in passing that you are looking for a job and hope that they get back to you. You need to proactively ask them to connect you with their network and stay on top of them. They are very busy people, so finding you a job is not their priority. That’s your priority.

Go to the Source – 45% of your time

In the post Why Job Sites are Bullsh*t and How to Overcome Them I tell you how to identify and reach the people that you want to directly work for. This is the highest probability path to landing the job you want.

If you want to work as a B2B sales professional in technology for Google then why would you call a recruiter or become a faceless name on a job site? If you want to work for Google go talk to people that work at Google! If you want water, go to the well.

It’s that simple and it give you the best odds of landing the job you want. But do you know why people rarely take this route? It’s because it’s unorthodox in today’s world.

The job market has told us that we need to play inside of the rules of their game. We need to apply to a job using a specific process or we can only speak to a hiring manager if we speak to the recruiter first. Fuck the game. I’m rewriting the rules of the game.

Are you telling me that if I knew the CEO personally he would make me speak to a recruiter before speaking to him? Of course not! So, I need to get to know the CEO personally. And how do I do that? I figure out a way to meet him.

But people are afraid of that. They think it’s weird to call someone directly and ask for what you want. Or they’re afraid they will piss someone off. Who cares? If you want something in this world you have to go for it with everything you have and sometimes that type of aggressiveness will piss a few people off. But I guarantee you that it will impress more people than it angers.

You need to go directly to the source. I provide details on how to do that in How to Skip the Line and Why Job Sites are Bullsh*t so I won’t go into it again here, but they key takeaway is that this path is the highest probability to success. You need to cut out the middlemen and go directly to the decision maker. Go for the throat.

So there it is, the proper allocation of time for your investment in finding and landing the job you want. We have identified the lowest and highest probability paths and apportioned our time appropriately. By using this method you will significantly enhance your efficiency and drastically improve your odds of landing the job you ultimately want.