Looking for a job? Get off LinkedIn

At the end of last year, Swava, Chad and I made the decision to wind down Narrative. As a result, I found myself exploring jobs for the first time in over ten years. I've read a number of horror stories about people's experiences finding work; I'll offer my brief journey, which wasn't horrifying, but was a pretty depressing indictment on jobs and recruiters.

Round 1: Blind apply

I decided to take a methodical and somewhat experimental approach to the process.

First, I applied to twenty jobs posted on LinkedIn that I was extraordinarily over-qualified for, but that I didn't actually want. Feel free to hate on me about the ethics of this; it sits fine with me, considering how much I've seen companies completely abusing my alumni and the professional community of designers at large.

I tried to focus on jobs that used their own application systems, rather than LinkedIn's "quick apply" feature. I've been on the hiring-manager side of the application process with LinkedIn, and their candidate browser makes it far too easy to reject people en masse without actually looking at them at all.

I've built this site and my portfolio in NextJS, and since it's all custom, it's easy to add some pretty rich telemetry. When a person views the portfolio with a password I've supplied, I receive an email about it. Since I provide a unique password to each company, it's easy to track their behavior during their session and across sessions, and see every page they view (both in the portfolio and in my larger site of writing and courses.) It's also not too difficult to integrate all of this into Google Analytics, which means I can use their advanced in-page event tracking to see behaviors like scrolling and dwelling.

Of the twenty jobs I applied for, one company visited my site, looked at the index page for about 5 seconds, did not look at any of the work (or anything else), and left. The other nineteen never looked at the site at all. Four sent me automated rejection notices. Sixteen never got back to me at all.

My hypothesis here is that the lack of engagement was a combination of poor AI/keyword matching from applicant tracking systems, and lazy recruiting.

Round 2: Beat the AI

For my next approach, I structured my application and resume to be obnoxiously tied to the job posting itself; I literally copy and pasted the job title, expectations, and raw text into my materials. For example, if the job was advertising for a "Staff Product Designer II", I led with "My name is Jon, and I'm a Staff Product Designer II."

I applied to ten jobs that I was again overqualified for. Of these ten, four looked at my site, and of those four, one looked at multiple projects and spent a meaningful amount of time looking at my work. I received invitations to interview with three of these companies, and turned them all down. The other six never looked at the work, and were never heard from again.

My odds for a "first look" here increased dramatically, from basically 0 to ~40%. My hypothesis is, again, poor AI/keyword matching, but this time, working in my favor. It's also worth pointing out that three recruiters logged into my site, never looked at anything, and reached out for interviews. I think they have been explicitly tasked with confirming a person actually has work to show before they enter someone in their pipeline, which makes sense.

When combined together, I applied for thirty jobs. Only five companies acted on my application. One looked at my work; three reached out for interviews; four rejected me. Twenty-two (73%) ghosted entirely. There are many ways to interpret this, and many places in this mini "experiment" that were biased or uncontrolled. But my takeaway is that applying to a job on LinkedIn is a bad use of time and largely wasted effort.

I've watched my friends, colleagues, and students all go through a similar (albeit less structured) process, all with nearly identical results. My wife is going through a job search in a completely different industry, and her experience is the same, too.

Round 3: Get off LinkedIn

After exploring these dynamics, I took the approach that I tell my students to use.

I requested introductions from friends, acquaintances, and people I trust. I focused on jobs I wanted, at companies I respect, and at levels of influence that are commiserate with my experiences. I reached out to designers I know, and purposefully moved the discussion as far off LinkedIn as possible.

I asked for introductions to executive-level recruiters from eight of these contacts, and received seven. Of those seven, I had conversations with six recruiters, and from those, entered the "official process" with four companies. In all seven cases, I had a clear reason why I did or did not advance to the next step in the process, and was treated with respect.

During my search, I tried to be objective. A company owes me nothing; I'm not promised a job, rejection shouldn't be personal, and given what I learned about shitty AI and lazy recruiting, a purely rational expectation is to expect nothing. But compounding the experience and ruining this objectivity is the context: my experience was largely initiated through LinkedIn. And LinkedIn has turned into Instagram.

On Instagram, everyone is having a beautiful and wonderful life, except you. On LinkedIn, everyone is finding high-profile, well-paying jobs—except you. It's relentless. It's terribly difficult to be proud of a former colleague when they update their status—"Jon has a new job as Vice President of Awesome!"—and at the same time, apply for jobs you know you can do well, and have 73% of companies completely ignore you. And it's a mindfuck to keep trying, because you know the process isn't going to work for you, but it sure seems like it's working for other people.

Network around this process

Here's my take. Network around the process. Your entire goal is to have a conversation with a recruiter based on a warm referral, entirely off of LinkedIn.

1. Get off LinkedIn, entirely. Stop doom-scrolling the feed, don't use it to find jobs, and stop cold-connecting to people who are, at best, going to ignore you. This feels so, so wrong, because it seems like a beehive buzzing with people winning. But by the numbers, it's just not; a combination of shit AI, shit recruiting, and a massive number of people shooting darts at a wall means that it's unlikely that you are going to get anyone's attention, no matter how good your work is.
2. Focus. Identify where you want to work and what you want to do. Don't worry about if they have open jobs or not. As one of my recruiter friends told me, "If a job is on LinkedIn, chances are it's already filled."
3. Overlay designers you know with companies on your list. Think about the people you've crossed paths with in the past. They don't need to be "high up" or in a hiring role; they just need to remember you, and, hopefully, think you are great.
4. Reach out to those designers—ideally, by phone—and ask for an introduction to a recruiter at their company. Your goal is to go around the entire process: no applications, no darts at a dartboard. Get out of the bucket of 10,000 applicants.

Once you have a call with a recruiter, it's on you; now, it's a fair process, one where you'll be judged based on your work, your experience, your personality, and so-on.

The bottleneck in this process is step 3: overlaying designers you know with companies on the list of places you want to work. That's because you need to have a network of people that really know you, that trust you, and that will actually answer the phone when you call them because they want to talk to you. That's a small network, and it's a network that grows slowly. That means that you have to be growing it all of the time, not just when you are looking for a job. And to translate this to human speak instead of gross-corporate-lingo: your network is a bunch of people who are friends with you, and also have a job that's similar to yours, and that want to have good conversations.

The takeaway

The best way to "keep your network warm"—("remind your friends that you exist")—is to catch up with these people when you don't want anything from them. That means that the best time to improve your ability to get a new job is when you don't need one.

I have a lecture about this that you may find useful; slides are here.

The end of this story for me, for what it's worth: I'm going to be joining the PhD program at UC Irvine, in Informatics, to explore how and why people are, or aren't, or think they are, or think they aren't, creative. It's been a while since I've been a student; I may go out for the football team. Stay tuned.