Four Questions That Tell You Which Part of Your Job Search Is Broken
Most stalled job searches are not broken in four places. They are broken in one — and people spend months repairing the other three. Here is how to find which one is yours.
A pipe does not usually burst along its length. It fails at a joint. Your job search works the same way, and this is the single most useful thing we teach, because almost everybody gets it wrong in the same direction.
When nothing is working, it feels like everything is broken. So people rewrite the CV, and join more job groups, and read about interviews, and change their LinkedIn photo — all in the same fortnight. Then nothing changes, because the one thing that was actually broken got about a quarter of the attention, and the three things that were already fine got the rest.
The four points
01 Supply — you can't apply for a job you never saw. Are you seeing real, eligible roles at all? Eligible means the company can actually pay someone in your country, which is a different question from whether the advert says "remote".
02 Representation — if your CV can't be read, you were never really in the running. Can software and then a stranger read what you are? A CV that people call "nice" can still be unreadable to the system that screens it first.
03 Aim — applying everywhere isn't the same as applying where you'd get hired. Are your applications going to companies that could have hired you, in roles you could have won?
04 Conversion — interviews don't pay you. A signed offer does. Do conversations end in offers, or in silence? Does the money arrive right?
Four questions
Answer these honestly, alone, with nobody watching.
One. In the last month, how many roles did you find that you were genuinely eligible for? If the answer is "almost none", stop reading about interviews. Your leak is Supply, and everything downstream is being judged on far too little evidence to mean anything.
Two. Of your last twenty applications, how many got any reply at all — even a rejection? Total silence and a stream of rejections are completely different diagnoses. Silence usually means you were never read: that is Representation. Rejections mean you were read and passed over: that is closer to Aim.
Three. How do you choose what to apply to? If the honest answer is "whatever reaches me" or "as many as I can, quickly", your leak is Aim. Applications sent is a measure of effort, not of direction, and a large number with no replies is evidence of a problem rather than proof of trying.
Four. When you get in front of a human, what happens? If interviews come and offers do not, your CV is working and your aim is close enough. The leak is Conversion — and that is genuinely good news, because the hard joints are already fixed and the last twenty minutes is the most learnable part of the whole process.
Then fix only that one
This is the part people resist. Having found the leak, fix that joint and deliberately ignore the other three for a few weeks. Not because the others are perfect, but because attention divided four ways finishes nothing, and you will never learn what actually moved the needle if you change everything at once.
There is also no feedback loop in job hunting. Nobody writes to tell you why. So if you change six things and something improves, you have learned nothing you can repeat. Change one, and the result teaches you something.
A shortcut
We built the four questions into a free tool that scores your answers and names your leak, along with three things you can do about it tonight at no cost. It takes about ninety seconds, asks for no email address, and stores nothing: Find Your Leak.
If you would rather do it on paper, the four questions above are the whole tool. The instrument matters far less than the discipline of answering honestly and then repairing one thing properly.