When job hunting becomes a job in itself

Somewhere in the last decade — especially once corporate greed grew shameless enough that layoffs became the preferred route to a fat bonus check — job security went out the window.

With every wave of cuts, more candidates flooded the market, and applying for a job quietly became a job in itself. Then COVID came, and with it more layoffs. Then AI arrived and made the previous rounds look like a fire drill.

Today, the average information worker applies to hundreds of jobs every time they’re laid off. This is now the norm.

The modern job seeker runs a one-person operations department with a workload, a schedule, and performance anxiety: sourcing openings across multiple platforms, tailoring CVs, writing cover letters nobody may read, tracking applications in spreadsheets, preparing for interviews that may never be scheduled, and following up into silence. Twenty hours a week is common. Forty and more is not rare.

And here’s the part that should bother everyone: you’re not out of work for a year — with all the implications that has — because there are dozens of better candidates than you. You’re in limbo because recruitment is broken and no one has enough skin in the game to fix it.

The volume trap

Soon, advising job seekers became its own industry, and today the market is saturated with experts selling advice based on that single time they did it. It’s a weird space where doing it once became a recognized sign of expertise — contrary to every other field, where only repeatable results matter.

The standard advice made it worse. “It’s a numbers game,” they say. “Apply to everything. You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

So people industrialized and automated. Dozens of applications a week. Hundreds over a search. One-click apply turned candidates into spam, and employers responded the way anyone responds to spam: filters, automation, and silence. Which drove candidates to apply to even more jobs to compensate. Which deepened the filtering. The arms race has no winner — just two sides drowning in each other’s volume. Another version of the digital Serengeti.

The math is brutal and worth saying plainly: if a posting attracts hundreds of applications and you’re sending untailored CVs into that pool, your expected return per application rounds to zero. Multiplying zero by a bigger number is still zero. Volume doesn’t fix a targeting problem. It hides it.

What the hours actually buy

Track an honest week of high-volume job hunting and sort the work into two piles: targeting and processing.

Processing is the grind: the tailoring, the form-filling, the uploading of the same CV into a portal that then asks you to retype the same CV.

Targeting is the rare, quiet work of deciding which jobs deserve you at all — whether your experience actually maps to what they need, and whether the odds justify the required time commitment — the tailored application, the prep for an intro call, and maybe a take-home challenge down the line.

Targeting and processing is the difference between the brain surgeon and the butcher, or the sniper and the machine gun. One spends most of the time carefully planning and executing a single stroke; the other hacks away or mows down everything in front of it. The quantity-over-quality job market has turned everyone into the latter.

If you’re one of these people now spending almost everything on processing and almost nothing on targeting, and you found yourself cornered by a lack of options, please know that it’s not your fault. But it’s still backwards. Targeting is where the leverage lives. One targeted application will genuinely outperform twenty or forty hopeful ones — for one simple reason: proper fit.

Reclaiming the workweek

If job hunting has become a job, run it like a good one — not a sweatshop.

Step 1 — Do the hard work once. Your experience, your evidence, your story — build it properly one time in improved.cv, where you can export custom-tailored versions for each application.

Step 2 — Target before you process. With your story built, assess each opportunity in improved.cv to decide which jobs deserve it. Kill the maybes early. A shortlist of three real fits beats a spray of thirty.

Step 3 — Cap the processing. Automate what’s left, timebox it — say, ten focused hours a week — and protect the rest of your life from it. Burnout doesn’t interview well.

Step 4 — Read the silence right. No reply from a mass posting says nothing about you. It says the pipe was full. Log it, move on to the next target.

Step 5 — Respect the season. Markets breathe. Hiring surges and stalls by month and by country. When your market goes quiet, pausing isn’t quitting — it’s refusing to pay full effort for empty odds. Rest is a strategy too.

None of this makes a broken system fair. But it changes whose terms you’re working on. The system profits from your volume; you profit from your judgment.

Job hunting became a job. Fine. Just remember you’re the manager of it — and a manager’s first duty is refusing to let the workload destroy the worker.