If you’ve read me for any length of time, you know that I believe job seek­ers are the dri­ving force for our indus­try. They are why employ­ers are will­ing to talk to us and will­ing to pay us. Their suc­cess in find­ing work is our suc­cess.

So how do you ensure that job seek­ers are suc­cess­ful? You start by think­ing like a job seek­er.

This is actu­al­ly a bit hard­er that you might imag­ine. I’ve worked with job seek­ers of all ages, edu­ca­tions, back­grounds, and loca­tions – and I’ve found that they strug­gle when look­ing for work. Why is that?

Because – unless they’ve been incred­i­bly for­tu­nate – no one taught them how to look for work. And even if they’ve been exposed to a few use­ful books, train­ings, or web­sites, they quick­ly dis­cov­er that the ‘hir­ing game’ is com­pli­cat­ed, unpre­dictable, and not designed to help them suc­ceed. Throw in a few more bar­ri­ers such as being a minor­i­ty can­di­date or hav­ing to look dur­ing a pan­dem­ic or reces­sion, and it’s actu­al­ly amaz­ing that most of them still man­age to find jobs.

And…many job boards are part of the prob­lem.

The way to fight that is to think like a job seek­er. What does that mean?

1. Do I know what I’m look­ing for? Many job seek­ers don’t. They have – at best – a shaky under­stand­ing of the rela­tion­ship between a spe­cif­ic job title and the duties and skills it entails. Help them by pro­vid­ing tar­get­ed and digestible con­tent that links the com­mon job titles in your niche with infor­ma­tion about what a per­son in that job actu­al­ly does.
2. Do I know where to find what I’m look­ing for? Most job seek­ers will start with Google, typ­ing in a job cat­e­go­ry or title plus a loca­tion. That means that your site must be opti­mized for the Google Jobs schema, that it must have land­ing pages and prop­er SEO for the most com­mon job search­es (Google’s search data can help here), and that your pres­ence online must extend beyond your site’s SEO – arti­cles, sur­veys, PR, and so on.
3. Can I fig­ure out how your site/app/whatever works? In my opin­ion, the first rule of site design is “Don’t be weird”. Yes, it would be cool to have ani­mat­ed hip­pos fol­low­ing the cur­sor’s track, and lime green is an arrest­ing col­or – but the poor job seek­er does­n’t care. She just wants to get in, find a com­pa­ny or job, and be on her way. She wants results. Don’t let your UX ego get in the way.
4. Can you remind me? Look­ing for work is – as you can tell – con­fus­ing, over­whelm­ing, emo­tion­al, and tir­ing. So help your job seek­ers out by tak­ing care of them via ‘auto­mat­ic’ reminders like the low­ly job alert. Don’t expect them to remem­ber your site. Don’t expect them to book­mark it or fol­low it or like it. Just make it easy for them to reen­gage.

There’s a lot more to think­ing like a job seek­er – but hope­ful­ly this will get you start­ed. Remem­ber – if your job seek­ers suc­ceed, you suc­ceed.

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