The Complete Job Search Guide

Getting organized.

Put every application in one place before you send another one. One row per job, six fields, five stages, and a next action on every open row. A pipeline you can read on a Friday is the whole system.

Searches usually come apart in the same place. The jobs live in browser tabs, the notes live in your head, and by week three you cannot remember which of the four companies you spoke to owes you a reply. Fix that first. It takes twenty minutes and it is the part of this guide that every other section depends on.

The six fields every row needs

• Company and role title. The exact title from the posting, not your shorthand for it. You will search for it later.
• A copy of the posting. Paste the text, not just the link. Postings come down, and you will want those words back when the interview gets scheduled six weeks later.
• The date you applied. Every follow-up in this guide is counted from it.
• The stage. One of the five below.
• One human. A recruiter, the hiring manager, anyone you have found who works there. A company is not a contact.
• The next action and its date. What you will do, and the day you will do it.

If you keep only one of the six, keep the last one. A pipeline with no next action is a list.

The five stages

1. Saved. Worth applying to. Not applied yet.
2. Applied. Sent. Waiting.
3. Screening. A human replied. Recruiter call booked or done.
4. Interviewing. Anything past the screen.
5. Closed. Offer, rejection, or no reply after your second follow-up.

Silence is a stage and it belongs in Closed. Leaving dead applications open makes the pipeline look busy while it is empty, which is the one thing you need it not to do.

How many applications a week

Take the number from your calendar, not from a blog post, and that includes this one. Budget 30 to 45 minutes for one tailored application: read the posting, pull the phrases, adjust the resume, write four sentences of a note, look for one person who works there. Then do the arithmetic. Ten focused hours a week is roughly fifteen applications. Three hours is roughly five.

Pick the number your week can actually hold and hit it every week. A number you hit forty weeks running beats a bigger number you hit once and then abandon.

How to split the week

Our recommended split is 60/20/20. Sixty percent of search time on applications, twenty percent on networking, twenty percent on preparing and building skills. That is a recommendation and not a measurement. Its job is to interrupt the common failure, which is spending every hour on the submit button because the submit button is the only part that feels like progress.

Building your resume.

Your resume is read twice: by software that ranks it against the posting, then by a person giving it a few seconds. Keep one master version and run a ten minute keyword pass against every job before you send it.

Applicant tracking systems rank and filter what they receive against the job description. A weak match does not usually trigger an automatic rejection. It buries you under the applications that matched better, which has the same effect from where you are standing. Both problems have the same fix, and it is not a rewrite. It is a pass.

The keyword pass, in ten minutes

1. Open the posting and your resume side by side.
2. Highlight every phrase in the posting that names a tool, a method, a metric, or a responsibility. You are looking for nouns, not adjectives.
3. Cross out every one that is not genuinely true of you. What is left is your list.
4. Move 6 to 10 of them into your bullets, in their words rather than your synonyms. If the posting says cross-functional stakeholder communication, do not write great communicator. Write theirs.
5. Save as PDF unless the application asks for .docx. Name the file First-Last-Role.pdf.

This is not gaming anything. A recruiter searching their own system searches with the posting’s words, because those are the words they were given.

Formatting rules that are about the parser, not about taste

• One column. Tables, text boxes, sidebars, and multi-column layouts are the most common way a good resume arrives scrambled.
• Standard headings only. Experience, Education, Projects, Skills. A parser is looking for those words.
• No graphics, no icons, no skill bars. A picture of a rating is not text, so it carries nothing.
• A common font at a readable size. This is the one rule that is also about the human.
• One page under ten years of experience. Two at most after that.

The shape of a bullet that works

Verb, what you changed, the number that proves it. Rewrote the onboarding emails and cut time to first reply from two days to four hours. If you do not have a number, use a count instead: how many people, how many accounts, how often, how long it used to take.

Numbers do not have to be impressive. They have to be specific. Specific is what separates a bullet a stranger can picture from one they skim.

Preparing for interviews.

Write six stories once and reuse them for the whole search. Spend the last thirty minutes before every call on the same four things. Bring three questions only someone who read the posting could ask.

Six stories, written down once

Most behavioural questions are the same handful of questions wearing different clothes. Write one story for each of these, once, and stop improvising:

1. A time you shipped something under a deadline.
2. A time you disagreed with someone more senior than you.
3. A time you broke something and fixed it.
4. A time you had to learn something fast to finish the work.
5. A time you led without any authority to.
6. A time you failed, and what you changed afterwards.

Write each one in the STAR shape: situation, task, action, result. Then read it out loud with a timer. Ninety seconds is the target. Almost everyone runs long the first time, and the fix is cutting the setup, never the result.

The thirty minutes before the call

• Read the job description again, out loud. You will hear which requirement is the real one.
• Read the company’s own most recent announcement, not an article about it.
• Look up whoever is interviewing you and find one specific thing to ask them about.
• Open your six stories in one tab and your three questions in another. You are allowed to have notes. Use them.

Three questions to ask them

Generic questions get generic answers and tell the interviewer how much you prepared. These three work in almost any interview, and the answers are actually useful to you:

• “What does the first 90 days look like for whoever takes this role?”
• “Six months from now, what would make you say this hire went well?”
• “What is the thing about this team that people only learn after they join?”

If the answer to the second one is vague, the role is not defined yet. That is worth knowing before you take it, not after.

Following up.

Follow up on a schedule, not on a feeling. One note seven business days after you apply. One within a day of every interview. One more at day fourteen. Then close the row and put the time somewhere else.

The point of a schedule is that it decides for you. Without one you either send nothing, because it feels like bothering people, or you send four notes in nine days, which is the thing you were worried about.

The schedule

• Day 7 after applying. One note, only if you have found a name. There is no point emailing an inbox nobody reads.
• Same day as any interview. One note to every person you spoke with, separately.
• Day 7 after an interview with no update. One line asking about timeline.
• Day 14. The last one. Then move the row to Closed.

The note after you apply

Subject: Following up on the [role] application

Hi [name],

I applied for [role] on [date] and wanted to put a name to the application. The part of that job I am strongest at is [the one requirement from the posting you genuinely own], and I would like the chance to talk about it.

If the role is still open, I am happy to send anything that would help. If it is filled, no problem, and I would still like to be considered for [team or function] later.

Thanks, [your name]

The note after an interview

Hi [name], thank you for the time today. The part about [specific thing they said] is what I keep thinking about, because [one sentence of your actual thought]. I want the role, and I am happy to answer anything else that would help.

Send it the same day and reference something that was really said. A note with no specifics reads as a template, because it is one.

The last one

Hi [name], checking in once more on [role]. If the timeline has moved or the role is closed, just say so and I will stop chasing it. Either way, thank you for your time.

Two notes, then stop. A third costs you something and costs them nothing. Close the row, keep the contact, and spend the hour on a live application instead.

Negotiating your offer.

Never accept on the call. Ask for the offer in writing, read the whole package instead of the headline number, then counter once with a number, a reason, and one alternative if base pay is fixed.

What to say on the call

Thank you, I am glad to get this. Can you send it in writing so I can read the whole package? I will come back to you by [day].

Then stop talking. Do not accept, do not counter, and do not react to the number out loud. Everything useful happens after you have read the document, and nothing you say in the first two minutes can improve it.

Take at least 24 hours before you answer. A yes given on the call is the only part of this process you cannot take back.

What to read before you answer

• Base pay.
• Bonus, and whether it is guaranteed or a target somebody has to approve.
• Equity, the vesting schedule, and what happens to it if you leave.
• Start date and title.
• Who you report to, by name.
• Time off, and whether it accrues or is the unlimited kind nobody takes.
• Your share of the health premium per month, in dollars, not the name of the plan.
• Remote or hybrid, written down. An arrangement agreed verbally in an interview is not a term.

The number in the subject line is one line of the package. Read all of them before you decide which one to ask about, because base pay is often the line with the least room.

The counter, in one paragraph

I am excited about the role and I want to make it work. Based on the scope of [specific responsibility] and what I am seeing for [role] in [city], I am looking for [number]. If base is fixed, I am open to closing the gap with a signing bonus, additional equity, or a review at six months.

One number, one reason, one alternative. Send it in writing, then be quiet again and let them answer. The realistic worst case of a polite, specific counter is that they tell you the number is firm.

Where to get a number

Orbyt’s salary explorer covers 3,445 roles across 81 cities. Those ranges are computed estimates, not measured wages, so treat them as a starting point and check them against what people in your own network say they were actually paid. The role pages also show the published Bureau of Labor Statistics national median for the occupation code that role maps to. That figure is a real government number for the occupation, and an occupation covers many job titles, so read it as the neighbourhood rather than the address.

Two numbers you trust and one sentence explaining why is a negotiation. A number with no reason behind it is a wish, and it is answered as one.

Staying well.

Most of a job search is rejection, so build the week to survive it. Give the search day a stop time, keep one person in your week who knew you before it started, and close every rejection in two minutes.

This section is not a wellness gesture at the end of a tactical guide. A search runs on your ability to keep doing the boring parts in month three, and everything above stops working the week you cannot start.

Three rules that hold up

• Give the day a stop time. Pick an hour when the search ends and hold it. An open ended search day expands to fill everything you have and produces the same work in twice the time, at twice the cost.
• Close every rejection in two minutes. Read it, write one line about what you would change, mark the row Closed, shut the tab. Do not carry it into the next application, where it turns into a worse cover note.
• One person a week who knew you before this. Not a networking coffee. A friend. The search shrinks your sense of yourself down to a response rate, and another person is the fastest way to widen it again.

The thing nobody warns you about

Rejections you never receive cost more than the ones you do. An application that goes silent stays open in your head at a low, constant volume. That is the real reason silence gets its own stage in the pipeline above. Closing the row is not bookkeeping. It is how you get the attention back.

When it is more than a bad week

If you cannot get out of bed, cannot eat, or cannot see the point, that is not a job search problem with a job search fix. Talk to a doctor or a therapist. That is the correct tool for it, the same way a resume checker is the correct tool for a resume, and reaching for it early is the cheapest move in this entire guide.

The Friday review.

Once a week, stop applying and read your own pipeline. Count four numbers, compare them against your own previous four weeks, and fix the first stage that stopped moving.

Take twenty minutes at the end of the week. Send nothing, apply to nothing, and count four numbers the same way every time:

1. Applications sent this week.
2. Replies of any kind, rejections included.
3. First conversations booked.
4. Later rounds and offers.

You are comparing these against your own previous four weeks, not against a benchmark. There is no trustworthy published response rate for your role, your city, and this month, and anyone who quotes you one is guessing. Your own trend is the only measurement that is actually about you.

Read the first number that stopped moving

• Applications flat. The constraint is time, not willpower. Go back to the calendar arithmetic in Getting organized and pick a smaller weekly number you can actually hit.
• Applications fine, replies near zero. The resume is not matching the postings. Run the keyword pass in Building your resume, then check it with the free resume score tool.
• Replies fine, few first conversations. The screen is where it breaks. Usually your six stories are not written yet, or your answer to what do you do runs three minutes long. See Preparing for interviews.
• Conversations happening, few later rounds. Prepare per company instead of in general, and follow up the same day. The interview preparation guide is the deeper version of this.
• Offers arriving and none of them right. That is a targeting problem, not a search problem. You are applying to the wrong roles very well. Change the list, not the process.

Write the four numbers in the same place every week. A number you can compare is worth more than a number you can remember, and four weeks of them will tell you more about your search than any article will.