Market mapping
On spending your effort where it counts.
Spray and pray, or volume applications, may have been a legitimate and even effective strategy for securing interviews 20-30 years ago. It may even have some merit in less competitive markets today. But in the current, ultra-competitive Australian market, it just won’t cut it. Unless you can demonstrate your alignment to a recruiter/hiring manager concisely and with conviction, you are unlikely to make shortlists, let alone actually compete in the late stages of the interview process.
We’ve previously discussed getting clear on your professional narrative. The next step is to thoroughly map your market. It is important to do this early because it does two things: one, it tells you where you have the best chance of alignment and ultimately success; and two, it determines how much effort you should put in and where that effort is directed.
The first decision is to identify a location or a number of locations where you would like to live and work. Then you start searching for the roles that are most relevant to you. You will start by looking for the jobs in those areas that are advertised under the same title or that require the qualifications that you have achieved or the skill set that you have built.
How narrow or broad you are in this search is up to you. The narrower your search, the more closely it matches your current title, skill set, or experience and the more likely you are going to be able to secure the role. The opportunities you identify in this first phase of your search are going to be roles that you have held before or are clearly well qualified for.
You can be aspirational and expansive in this phase of your search. That is, you can identify opportunities that you haven't necessarily held before but that you think your skill set will transfer well to. This will be the case if you are a graduate, pivoting your career, or perhaps returning to work after time out of the workforce. Keep in mind, opportunities where the alignment is not immediately obvious will require more creativity and effort on your part to demonstrate that you are suitable.
After identifying appropriate opportunities, your research begins. You are going to deep-dive on these positions and the companies advertising them. Your research is aimed at understanding the type of people that these companies hire. Do they hire graduates? Do they appear to have a preference for specialists or generalists? Do they bring in new people for senior positions or do they appear to promote from within? In short, what does the existing workforce look like and what can you learn from that?
You'll be able to get a general gauge by looking at their open roles and the people that already work there. LinkedIn is a great tool for this type of research. If you can see some alignment between the type of people they have already hired and are looking to hire in the future and those people are similar to you in experience, skill set, or qualifications, then this is a good sign that there will be at least superficial alignment there for you. That is, you are going to be familiar and understandable to their recruiters and hiring managers.
The information that you can gather from this part of your research is largely concerned with establishing your technical fit; that is the degree to which you align with the role and company from a hard skill perspective. From there, you need to start looking at the likelihood of there being cultural alignment. There is no single definition of cultural fit. It means different things to different people. For your purposes, when gauging how aligned you are to a company’s culture, think of it as the interpersonal and social factors which contribute to the likelihood that you will be happy and productive in a given workplace.
For example, do you resonate with the company’s stated values? Do they have a dress code, and is that appropriate for you? What can you learn about their ways of working, and does that match how you do your best work? Is the company size compatible with your experiences? What does their social media tell you about the way people interact with each other? Is the mission statement inspiring to you? Do you respect and value the product or services that the company or organisation offers? All of this information will give you an insight into what the recruiters and hiring managers will be looking for and whether or not you fit that mould.
Once you have determined the degree to which you are a technical fit and appear to be culturally aligned, it is time to tier or rank these opportunities. There is no right or wrong way to do this. Some of it will just be gut feel. There is a balance somewhere in there between what you are genuinely appropriate for and what is appealing to you. This process will help you clarify what is important to you in a workplace and in a position. It will give you a list of clear criteria against which you can measure the opportunity.
Those companies that you identify as having a high degree of alignment, technically and culturally, will be in your top tier, tier 1. For example, you could decide that companies that match with 75% of your criteria or more belong in tier 1. Anything between 50% and 75% alignment would belong in tier 2, and every other opportunity would belong in tier 3. How you break the tiers down is up to you and will depend on your own personal circumstances. If you are being selective, you may want to rule out any role that is below a 75% match. If you are being less selective, you may be happy with a 50% match. Only you can know what is appropriate for you in this respect.
This mapping and tiering process is crucial because it tells you how much time and effort you should spend on applying to any given role. The most effort and concentration goes to tier 1 roles, and then you scale down appropriately for tier 2 and 3 roles. The key thing to remember is that you will not have to put tier 1 effort into every application you make, but there is no escaping the fact that truly competitive applications require concentration and focus.
So what does tier 1 effort look like? For tier 1 roles, you are going to send thoughtful and comprehensive applications complete with individually tailored cover letters that speak the language of the company and demonstrate clearly that you understand the position and the part that it plays in addressing the company’s pain points and the main objectives.
To the extent possible, you’re going to learn about and understand the product or service that the company offers, what their achievements have been, the failures they have experienced, their goals and plans, their people, and then you are going to take that knowledge and demonstrate how you are specifically aligned and how you can contribute. Where possible, you will be able to tie your goals together with the goals of the company so that working together would be mutually beneficial.
This process will take time. It is not easy to generate that type of alignment or connection, and you cannot hope to achieve it with a one-size-fits-all approach to your applications. You are going to have to tailor your applications. You will have to choose your hard in this respect.
You can continue to send off bulk applications to as many companies as possible in the hope that the sheer volume you are sending will result in an interview and then face the disappointment when you are rejected, or worse yet, receive no reply at all. Or you can slow down and spend some time understanding your market, learning about the opportunities that best suit you and then target them with intention. Both approaches will be hard. I know which hard I would choose and, more importantly, I know which type of hard generates results.
By taking this targeted and thoughtful approach, what you are doing is helping the recruiter solve their problem. That problem specifically is an open role that needs to be filled. To fill that role, the recruiter will look for a set of criteria given to them by the hiring manager. Those criteria are often listed in the job description. A recruiter can only shortlist people that meet the minimum criteria.
If you don’t meet that minimum, you don’t get shortlisted. Recruiters often have to make this type of analysis quickly. So, if you don't spend the time demonstrating your alignment clearly and concisely, a recruiter cannot justify the time or the risk to their reputation involved in shortlisting you. Recruiters who can’t match candidates against the criteria they have been given don’t last very long. While the relationship between candidates and recruiters can appear adversarial, in reality their interests are deeply linked.
Of course, doing the minimum might be enough to get shortlisted, but it won’t get you hired. The person that gets hired is the person that has not only done the minimum but also demonstrated consistent and cohesive alignment with not only the technical criteria of the role but also the cultural makeup of the organisation.
Without mapping and tiering your market, you are probably distributing your focus and concentration thinly across competitive markets, and then wondering why you never hear back on any of your applications. While you are focusing on volume and beating the ATS, you are losing out to those candidates that are certain about what they want and what is suited to them and have crafted applications that make those intentions and capabilities clear to recruiters.
This is where a thoughtful and measured job search system becomes critical to your ability to compete. A well-tuned job search system, of which market mapping is a critical part, paints a cohesive, consistent, and easily understandable picture of your technical and cultural alignment in a way which recruiters and hiring managers understand.
When you have a clear professional narrative, you’ve mapped your market, your CV is focused, you’ve written meaningful cover letters, and your online presence holds it all together, you then have a well-structured job search system and you will be in a position to not only make shortlists but to genuinely compete in the interview process.
Remove yourself from the endless cycle of sending applications in return for silence. Forget spray and pray. Avoid the volume trap completely. Do not settle for the bare minimum.
