30 days to offer 🚀

Sabrina Iglesias had been unemployed for 427 days when we talked about her job hunt.

Just 30 days later, she emailed me: "I applied for 5 jobs ... and *drum roll please* I got a job!" The offer came from the very first place she had applied to using her new strategy.

Last week, I talked with Sabrina about how a simple experiment got her the result that 131 other applications had not. Without the Career River, "I genuinely think I would still be unemployed," she told me.

Sabrina had tried everything after she was laid off from The Philadelphia Inquirer. All her effort had led to 23 rejections and a single interview. When we met, she had gotten shingles from the stress and was wondering what she was doing wrong.

"As time went on, I was just getting more and more down on myself. Just because it wasn’t working. Nothing was happening," she said. "Most of my applications, they were completely ignored. Just completely ignored. And it was very degrading."

When we first chatted, I told her she wasn’t at fault — the grueling job application system was. And then we planned a 30-day experiment:

1. Make a list of her must-haves and nice-to-haves for her next job.
2. Search for openings, not by job title, but by problems to be solved.
3. Focus her applications on the unique value she could bring to the role.

Sabrina would simply gather data to test her hypothesis: that switching up her search terms would lead to discovering new opportunities.

"I left the call feeling, dare I say, hopeful," she said. "I have something new to try. And if this one doesn't work, then we'll try a different hypothesis."

Here’s what she learned:

The Might of Must-Haves

Before we met, Sabrina had one major requirement for her next job: it needed to be remote to accommodate her disability. She’d been reluctantly applying to hybrid roles, but she was worried about starting a job she might be physically unable to do.

Writing out her list of must-haves and nice-to-haves made Sabrina think about what would be realistic.

"Some places will accept my accommodation needs. Some places will do what they need to do to make sure that I'm comfortable and successful. I have to step away, I guess, from those reminders of when it didn't happen," she said.

She drafted a list that included:

Must haves:
● Remote/mostly remote
● Base salary amount
● Sick time + PTO
● Health insurance

Nice to have:
● Not a brand new role
● Tech allowance
● Unlimited PTO

The job she found met all of the must-haves, and two of the nice-to-haves.

"Without the Career River, I would have chased roles that had only my one must-have, which was the remote aspect. And that still may not have been the right fit for me," she said. "Instead, I was able to think more clinically about it and find different things that did work for me, and apply that to the job search to find a role that was a better fit."

Shifting Search Terms

When we first talked, I recommended the "Problem-Solver Search" to Sabrina — instead of looking by job titles, look for problems you can solve.

On LinkedIn, she used these search terms: "Community building, trust building, story editing, video editing." While it wasn’t perfect — trust building, in particular, yielded a lot of finance jobs — she found five jobs to apply for. She found using more descriptive search terms saved her from applying for roles that weren’t the right fit.

"It almost gamified it for me, where I was able to say, 'OK … Today my adventure is I'm looking into these search terms, and I have to find X number of roles and then apply for one or two of them,'" she said.

Bringing Unique Value

Sabrina had a good feeling about the job from the moment she got the invitation to interview.

"The interviews barely felt like interviews," she wrote to me. "They were aware of my work already and it just felt like getting to talk with folks excitedly about things I love doing."

Her only goal was to present her best self in the interviews, which made it easier for her not to stress about whether this was the perfect job for her.

Part of what I love about Sabrina’s story is what she didn't do — she didn’t change her resume or the other materials she used in her applications. And she wasn't following the tired advice she'd already tried "a million times": connect to people, promote your website, go to conferences, treat applying like a full-time job.

"I had tried everything that I knew, and I tried everything that other people had recommended to me, and I thought that the way to do it was just to keep trying," she said. "You have to keep applying, you have to keep being ghosted or keep being rejected, and keep begging for help … I didn't know that I could try it a different way."

Her advice to job-seekers now is to step back and see if there’s a hypothesis you can try. Find one that feels easy, give it a month or two, and see what you find. In her case, we'd agreed to give the search term shift 30 days to see what Sabrina would discover.

"I was like, 'Oh man, it'd be so funny if right before I have to email Bridget an update that I can tell her that I got a job,'" she said.

"And that's exactly what happened."

Happy navigating,
Bridget