The Same Four Things, Every Time
Different degrees, different industries, completely different people. I keep hearing the same four things.
I’ve stopped asking what someone studied. Not because it doesn’t matter to them, it clearly does, they’ll usually tell me anyway within the first few minutes. I’ve stopped asking because it’s stopped telling me anything useful about what’s actually wrong.
Get Jackie Bedford’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Engineering, English literature, fine art, finance, it doesn’t matter. What I’ve noticed, watching people move through the founding cohort of Get The Job You Want, is that the same four things come up again and again, regardless of what’s on the degree certificate or which industry someone’s aiming for.
The one that looks like a numbers problem
The first thing people usually say is some version of “I’m applying to everything and hearing nothing back.” It sounds like a volume problem, so the instinct is to apply to more. Alin, one of the founding cohort graduates, put it plainly: applying randomly, hoping something would stick, getting filtered out with no idea why. It’s not a numbers problem. It’s a targeting problem wearing a numbers problem’s clothes.
The one that feels like something’s wrong you can’t name
This is the quieter one. Amariah, also in the founding cohort, spent months rewriting a CV/résumé that kept getting rejected, without ever being sure what was actually wrong with it. That not-knowing is its own particular kind of exhausting, worse in some ways than a clear rejection, because there’s nothing to fix if you can’t identify the problem. Once she could see it through an employer’s eyes rather than her own, five interview invitations followed within a month.
The one that shows up after you thought you’d cracked it
Getting an interview feels like the hard part is over. For a lot of people, that’s where it actually starts going wrong. Emily, another founding cohort graduate, talked about finally understanding “how things come across from an employer perspective.” Edward found structure through the STAR method. Oksana described being pushed to think about interview questions “from another angle.” Three different people, three different fields, the same underlying gap: knowing your own experience isn’t the same as knowing how to demonstrate it to someone else.
The one underneath all the others
If I had to pick the root cause behind the other three, it’s usually this: not knowing what you’re actually aiming for. Idowu’s shift, in their own words, was becoming “more intentional and proactive.” Everything downstream, the applications, the CV/résumé, the interviews, gets harder to fix in isolation if the target itself was never clear.
What that actually tells me
None of these four things care what you studied. They don’t care what industry you’re aiming for, or whether you’re three months out of university or three years into a career you’re trying to leave. The job search process is the same process for everyone, which is either a discouraging thought or a genuinely useful one, depending on how you look at it. I’ve come to think it’s the useful one. It means the fix was never about being a different kind of person. It was about identifying which one of these four things applied, and working through it at your own pace, not everyone else’s.
