Career Tips from a PM (9/30) – Spray and pray will ruin your day.
As I hold back the gamer in me reminiscing about my early CounterStrike days, remember that targeted efforts will always bring better results in the long term.
When you spray your resume every which way imaginable, you end up spending significantly more time and energy than if you were to dial back and pursue more specific opportunities. If you spray and pray, you might as well be pulling the trigger on a spray bottle hundreds of times until it hits that one spot you were trying to get at the start (if at all).
Not only does it eat away your time and energy, it causes significantly more mental fatigue, too. I don’t need to go into why mass applying translates into very low conversion rates. But, in that, it also means you end up flooding your inbox with rejections or the spirits of ones that ghosted you. You may be fine with it, but your subconscious isn’t.
Instead of spraying and praying, do three things:
(1) Dial in on what your value proposition is as a professional.
– Heads up, your tech stack is not a value proposition.
(2) Identify the companies in the market that need that value.
(3) Only network and apply for roles with those companies.
I promise you, if you do that, you’re well on your way to better opportunities and more callbacks for the same amount of time and energy you use otherwise, even in a job market like today’s.
Spray and pray will ruin your day.