Treating your job search like a sales funnel

June 8, 2022

What is the sales funnel

If you have never worked in sales you might not be familiar with the modern sales process. It is basically a way of modelling how potential clients actually become clients. It is not just a single switch where one day someone is a potential customer and suddenly they are paying for your product. Your prospects go through a process of becoming paying customers and in each stage of the process there are less and less people as some drop off and decide to not continue.

I find it fascinating how the whole sales process has become extremely technical. As with most business processes in the modern era we use the scientific process to closely measure it and continually improve to get better and better results.

Each stage of the sales funnel is closely measured in order to improve it continually. Using the scientific process to measure, learn and improve has allowed the sales and marketing team to become more and more efficient at turning these prospects or leads into customers.

Looking for work is a full time job

An often heard nugget of advice when looking for work is that “Looking for work is a full time job” meaning that you have to dedicate time to finding a job but I would argue that it’s not just about time. It’s about using the same approach that you use during your working life. In reality, the same attention to detail and reliance on the scientific method is barely if ever used when searching for a job. Why not? It's something that affects us financially far greater than practically anything we do in our lives. Why not improve and optimise the process? Why not try to use the same structured frameworks that we use in all other areas of our professional lives.

If you think about it, the whole process of applying for jobs, going through interviews, doing take home projects and negotiating over salary is extremely similar to a standard sales process where you have top of the funnel prospects converting to qualified leads, doing sales demos etc and finally converting to paid customers.

Looking at your job search like this allows you to answer many key questions that could give you insight on how to improve the process. For example:

What percentage of your applications lead to interviews?

• If the number is very low maybe you need to improve your CV or cover letter.
• If it is very high you probably don’t need to focus here.

What percentage of interviews lead to a second interview.

• If it is a very low percentage you probably need to improve your interview skills.

How many jobs a day are you applying to:

• If you apply to only a few you need to increase.
• If you apply to a lot but no interviews maybe you need to be more selective
• If you apply in spurts maybe you need to be more consistent.

With this tactic you can begin to see where dedicating time will help you get a job. If you can see that dedicating 5min to applying to a job yields similar results to customising your CV and cover letter, maybe spending this time is not worth it even though everyone will advise you to do this. I am not suggesting that either is the right method. What I’m suggesting is that you have to measure this and make decisions based on data, not on what other people think is the best tactic.

Let’s go through the job search funnel one stage at a time. How do you optimise each stage. So the first step in the funnel is the application. This is equivalent to the top of the funnel reach. The good thing here is that applying for jobs is actually almost free. The time to apply to a job isn’t really that long and it can be optimised with tools.

The next stage is the first interview or screening interview. This is often with HR and very different from the more in depth interviews that your potential new managers might give. Again this can be optimised for prep time Vs success rate.

In depth interviews where technical abilities are often judged can again be optimised for prep time Vs success rate.

Take-home projects tend to be a straight compromise how badly do I want this job Vs how many hours am I willing to dedicate to the work.