Kelly talks about the most effective tools for finding work with Madeline Mann, an HR & Recruiting leader who spun her insider knowledge of the hiring process into an award-winning career coaching empire called Self-Made Millennial. She has a new book, it’s called “Reverse the Search: How to Turn Job Seeking Into Job Shopping.” 

You reframe the job search as job shopping instead of job seeking, why? 

“Job seekers are constantly chasing these opportunities, hoping that these companies deign to give them any sort of attention. Whereas job shoppers use this piece of knowledge to their advantage of ‘How am I going to become that irresistible candidate who’s in the league of their own?’ Where these companies start to say, ‘Ooh, we can’t live without Kelly. We’ve gone through this entire interview process, if we can only get Kelly to join, then all of our prayers will be answered.’ And so, when you flip that dynamic, opportunities really come pouring in, and it makes the whole search quite fun.” 

One of the myths that you challenge is that you need all kinds of extra academic degrees to get the job you want. 

“Unfortunately, when we are in the job search, we look for paved paths. And a job search is a road with no signposts and education has signposts. So, we go there. We spend tens of thousands of dollars on this MBA expecting that it is going to magically change our fortune. Or we get that fourth certification for our career path when, really, the first certification was all we really needed to hit those qualifications. And so, the bottom-line is don’t think that additional education is going to fix your job search. It’s not going to help you stand out. It might help you meet baseline qualifications, but if that’s the case, everyone else has those too. So, you need to find other ways to stand out.” 

One of the things you focus on is how often people take a passive approach to finding their job. 

“Kelly, you read the book, so you know that at a certain point I gave a statistic of when I asked my audience, ‘How did you choose your career path?’ And 53 % of people said, ‘I stumbled into it.’ And this to me is so bonkers because it is. Besides possibly choosing your spouse, choosing your career path is probably the single most important decision you’ll make as far as day-to-day happiness, your financial situation, all that kind of stuff. And most people choose to not choose. And we carry this mentality of – even if we chose wrong – that some magical day in the future, it’s going to fix itself, that we’re going to stumble into the correct thing. And so, this is one swift kick in the pants to say, get out of that mindset and start making actionable moves that are going to move you in the right direction versus just letting the lazy river take you where it may.”