Benjamin Todd

The common theme is to think from the employer's point of view and do whatever they will find most convincing.

That means instead of sending out lots of CVs, focus on getting recommendations and proving you can do the work.

While the rest of this guide is about working out which job is best for you in the world, here we focus on the practicalities of taking action on your plans.

Just bear in mind there's no point using salesmanship to land a job you wouldn't be good at.

You won't be satisfied, and if your performance is worse than the next best applicant, you'll have a negative impact.

But we wrote this chapter to prevent the opposite situation.

We've seen too many great candidates who want to make a difference failing to live up to their potential because they don't know how to sell themselves.

Stage 1.

Leads.

A lead is any opportunity that might turn into a job, like a position you could apply for, a friend who might know an opportunity, or a side project you might be able to get paid for.

You need a lot of leads.

We interviewed someone who's now a top NPR journalist.

But when he started out, he applied to 70 positions and got only one serious offer.

This illustrates the first thing to know about leads.

You probably need a lot of them.

especially early in your career, it can easily take 20 to 100 leads to find one good job, and getting rejected 20 times is normal.

In fact, the average length of a spell of unemployment in the US is six months, so be prepared for your job hunt to take that long.

This is especially true if you're applying to jobs that are especially desirable and competitive, which are normally more selective and therefore require more leads.

This includes most jobs directly working on the pressing problems we talk about, in part because we focus on neglected problems, so there just aren't that many jobs available.

For instance, if you want to work on preventing catastrophic pandemics, but can only find 10 leads, that's normally not enough to make it likely you'll find a job.