I’m in the middle of a job search myself, so I can’t promise that these X tips are going to land you a job in X days. I just started to realize as I’m connecting with other friends and colleagues in similar situations that there are some marketing concepts that apply to a job search that I hadn’t thought about in this way before. However, I do feel like my own search has started to accelerate since making some of these adjustments (I’ll let you know how that ends up.) And, in the spirit of this new corner of the Internet I’ve carved out, Work Mappers, when I feel like I’ve figured something out that can be helpful, I want to “draw a map” if it can help someone else.

Narrow In on Your Ideal Employer Profile

In marketing, there’s a concept of an ideal customer profile. It’s exactly what it sounds like. Who is the ideal customer for your product or service? If the answer is everybody, you’ve got a problem, because if you’re trying to sell to everybody, you are essentially selling to nobody. You can’t speak someone’s language or connect to the pain they’re trying to solve if you don’t focus in on a particular segment of the market and get to know them deeply.

I had an a-ha moment the other day as I was counseling a friend about her LinkedIn profile. She’s done so many amazing things in her career, but it means her background isn’t straightforward. She’s also not completely clear what direction she wants to go in. Does she want to pursue path A or B or C? She has experience in all three. As the words were coming out of my mouth, I realized how true they were, “If you don’t know what you want to do and the type of company you want to work for, the people looking at your LinkedIn profile aren’t going to know either. You’re making them do too much work.”

It’s tempting when you’re job searching, especially if leaving your last employer wasn’t your choice (due to a layoff or being fired or even needing to take a break for some other unexpected reason), to keep yourself open to all possibilities. But, your openness can create a lack of clarity about your background, skills, and career goals. Even if it feels challenging, you need to choose. It doesn’t mean you can’t be open to other possibilities, but which role and type of employer is the “ideal?” That’s what you optimize your LinkedIn for and spend the most cycles on in terms of your job search. You can always tailor resumes for other options as well and keep them handy for when you want to pursue those possibilities, but there has to be a primary so you can focus your online presence and job search accordingly.

A couple questions that can help narrow it down:

• Are there commonalities about your past employers that can help you create a profile of the “ideal employer” where you’ve done your most impressive work (e.g. industry, total revenue, stage)?

• Are there aspects important to you in an employer (mission, location, remote work policies, benefits)?

Answer the Key Questions Up Front

This applies to both your resume and your LinkedIn profile. I’m a big fan of Emily Kramer of MKT1 (fellow Substacker and marketing expert), and I’ve used some of the Claude skills she’s created for her paid newsletter subscribers when working with a couple marketing clients I’ve managed to pick up for small projects. One of those was a homepage audit since I was helping redesign a homepage for a client. Part of MKT1’s framework around building an effective homepage is to answer three questions above the fold:

• Who is it for?

• What is it?

• Why is it better?

• I added a fourth when working with my client: What pain does it solve?

I’d argue the same questions are a fantastic framework to apply to your resume and LinkedIn page. Once you answer these questions, make sure the key information is in the executive summary on your resume and the headline of your LinkedIn profile.

Leverage the People They Already Trust

This is true for potential buyers of a product, and it’s true for your next potential boss. People are much more likely to listen to people they already know and trust when it comes to making critical decisions. Hiring is one of those decisions, so like it or not, playing six degrees of Kevin Bacon is a much better bet in terms of getting your resume seen than blindly sending it in via LinkedIn or some other online job application tracking system. You should do that, too, because people like to have resumes in their official system, but figure out who you know who may be connected to someone at the company you’re applying to. There are many paths to your “Kevin Bacon.”

• You know the hiring manager or recruiter personally (Jackpot! Rare, but it happens.)

• You know someone personally who works at the company and can pass your resume along.

• You know someone who knows the hiring manager (or who you suspect is likely the hiring manager) or is at least in the department/function in which you’re interested.

• You know someone who knows the recruiter managing the search at the company or you know someone who knows someone in recruiting/HR at the company.

This is what LinkedIn was made for, and it can feel a little awkward to reach out to someone you haven’t connected to in a while to ask for a favor. But, generally, most people want to help. You’ll figure out the ones who don’t pretty quickly, but don’t let it stop you from making that next ask. Just remember to circle back if you get the interview (and especially if you get the job!) and thank the person who made the connection. And, remember it next time someone reaches out to you. Asking for help is hard. The least we can do is give someone else a fighting chance in a tough job market.

Shine a Light on What Sets You Apart

In marketing, there are many ways you might highlight what’s great and unique about the product you’re selling. You may let customers help tell your story (e.g. reviews, case studies), you may put up product pages highlighting key features that set you apart from competitors, you may publish something meant to educate your audience and showcase thought leadership. You can do the same type of thing in your job search.

• Ask past colleagues for LinkedIn recommendations — most people you’d think to ask are willing if you make the request. Showcasing on your profile that past colleagues (bosses, peers, direct reports) have great things to say about you and would work with you again goes a long way.

• Put up a basic website highlighting your work — this is so much easier to do now with AI tools, and there are 1,001 tutorials out there that can walk you through how to do it. I created a website for a marketing consulting business in just a couple days using a $20 subscription to Claude, GitHub (free) and Vercel (free) + a domain that cost me less than $10. And, I created a portfolio section on the website I could link to from my resume as well so it kills two birds with one stone. It shows both potential part-time clients and potential employers for fulltime roles what I can do.

• Keep learning, doing & “showing your work” — you don’t have to stop doing what you do well simply because someone stopped writing you a check. If you want to showcase that you’re worth hiring, show them what you’ve done lately. Write something, build something, create something. And, make it visible. Put it out into the world. Being able to speak to what you’ve done recently is powerful, even if it wasn’t for an employer. In the marketing world, for example, every employer wants to know their next hire is not just AI fluent but can build things with AI. So, I built a tool I wish I had in my last job with dummy data and posted it up on GitHub so others could use it if they like. But, that gave me a link to share on my LinkedIn profile and at the top of my resume demonstrating that I can follow through on what I say I’m capable of. Think of what that might be for you. What could you showcase?

I don’t have all the answers, but the more I’ve been thinking about this approach, the more it makes sense. I’ve been doing these things in my own search recently, and what at first felt like pushing resumes into the void feels like it’s turning into a more consistent pull of interview requests into my inbox. If this helps even just one other person, it was worth the time to spill the thoughts out of my head and into this Substack post.

Share Work Mappers

When I recently lost my job, like so many others, I felt myself adrift without title or employer or day-to-day work responsibilities to anchor to. It’s amazing how quickly decades of experience can feel inconsequential.

Part of what pulled me out of my tailspin was being asked by a friend who teaches parttime at a university to speak to a group of MBA students about to graduate. She didn’t want to hear from me because of my company association. She didn’t ask me because of my current title. She said she asked because she’s heard me speak before, and she knows I have something more to say.

She knew it before I did, but she was right. It turns out my voice did not belong to my employer, and the life experience and opinions and learnings I’ve gathered over time are still mine and still worth sharing — if only for my own sake.

I still have something to say.

I hope what I have to say can help someone else in some way.

Just the act of putting this talk on resiliency together has already helped me. It reminded me that part of what makes me who I am is an innate curiosity that drives me to ask questions paired with a desire to make the world a bit better.

Maybe I’ll end up using those skills again for an employer. Maybe I’ll start something new. Regardless, I plan to keep using my voice to ask questions, tell stories, and hopefully make the world a bit better along the way.

Full Resiliency Video Transcript Below

Let’s really examine that word.

Resiliency is an ability to recover from or adjust easily to adversity or change.

Do you adjust easily to change? I know I don’t.

We’re all facing some level of adversity or change in 2026. It’s scary out there for everybody, whether you’re currently working for a company, for yourself, whether you’re unemployed or underemployed. The workplace and job market feel unrecognizable in many ways. AI is suddenly everywhere, people are being laid off in huge numbers, whole categories of jobs are under threat (supposedly). We shall see what actually comes to pass there.

And knowing it’s not the only upheaval in the history of the workplace maybe helps a little, but it doesn’t make it a lot simpler to navigate what’s happening when you’re in the thick of it.

It is easy to suddenly feel “not enough” — that maybe we don’t have the right skills or education or experience; that maybe our boss or that next hiring manager won’t believe we can do the job; that maybe it’s too hard to climb that next mountain and learn that new technology.

The Ma Bell Experiment

I did come across this really interesting experiment though. It happened during the antitrust breakup of Ma Bell (better known as AT&T) and a bunch of other smaller companies (known as the baby bells).

And, it was a psychologist Salvatore Maddi who partnered up with an executive at Ma Bell since everyone could see the writing on the wall and knew the breakup was coming. They wanted to see how employees were impacted by this significant change and upheaval in their lives.

The majority of people — whether they kept their jobs or lost them during the transition — were devastated by the change. There were divorces, strokes, suicides, heart attacks, addiction. It was awful.

But one-third of people — whether they were in the group that stayed at the company or were laid off — didn’t just survive, they thrived. They either became high-ranking leaders at the newly formed company or became stars at their new companies. On paper, they looked like everyone else. They didn’t have less stressful jobs, more education, easier home lives, more privilege.

But they did something very differently than their peers.

They didn’t live in regret asking what they could have done differently or why it happened to them.

Instead, they looked to the future and asked, “what can I do now to improve my situation?”

Here’s the truth that ultimately we all know, but we routinely forget.

You are not the jobs you’ve held, the degrees you’ve earned, the places you’ve worked, the accolades you’ve received, the technologies you’ve mastered.

You are something more.

You’d think it’d be easy to remember who you are. It’s not always, when the world is changing and the voices outside yourself telling you who you ought to be are so loud.

Stripping everything away and defining who you are at your core can be hard work. The world is bound and determined to shake our foundations, but that core is what is truly unshakable, and it’s essential to developing resiliency. It’s work you’ll likely have to do more than once in your life. I’d encourage you to think about this and write it down at some point. Next time you need to remember, pull it back out.

The adjectives here reflect kind of what came up for me as I thought through this exercise. They may look different for you. But, stay away from job titles or areas of study. And, if you’re having a hard time, ask the people around you how they’d describe you. Once you have your list, think about how those descriptors translate to skills. What does that core make you innately good at?

You know, a great example is:

• If you’re curious, you’re likely great at telling stories.

• If you’re empathetic? Fantastic at relationship-building.

• Bold? You’re a leader.

• Candid? Providing feedback.

• Tech savvy? Great at building things.

The other piece to consider is your non-negotiables or your values. Any fans of “The Bear”? It’s a show originally on FX about a restaurant and its staff (but also so much more). Carmy, the chef, had a list of what he called “non-negotiables.” Were they his values? Maybe, or maybe super unrealistic standards he held the people around him to. It’s OK, though, to have a set of things that are so core to who you are and how you operate that they’re not something you can compromise on, because when you do, you feel a sense of dissonance.

In moments when you feel you have less agency and room to negotiate, remember that there are still things that can make a situation more or less tolerable. Even if the pay or the job title isn’t quite what you need it to be, you know, maybe after a layoff, can you find an employer that at least shares your most important values? Your non-negotiables.

Build Authentic Relationships

The reason people don’t like networking is often that it’s not built on authenticity. And, often, when you’re in a room of people networking, everyone is trying to figure out who the “right people” are to connect with who can help them in some way. That’s the exact wrong way to think about building your professional network, or at least that’s what I’ve always found. When you approach professional relationships in the same way you do personal relationships, to a degree, magical things can happen.

I’ve found this to be true throughout my career.

You really, you know, you want to get curious, ask questions, seek to understand someone for the sake of just being in that moment and that conversation.

And, as you’re building that network:

• Show up for people in the moments that matter to them, even when it feels inconvenient for you.

• Go out of your way to make a connection.

• Follow through on what you say you’re going to do.

That’s what creates real connections and people who will show up for you when you need it most.

Keep Learning

As your career progresses, you can get complacent and decide you’ve mastered all you need to master, but if this most recent wave of AI in the workplace has taught us anything, it’s that everyone, at every level, still has more to learn.

And, if you’ve recently experienced a layoff, it can be hard to see that as an opportunity of any type, but it may be one of the only times in your career when you have dedicated time to deep dive into growing your skills in a way that can feel really challenging when working fulltime.

Stay Open to Different Paths

I have never been a fan of the concept of a 5-year plan, and at the pace of change in our world, who can see that far down the road?

If you’re locked into a particular path, you might miss the turnoff that could represent a major opportunity.

There are so many more potential income streams than there used to be, and that can feel really unsettling, but it’s also exciting. Your next career move doesn’t have to look one way. Maybe you want to launch a startup, or work at multiple companies in a fractional capacity, or switch careers.

We can’t stop change from happening, but we can be more ready for it when it does.

Ask for Help When You Need It

This is a hard one for so many of us. No one wants to have to ask for help, but we all need it sometimes, especially during times of change, and especially when we’re struggling.

You’ll find that when you reach out, the people reaching back aren’t always the ones you expected. But, if you never try, you’ll never know. And, in my experience, vulnerability is strength.

The Formula for Change

I’ll leave you with this. Apparently there is a formula for change. I know, I know how did I slip math in here? But, back in the 1960s, it was created by a change management consultant at the Arthur D. Little firm, and it underwent several revisions over time.

Ultimately, though, it landed here:

C = D x V x F x S > R

C = Change

D = Dissatisfaction with how things are
V = Vision of what’s possible
F = First concrete steps toward vision
S = Support for follow through

R = Resistance to change

That when you combine a dissatisfaction with how things are along with a vision of what’s possible, and the first concrete steps toward that vision, along with the support to follow through, you are able to overcome our very human resistance to change.

But, I realized, those also feel like the makeup of resiliency. And, resiliency is what allows us to overcome our resistance to change and adjust to the transitions that will inevitably come our way.

It’s what allows us to move from living in the past, and living with regret, to moving toward the future.