S1 E2: Quality vs. Quantity
In this episode of the Colorful Futures Podcast, we’re tackling the whole “quality vs. quantity” debate when it comes to job applications. You know how, at the start of your job search, you’re all thoughtful, excited, and picky about what roles you want? But then, as time goes on, you start lowering the bar and applying to anything just to get a response? Yeah, we’ve all been there. 🥴
I’m here to remind you that it’s important to stay intentional and focused on what you need from a job, rather than just sending out as many applications as possible. I’ll share why taking breaks and doing things that bring you peace can help you avoid burnout. Oh, and that idea of finding a “perfect career” is a myth! What really matters is staying connected to your values and making sure you’re doing what feels right for you.
So, let’s keep it real—grab a coffee or your favorite snack and something to fidget with, get comfy, and join me as we chat about making your job search a little more meaningful and a lot less stressful. 💖
Transcript
Speaker: Liora Alvarez
Hello, my friends. Thanks for joining me for another episode. If you don't already know who I am, I'm Liora Alvarez. I'm a career coach and an HR consultant. And in our show, we talk about careers and business and career transitions and crafting sustainable, successful careers where you can be valued and supported as your genuine, neuro-queer self.
So today, what I wanted to talk to you about is something that's been coming up a lot in the past week or so with my clients, with people I've been chatting with on social media. And that is the concept of quality versus quantity when it comes to job applications and how many you're submitting in any given day or week or just throughout your search.
What I've noticed is that when you start your job search, you tend to be more thoughtful. We're looking at, you know, what are the things that we want? What's like our dream job? What's our dream company? We start defining what that looks like. And then the longer our job search goes on, especially in today's clusterfuck of a market, you will start to kind of be a little more lenient. You'll make more compromises. You'll start settling for things that you previously wanted.
So maybe you were looking for a specific pay, you might go down and pay. Maybe you were looking for a specific type of company, you might start looking elsewhere. Maybe you even wanted a specific type of job. And then the further that your search goes on, the more time that passes, you're like, well, I'll just get another job or I'll just get a different thing, something that I'm not as excited about. And this is natural.
It's completely understandable, especially with today's market and just the way that things are going, very normal and completely understandable that we might need to make some sacrifices. And there's a time and a place for that, for sure. Like there are times where we might need to make compromises to meet our needs, get a job, and just be able to kind of survive, right? Totally get that.
Where I see things start to kind of fall apart is that as your search goes on, we stop focusing on our needs. We stop focusing on the right type of company, the right type of role, the right benefits, the right pay, all that kind of stuff, and we apply to anything. What I've seen happen is that suddenly we panic and we'll go, we're not hearing back.
We're not getting interviews. I just need to apply to jobs. And we start to panic and like your nervous system starts getting lit up. And that's where you'll just like go on LinkedIn and apply to whatever. You'll hit easy apply on a bunch of jobs.
You'll just like start applying to anything and spraying and praying. That's what we have called it in recruiting is the spray and pray approach. You're just kind of throwing a bunch of shit at the wall hoping something will stick. But this actually kind of makes it worse and I'll tell you why. So let's get into first where I think ADHD comes into play. So I think this is especially common for ADHDers because we are such dopamine-seeking creatures. And so when things aren't quite happening, we're not seeing results, we're maybe getting rejected, and there's just like a lot of stuff happening. We need to feel like we have control of something, we need to feel like we're doing something. And that's where we'll start to massively apply to jobs. Then I'll hear people who are sharing, “I've applied to 300 jobs, I haven't heard anything.” “I've applied to 700 jobs, I haven't heard anything.” “ I've applied to 1000 jobs. I haven't heard anything.”
I just talked to a client who said their friend started searching for a job two weeks ago and they've applied to 100 jobs. If you think that it feels shitty to not hear back from 20 applications that you actually intentionally applied for and took your time on, how do you think it's gonna feel when you just throw 100 applications out there and then don't hear anything? Kind of worse. Right?
Like I feel like it really amplifies the effect because now in your mind, you've kind of convinced yourself that you've done everything right by applying to as many jobs as you can, just like putting out as much as possible and kind of treating it more as a numbers game. It makes it worse because now you're putting out low quality applications. You're not being intentional and it's just going to increase the amount of ghosting that happens, it's gonna increase the amount of rejections that you receive when you're not being intentional.
And now we've made it worse on our mental health and on our nervous system because we think we're doing everything right by applying to more. And so then when we don't hear back, it's so much bigger. Like it's one thing to say I applied to five places and haven't heard back, but to say I applied to 500 places and haven't heard back feels a lot worse, right? But we're kind of doing it to ourselves. And again, like no judgment.
I've done this too. Even though I've had a bad day at work and at the end of the day, it'll be like four o 'clock, I'll be like, I'm just gonna apply to a bunch of jobs because this isn't gonna work or whatever. It doesn't really get us anywhere, right? So if you look at the data, if you look at the research and you even just put into Google, like quality versus quantity in your applications, everything will tell you that quality matters.
But then how do we kind of cope with that feeling, that anxiety bubbling up? That's telling us just to do something already, to make something happen. I have some advice for you. When we start to notice those feelings where we're really anxious, we're feeling our nervous system get triggered, we start to panic. It's really hard to make sound decisions when you're in that state. It's fight or flight. So when you notice that, I recommend just taking a beat, take a minute to just be with yourself for a moment. Be kind to yourself, give yourself grace and just remind yourself that this is a really hard thing, especially in the market right now.
It is very difficult and we could be putting in a hundred percent near-perfect effort and it's still going to take some time to get that job. It's still going to take intention and thoughtfulness to get the job that's right for us that we are meant to have. And then I would encourage you to, when you recognize that feeling happening, to go do something that's completely irrelevant and unrelated to your career and your job search.
And this is another topic that we'll talk about another time, but there really isn't such a thing as a perfect career. There really isn't such a thing as like what you're meant to do in your career, sure, you can get a job in a career that aligns well with your natural skill set, that aligns well with your personality, but this idea that we will eventually find something that is like exactly what we're meant to do and we're going to do that forever, it's very much an outdated mentality and probably unrealistic, especially for ADHDers like myself. This is also something that came up in a session just this morning that we most likely won't have the same job for our whole lives. I love what I do. I love my business. I love career coaching. I love business coaching. And I also know that I'm probably not going to do this forever. My interests will change. My skills will evolve. I might find out about a job that I didn't even know existed yesterday and find my way into there.
That's kind how I fell into recruiting. I never thought I'd be a recruiter or that I wanted to be in HR and recruiting and it just kind of happened and it turns out I really enjoy it. But to think that that's gonna be my forever job for the next several decades is really unrealistic, especially just for how my brain works and how my interests work. Removing ourselves from that when we feel triggered in our job search is so important to remind ourselves what this is all for.
You are working to live your life. We are not living to work a job. So once you've recognized you're in that space of feeling really panicked, anxious and triggered, and just kind of getting that sensation of like, my gosh, I have to just like do something. I want you to go do something that soothes your soul. Maybe you go for a walk. Maybe you go to a coffee shop. Maybe you call a friend. Maybe you schedule a therapy session. Maybe you journal. Maybe you sit with your cards, pick up a crystal, journal on it. Maybe you play a video game, read a book. Just do something else so you can step away from what is causing that anxiety and that panic. And this might feel counterintuitive. You might be like, “no, when I'm anxious, I need to like take action and do something to help me.”
This is gonna help you. An analogy that I like to use is something that I learned when I took music classes in like high school and college, which is that when you think about a piece of music, the rests, those breaks between notes are just as important as the notes themselves. When you are not hitting a note or making music, making something happen, and there's that silence, that pause, that is what makes the song. Because a song, a good song would not be just pause -less or rest -less, it's not gonna be just constant noise. There's gonna be breaks, there's gonna be moments between the notes, and that's what makes it so good and impactful.
And it's the same for your life, it's the same for your job search. Those rests are just as important, if not as important, as the work, the actions, the playing of the notes. So I encourage you to think of it like taking that time away is part of the process. Taking that time away to live your life, to go to a museum, go see a movie, go to a show, go catch up on FaceTime with a friend that you never get to see. All of that is gonna help you stay tuned into your personal values and stay tuned into what's important.
And again, like I said before, this isn't meant to say that you should never compromise with your job search. There might still be compromises that need to be made, but it's not worth tanking your mental health over. It's not worth beating yourself up over. It's not worth putting in all of this time and energy into just checking off the box of sending an application in. Because is your goal really submitting an application?
Or is your goal getting a job? Because if the goal is sending an application, go off my friend, go send as many applications as you want, easy apply button, click, click, click, do your thing. But my guess is your goal is to get a job and you won't get a job that way. Spraying and praying won't get you a job. Burning yourself out won't get you a job.
And I imagine many of us are going through burnout right now for many reasons, from many sources, whether it's from your work, from your personal life, from just the state of the world. Right now, there's a lot of things that are pulling at our resources, pulling at our mental capacity, pulling at our mental and physical health and wellbeing. This is something that you can control. It might feel natural to make that thing going off and applying. So I encourage you to sit with it, notice it, do your best when you notice it, step away, take a break, come back later. Because taking that break, getting reconnected with what fills you up, what supports your soul, what makes you feel joy and calm and secure will help your job search way more than panic -fueled, dopamine -seeking -fueled applying. And if numbers help you, the general recommendation and what I have seen works well for a sustainable but effective job search is one to two quality applications a day. So maybe up to 10 a week and that's it. So you can end your week knowing that you've, even if you did one application in the week, if you were intentional about it, you made sure that you are qualified for the position, at least 50 % qualified.
If it's a role that makes sense for your career trajectory, your career goals, if the company makes sense for your interests, your needs, your values, and you've taken the time to be thoughtful about it, be intentional about it, you can rest easy knowing that you are doing more than everyone who's sending 100 applications a week. And as an aside, this is like slightly related, but not, but you'll see, it'll make sense in a second.
People get really scared when we see like on LinkedIn, 700 applications for one job, thousand applications for one job. And sometimes that like gets in our heads and we're like, well, why should we apply? Like the imposter syndrome voices love when we give them an opening to tell us that we suck and we don't deserve the job and we're not qualified. Try not to let those application numbers get in your head because one, they're inflated most of the time. There's a lot of, like, weird data algorithmy things happening behind the scenes, but they're a lot higher than they actually are. And most of those people are not qualified. I talk about this with my recruiter friends all the time. If you have a job with 500 people and I speak from experience of being in this myself as the recruiter reviewing applications, half of those applicants are gonna be straight up not qualified.
I got a marketing job and you applied and you're like an engineer or you're, I don't know, a therapist, like just like completely unrelated. And I'm not talking like therapists trying to transition to marketing, has a certificate, has like an internship or whatever I'm talking like, unqualified, half of them are gonna be that. And then there's gonna be a fraction of people who maybe are slightly qualified, but don't really meet what the job is looking for. And then those are gone or they're out of location or they just have some logistical thing that doesn't work. Like they need sponsorship but the company doesn't offer it.
There's a lot of reasons but my point being a majority of them are gonna be quick, totally not a fit. And then the people that are a match, I've found many we don't hear from or we schedule a first interview and there's something that like doesn't quite align with what we can offer and what they want, or they throughout the process like had interviews elsewhere and like are no longer interested and then you end up with like a much much much smaller pool of people that actually you know can be considered for the role.
So I say that for two reasons. One, I don't want you to let those numbers scare you because recruiters do look at the resumes thoughtful considerations of each person, however, many are just like very clearly not fit. My other point is that the more intentional you can be with your applications, you're actually helping everyone. You're helping yourself because you're gonna see better results with less stress and less time in your job search. My clients are always shocked at how much less time they're spending on their job search when they actually do it with intention and quality, but they see more results from it. And you're helping the recruiters because now when they're going through their applications, people are qualified.
It's not these like totally out of left field, random people who clearly aren't a fit. Sometimes I even wondered like, did they apply to the wrong job by accident? So you're helping that and then you're helping everyone else because again, if we think about those big inflated numbers, so many of them are not the right fit. And so now if you are being intentional, putting in your very thoughtful applications, it's gonna bring all those numbers down because now it's actually more realistic of the amount of people who are interested in the role and meet what they need.
So again, this is a very like impromptu recording and I appreciate you being on this journey with me and listening. If this resonated with you, I'd love to hear from you. You can send me a DM or send me an email, all my information is on my site. And I wanna know if you've found a difference in doing quality applications or quantity or are you one of the people who put out, you know, hundreds of applications in a few weeks. And did you see success with that?
I want to hear from you because I'm all about incorporating real experiences, lived experience, and figuring out what works best for neuroqueers to find a job that is successful, sustainable, and allows them to be their genuine selves. So that's all I have for today, but I will see you in the next episode.