Relationships

Pete Mockaitis
Steve, welcome back!

Steve Dalton
Great to be back.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I am so excited to chat with you again to talk about the third edition of The 2-Hour Job Search and more. You know, Steve, I have mentioned to you, and I think I’m going to share this with the listeners as well, that I think of you every time I clean my toilet. No joke. Have you heard that before?

Steve Dalton
I have heard that before, actually.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, it’s kind of special, and I hope you don’t mind.

Steve Dalton
I consider it a position of honor, frankly. My favorite chore, or, at least, unfavorite chore.

Pete Mockaitis
Indeed. And so that was in our previous conversation, which I 100% recommend every person hear, especially if you’re looking for a job or you know someone dear who’s looking for a job.

You are my go-to that I send people to, and I’ve had other listeners say the same. But just for those wondering, toilets, explain, Steve. Toilets?

Steve Dalton
There’s a special thing about the word favorite because it allows you to talk about unsavory experiences in a positive way. The way I describe this is I’m going to give you three statements, only one of which is true. “I really enjoy cleaning the toilet” is the first. The second, “I’m very passionate about cleaning the toilet.” And the third, “My favorite chore is cleaning the toilet.”

For the logicians out there, you might be able to figure out which one is the true statement of the three, because it’s the third one. Now, cleaning my toilet is my favorite chore but it is not something I enjoy. It just happens to be the chore I dislike the least.

So by nature of it being the least negative number, it is my favorite chore. But it gives me a positive way to talk about a negative experience. And a lot of job seekers have negative past experiences.

By framing it in terms of what your favorite part of that unfavored experience was, it gives you a very elegant and professional way to discuss and address negative experiences in your past in a positive and forward-looking way.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, indeed. And so you can’t say you’re passionate about a thing you’re not passionate about, because then you’re kind of lying, and they probably know you’re kind of lying. But you could say, “Hey, my favorite part of this was that,” and it’s good and honest.

And you love, well, your favorite chore is to clean the toilet because it’s a small amount of effort for a lot of impact. A quick swish and it’s like, “Wow, that was kind of gross.” And, like, five seconds later, it’s not gross.

Steve Dalton
Smells great. Yeah, but a lot of people are uncomfortable disclosing and being authentic and saying something that’s genuinely their favorite. So they will often pivot to, “I really enjoy cleaning the toilet,” or, “I’m passionate about cleaning the toilet,” because that feels like the thing you’re supposed to say in an interview that you’re passionate about things.

But so much of interviewing is building and maintaining trust with your interviewer. And if you deliver it, “I’m passionate about cleaning the toilet” with flat affect, they’re not going to believe you. But you can say, “My favorite chore is cleaning the toilet” with flat affect as I just did, and it’s completely credible and authentic.

Pete Mockaitis
Yep, absolutely. Well, we’re going to talk a lot about what’s new, but if you could you give us maybe the one minute version of what’s the big idea, the main thesis of The 2-Hour Job Search for those who have not yet been blessed with hearing you previously.

Steve Dalton
The 2-Hour Job Search is hinged to that great concept that we prefer instructions for difficult or unfamiliar tasks rather than tips. If we are trying to bake a cake for a loved one, we look up a recipe and not a list of tips on baking a cake.

However, that was never extrapolated to the job search. That one universal source of anxiety that we all face, that ability to provide for ourselves and our loved ones. I thought back in 2008 that that was unconscionable.

How can so many career coaches be so smart and think about this for so many hours in a day, but nobody thought to put a set of instructions to do the most difficult parts that anyone can follow, regardless of who their career coach was?

So my whole career has been about bringing structure to chaos, bringing instructions to critical life tasks. I started with The 2-Hour Job Search which was specifically for the key bottleneck of job searching, which was getting that first interview with a human being.

And then my second book, The Job Closer, was similar style of frameworks and fill-in-the-blank models for doing all the other necessary tasks in the job search to make time for reaching out to strangers, asking them how they got so good at their job, and engaging with their answers as is explained in The 2-Hour Job Search. So those two are really companion pieces to one another.

Pete Mockaitis
So you have the instructions, and a key part of the instructions, which I think is sort of a light-bulb moment for many is that the name of the game is having conversations that lead you to having conversations with the right people, which lead you to interviews, as opposed to click, apply, click apply, click apply.

Steve Dalton
Absolutely. I think there is a lot of resistance to this, that concept of networking. I think the biggest one is that you’ve never been trained to network with strangers for the purpose of a job search. People just tell you to go network like it’s self-apparent and it’s totally not.

The chemical engineer in me is bred for awkwardness. And “Sell yourself and put yourself out there, and the job search is a full-time job and be confident,“ all of those things, when I try to put it into practice without really having that aptitude, were counterproductive.

And I realized there are a lot of people like me out there. They’re awkward. They’re neurodivergent. What about all of us for whom sell yourself doesn’t work? And I realized instructions are both clear and kind, to use a Brene Brown-ism.

If we can follow recipes, we should be able to bake a cake. I wanted to bring that to anyone with a library card, not just my students who happen to be able to afford MBAs and then happen to choose Duke University where I worked for 17 years in their career center.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So we got the instructions and they’re gold, and I’ve shared these instructions with many people and I am chatting with a listener shortly. Shout out to Kai. and I’ll be discussing your instructions yet again.

But, before we get into the juicy bits of what’s new in the third edition of The 2-Hour Job Search, I want to get your hot take. As someone who provides the instructions that are great, what’s the sense of the job market in late 2026, early 2027?

Sometimes, you see terrifying things like, “I’ve clicked hundreds of jobs and I can’t get anything at all.” But other people I know have gotten them fast. It feels like an oversimplification for me to say, “Well, if you just do what Steve says, you’ll get a job fairly soon-ish.”

Is that harsh and inaccurate? Or is it kind of what you’ve been seeing with people that, “Hey, if you do the networking things, you still tend to find jobs, even in this difficult environment”?

Steve Dalton
Overview, the job search, as most people know it is terrible. It’s just as awful as everybody thinks it is. Ashby did a study last year, over several years and 34 million applications, and they found the offer rate on a single online application is 0.2%. Not 2%, 0.2%, one out of 500.

Pete Mockaitis
Five hundred, okay.

Steve Dalton
So I asked my LinkedIn followers, “How long does it take you – when all tasks are combined, searching for postings, customizing resumes, and hitting apply – how long does it take you to get an application out the door?” They said 90 minutes.

Now, quick math here. If you spend three hours a night with no holidays or weekends off, every night, it will take you 13 months at those odds just to have an 80% chance of getting an offer through an online job posting.

And this is 2025, before AI was really, really helpful at making you crank out online applications faster. That’s only going to get worse. Bots are only going to get better. I predict within six months, online applications are something that will require no active effort on the part of job seekers. And I can’t wait for that to be the case. It gives us so much time back.

But what does the job search look like when applications happen while you sleep with no active involvement of your own? So online applications are a cesspool, they are basically zero odds, but you will hear the urban legends. I equate it to playing the lottery to try to pay off your rent.

It, occasionally, works out, but it’s not a great way to do it. And it causes a lot of downstream suffering if you’re unsuccessful, which most people will be. Now, the job market for applying is terrible. The job market for networking is an arbitrage opportunity. Very few people are doing it. We’re all obsessed with online applications. In six months, I think online applications go away. There are only really three options for job searching.

There is applying online, which we’re all familiar with; there’s networking, which you’ve already heard me talk about; and there’s attracting, which is that school of thought of “Be a thought leader,” “Become an influencer in your space,” “Comment on other smart people’s insights on LinkedIn or on TikTok.”

I think that one is better than applying because, at least, you’re learning, your network is broadening. But it’s not for everybody to live such a public job search. The thing is, the most popular method is going to go away in about six months. What’s going to happen when it does?

I like to think people will, begrudgingly, embrace networking and realize, “Wait, it’s not my fault. I’ve never been taught to do this. I’ve just been told to network with no instruction beyond that.” But my real concern is despair happens. And people just throw their hands up and, “Well, if the bots don’t match me, I guess I’m just not fit to be employed.”

So my goal is really to let people know that networking, it is a skill like riding a bike or learning to swim or speaking a new language that can be learned. Get ahead of the curve. If you’re one of the few doing it right now, you are going to trounce the competition. But it is scary.

And it’s scarier the further you get in your career, because the more insight, because it took me two editions of the book to finally figure out who the target market for The 2-Hour Job Search which is embarrassing as a marketer.

I used to be a marketer for General Mills, and they said, “If you target everybody, you target nobody.” And I thought The 2-Hour Job Search was for everybody. It was only for the third edition that I realized The 2-Hour Job Search is for anyone who is or can become vulnerable and humble because that is the way you get strangers to help you with your job search, to risk their own social capital to advocate for you.

But that is not everybody in the world. Not everybody has that ability. And the more knowledge you have, the longer you’re used to teaching, the harder it is to put the learner hat back on.

So it does require vulnerability and humility to get people to bring their guards down enough to, almost irrationally, risk their own social capital to help you with your job search, but it is a skill that can be learned, and it will make you. It is a more human and humane way to go about this daunting, daunting task. You just need to be trained for it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, I hear you loud and clear. Networking is key in order to be competitive. Do it. And watch out for despair. So then, those who are networking are seeing fine results? Even now, things are not catastrophically, horrifically far worse than they were one to six years ago? Is that true?

Steve Dalton
Networking is harder, there are fewer jobs, more positions are being dissolved and not replaced. Furthermore, we need to talk a little bit about networking, because networking is itself a problematic term, because some people will say, “I reached out to my network and asked them if they had any positions, and they didn’t have anything for me, so networking doesn’t work.”

You could argue that, “Is that networking or not?” What I teach is something I specifically call proactive networking. It’s reaching out to people who are not expecting to have a relationship with you back. So usually strangers.

Now, it’s okay to involve people from your past, but I find it’s harder to change the urgency of existing contacts than to establish an advocacy relationship with someone who’s never known you in any other capacity as a job seeker.

I differentiate that from reactive networking. Reactive networking is my term for getting along with people you share space with. If you’re put on the same team as somebody, they’re going to expect to have a relationship with you and you back with them. That’s just cooperation. We’ve learned that. We learned that by aging, just by going through grade school, being placed on teams and our academics.

But proactive networking is a novel skill that if you aren’t taught to do it and you don’t build that muscle mass, you will just continue not knowing it for the rest of your career, and that’s terrifying.

The nice thing is you only need to learn it once and it’s there for you for the rest of your life. So networking, networking done poorly is counterproductive. Networking done properly, what I call proactive networking, is very, very predictably positive, but it requires learning a new skill, learning a new language.

It is not the “Sell yourself” networking that you may have learned in the past. It’s not the, “Open with two minutes about yourself and your accomplishments before doing an informational meeting.”

It’s, “Wait until you’re asked questions about yourself before talking about yourself because the person you’re speaking to is the star of the show.” They are the one who’s doing you the favor. So let’s feature them and ask them how they got so good at their job.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, certainly. Okay. So you gave us the instructions previously. I guess I’d love to know what’s new, what’s fresh, what’s updated in terms of the recipe? We know who the recipe is for. Got to be vulnerable and humble, and it’s nice to flag that clearly in terms of like, “This is what it’s going to take, and that doesn’t feel so good. But the quicker you can kind of get over yourself in that hurdle, the better.”

So duly noted. Then, assuming we are humbly over ourselves and we have the old recipe, the old instructions, what do we need to know now, Steve?

Steve Dalton
Excellent question. So AI has been a blessing and a curse in our job searches. We’ve been talking incessantly about AI for several years. Quick question to those of you out there listening, do you feel your job search is better because of it?

Most people I talked to would answer no. It’s worse, if anything. It’s harder now, now that everybody else is using AI. And that, to me, is a sign that maybe this is insanity that we’re engaging in, by doing the same things over and over and expecting a different result.

AI is not the silver bullet we hoped it would be. We gave it every shot. We went to how many workshops on it to learn how to apply AI to our job search. We are going back to the future as AI basically commoditizes the cost down to zero of your resumes and applications because they’ll be submitted overnight, and bots will do it for us.

We need to figure out where we’re going next. Are we going to attract people to us by being influencers? Or are we going to go to them by being networkers? So, obviously, I encourage people to be networkers.

Now, where AI is helpful, people, the job seekers tend to use AI for the wrong things and not use it for the right things. The wrong things to use it for are, incessantly, like updating your resume. Nobody is looking at the resume that closely. There is no data-based way to beat an ATF system or an online resume drop.

As much advice as you see on the internet, it is companies with vested interests who are making you very, very paranoid about what you’re doing to your resume before hitting submit, but there’s no data that it leads to offers, and that’s the ultimate goal of this exercise.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, let’s have a timeout on that. So, I mean, I love a good resume. Call me old fashioned. Am I hearing you say that there’s no gaming or finessing the applicant tracking systems, ATSs, with key words or including this paragraph versus that paragraph in your resume, like there’s studies or evidence suggesting that none of those efforts do anything for you?

Steve Dalton
Let me put it another way. There is data that shows that being one of the first 10 or 20 applicants to apply has a much stronger impact on your likelihood of being selected than optimizing your keywords. Because if you’re the hundredth one who applies, the recruiter who is looking through that batch, like ATS systems are surprisingly low tech, you’ve got a human being, a recruiter.

Now the recruiter is measured on how quickly they close these open positions. So their incentive is to be fast, to satisfy, to be good enough quickly.

So they will look at the first batch of 20 and decide if there’s a good enough batch of people to move on to the next round. And if they don’t, they’ll look at the next 10 and hope to find enough to round out a full roster, and they’ll look at 10 more, but once they find a good enough batch, they’ll ship it off so they can focus on their other 14 jobs.

So they aren’t able to be really, really well trained in what elements of a resume make someone a sure thing candidate. And complicating matters, these recruiters are getting overwhelmed by bot-driven applicants, “Well, people who are clearly not interested in the job, they’re just firing out resumes ad nauseam.”

But the fairest way to go through those resumes is in the order that they were received. So my take is optimizing your resume for each online posting that you apply to is of limited value.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it sounds like it’s counterproductive because that will take time, making you not one the top first 10 to 20.

Steve Dalton
Exactly right. And what’s funny is recruiters will complain, “Oh, there’s so much AI in these applications.” And how do they respond to that? “Well, we get overwhelmed with applications. We got to take this posting down, suddenly and without warning.”

And when postings come down suddenly and without warning, job seekers think, “I need to use AI so I can submit before the posting goes away.” So recruiters get more and more AI-based applications. So it’s a death spiral.

Now, where investing in your resume matters is when you have an advocate at a company and they say, “Send me your resume and I’ll pass it along to the hiring manager.” Now it matters. Now put some thought and time into it to make sure that your advocate doesn’t get burned by you having a typo or by you using a resume that’s clearly for a different job function or a different company.

My best practice is have one resume for each job function that you are targeting. Do your best on it, but take all of that extra time and stress and anxiety, and every time you edit your resume, you introduce the risk of typos and grammatical errors, that can get you kicked out of certain processes.

Take that time and port in networking and just do your networking first. It’s only going to be 15 minutes a day if you use The 2-Hour Job Search recipe that I provide in the books. Just do that 15 minutes first, and you can spend however much time with the remainder of your day applying online if you’d like, or building your brand on LinkedIn, or going to a movie and spending time with loved ones.

I think all of those are better uses of time. Just make sure that the bottleneck of the process, waiting for strangers to get back to you to see if they’re going to advocate for you, do that first. That’s Operations Theory 101. If you have a bottleneck, move it to the front of your process because that limits the rate at which you make progress.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, then, so AI, where can it be useful for us?

Steve Dalton
So AI can be incredibly useful on the very, very front end of this process, making something called the LAMP list. The LAMP list is the fundamental centerpiece of the first third of the two-hour job search. It is prioritization.

You only have a finite number of hours and pain tolerance to devote to networking with strangers, this scary thing that you probably never had to do before with any sort of rigor or training behind you. So I want to be very mindful. We need to maximize every minute that you put into this.

But to maximize our benefits, before we spend dozens of hours networking with strangers. Let’s spend 40 minutes thinking who we should even be reaching out to.

And so we brainstorm a large list of potential candidates. We find three pieces of data which are easy to find and predictive of success. We rank them in order, and then we fiddle with those numbers until we get the six that we feel best about, being our first batch of outreach.

This is inspired by the TV show “The Bachelor.” It’s better to be the bachelor on “The Bachelor” than one of 25 contestants on “The Bachelor.” But AI is incredibly good at helping you brainstorm companies, better even than classic tools like Pitchbook or Crunch Base. Tell it, “Here are two or three companies I’m super excited about,” and tell it why. “Give me 10 more like those,” and it will give you 10 more like those.

And then you just give it feedback, “I like these three that you suggested, but I don’t like these other seven. I like these three because of their geography, and because they’re more in the growth phase. And those seven, I don’t want to live there, and they’re more established and bigger companies. I’d rather work for smaller companies.”

And it’s really good at reactive brainstorming. It can keep pitching you ideas so you can swipe left on the ones you like, or on the ones you hate, and right on the ones that you like, and you can get to 40 employers, which is the bare minimum for a LAMP list in about 10 minutes, just reactively reacting to whatever AI spits out at you.

Pete Mockaitis
I dig that a lot. So the AI is, and that’s perfect, I think, in terms of, that is my best experience with AI, is I give it a boatload of context and say, especially for book recommendations, like, “I’m looking for a book that’s going to help me this, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” And I was going in all this detail, it’s like, “Give me my top five options and your rationale.”

And I was like, “Number one sounds close, but I want it more like this. Do it again.” And then, sure enough, it’s great because, like, the key words only take you so far. So that’s awesome. I dig that.

And so I’m imagining, you know, you could just use multiple models. I mean, sometimes, I geek out on what do I see on Arena.ai or Artificial Analysis to see who’s on top at the moment. But this is so quick, you could probably just do it in five different models and just rock and roll.

Steve Dalton
The shorter time you spend making this list, the easier it is to walk away from. And this is meant to be like a balance sheet, for my accounting friends out there. It’s a snapshot in time. Best used when you focus on no more than three sectors that you just inherently or organically enjoy learning about.

And let’s say you talk to a couple people who are product managers at video game companies, and you decide, “Actually, that’s not me anymore.” You just dissolve the list and remake it from scratch with another sector that you think would be more interesting based on what you’ve now learned.

So it’s not meant to be something that you update. It’s not meant to be open on your laptop at all times. It’s something you do once, you see your top six and you close it, and you only look it up when it’s time to move down to company number seven or when you realize your goals have changed.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. Well, also tell us, if we operate with the two-hour job search instructions that we’ve heard before, or I recommend you go listen to again, what else is new or different or can be enhanced in 2026, 2027?

Steve Dalton
I think it’s important to note the outreach email is now the seven-point email. But with the proliferation of AI spam messages, especially on LinkedIn. LinkedIn has gotten harder to operate in, in a pleasant way. With the proliferation of spam emails, it is more important to be precise in your outreach to strangers, to not resemble the AI spam that’s out there.

So the seven-point email is a very specific and simple fill-in-the-blank template with no fluff. It is, you know, all killer, no filler. But it is a fill-in-the-blank exercise that basically is so short and so targeted, every word, every sentence counts, but that differentiates it from the spam email that you’re used to seeing and deleting immediately without reading.

So there’s no, “Hope you’re well.” There’s no niceties. It’s rooted in the concept that most people don’t want to help you in your job search. You will encounter three different types of contacts.

There are curmudgeons who will never respond under any circumstance. They’re not the worst ones because they’re clear about not being helpful. There are obligates. They are the worst ones you’ll encounter because they want to appear to be helpful, to not lose face, but they don’t actually want to risk their social capital on your behalf, which is devastating because they give you negative return on investment. They take your hope and crush it.

The majority of the help you get in your job search comes from boosters. They’re about 20% of the population. But they are beautiful people and the great thing about them is they’re very easy to reach efficiently.

They don’t need to be sold on why you’re a good person for them to talk to. They just need to know you need help. So there’s a great study in Predictably Irrational that finds you’re just as likely to get a stranger’s help to move a couch if you offer them $0 as if you offer them $50.

But if you offer them $5, you’re far less likely to get a person’s help moving a couch. They call that in the study switching from social norms to market norms. The reason you move a person’s couch for $0 is it’s a good deed. The reason you move someone’s couch for $50 is that’s a good day’s wage.

But once you introduce $5, it’s not a good deed plus $5. The good deed goes out the window, it’s purely an hourly wage calculation. So there were a couple of aberrations that were starting to happen. I think job seekers today are so terrified of making mistakes that they tended to take exact job titles from LinkedIn, put it into their outreach messages, especially in the title.

Your SENIOR PRODUCT MANAGER experience at Waymo, with senior product manager, in all caps, or is capitalized, where it looks like it’s a merge letter that you just copied and pasted their job title and put it in the title. We want these things to look more casual than super formal because super formal is what AI tends to opt for.

So writing a message that is targeting boosters exclusively, or primarily, using language that brings down the temperature on your ask, this is just one person asking a professional how they got so smart at their job.

And then living through with their promise. This is about the readers’ insights and knowledge that they’d be willing to share with a stranger out of the goodness of their heart. It’s a very specific email, but it has a very, very strong impact with our target audience, and it works just as well now as it did five or ten years ago.

There will always be boosters out there. We just aren’t trained to find them.

Pete Mockaitis
I love it. Well, Steve, could you give us a rundown? So we got seven points, you say, in this message. Could you first – I’ll put you on the spot – give us a rundown demo of what straight-up a full text of such a message could sound like? And then highlight the seven points from that.

Steve Dalton
Yes. Subject would be your product management experience at Waymo. The body would be, “Hi, Mark, I’m Becca, a fellow MBA,” and in parentheses, (Duke, Class of 2028). “Do you have some time to chat about your product management experience at Waymo? Your insights would be greatly appreciated because I’m trying to learn more about product management in the autonomous vehicle space. Best regards. Becca.” So that is the email.

Pete Mockaitis
There’s seven points in there? There are so few words. Seven full points.

Steve Dalton
Yes, exactly. And that’s one of the points. Keep it short. Short emails. Allow short responses. They’re easier to scan. It’s easier for people to figure out what the point is.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s easy to say yes to. Like, if I see paragraphs, I just go, “Ugh.” It’s, like, “Maybe later.”

Steve Dalton
It’s funny because I’ll get a lot of pushback from job seekers who say, “I can’t send these messages. I don’t want to impose on people.” Emails this short are not imposing. It’s those long emails, especially ones where you tout your own background, the cover letter style emails, where you’re telling someone why you’re so great when they did not ask for that email.

That’s where you get into problems. This is a very reader-focused email. There’s almost nothing about you, the sender, and that’s by design. Because this conversation is not going to be about you, the sender. It’s going to be about the reader.

And we are going to honor that promise. We will talk about ourselves when asked and not before. We can put a shortcut to our LinkedIn profile at the signature line of our email. But before that, like, we are a cipher. We are whatever they want us to be. That is fine.

So the other points. Make sure you make your ask in the form of a question, ending in a question mark, not a statement ending in a period. Keep these short, under 75 words. The body of the one I just went through is about 50.

Categorize your interest. So tell them without telling them what other companies you’re likely speaking to, so they know this is probably not your first conversation in this space. So you’re going to know what you’re talking about. That is the most important one of all, is just have that category, that product management in the autonomous vehicle space.

They can probably assume you’re also looking at Lucid Motors, Argo AI, Polestar. Great! And you didn’t have to put them on the spot by saying, “Here are the companies I’m also talking to.” You gave them the category. They can infer from there.

State your commonality to them first. So you might not have gone to their school, but you share a degree with them, potentially. And if you don’t share any commonality with them, you skip that one. But the more senior they are, the more I’d want you to Google them to see if you can find a media reference that was made about them, an interview they appeared in.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I mean, if I may, AI could help you there, too.

Steve Dalton
Absolutely, it can. So it’s great at research and great for prepping for these meetings as well. Put their experience into your own words. This is the newest and seventh point. So if they are a senior product manager, don’t ask about their SENIOR PRODUCT MANAGER experience where senior product manager is capitalized.

It’s still product management experience, “Can you tell me about your product management experience?” I know they’re a senior product manager, but to call that out very specifically makes it look like this is a job search. A little bit too on the nose, a little bit too obviously. But show the confidence that you can put their experience into your own words.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m curious, are you better off with email or LinkedIn nowadays?

Steve Dalton
You are better off with LinkedIn Group messages, specifically. Best kept secret in the job search, and LinkedIn is aggressive about trying to take away that option from you. So they recently offered everybody a free year of career premium. The problem with career premium is it only gives you five in-mails per month, per calendar month. And it will charge you an in-email to send a message to a fellow group member.

Now to send a message to a fellow group member, you’ve got to look them up in the group directory itself and then send them a message. If you are a proud basic member, like I am, I’m proudly basic in a lot of ways, but if you’re a proud basic LinkedIn member, you can do that free 15 times per calendar month.

And that happens to be the best way to get in touch with boosters, people who are predisposed to be boosters, because you share this affinity group. They didn’t have any obligation to respond to you so they’re probably doing it because they want to engage with you and want to help where they can.

When you reach out to someone at their work address or even their alumni address, there’s a higher than average instance that they’re obligates. They’re responding because work might be checking their email or because they don’t want to lose face because they’re supposed to be a good alum but they really don’t want to do this.

So LinkedIn Group messages are your best bet. A direct email, ideally, a lifetime email from an alumni database, but second to that, their direct work email, which you might get from a Prospeo.io or a hunter.io. There are tons of services that will help you guess professional emails. That’s your second best bet.

LinkedIn Connection requests are great follow-up attempts, but they are terrible first attempts because there’s no graceful way to follow up on them, and people tend to accept them and never reply, or they tend to ignore them because they don’t know you. And you only get to customize three of those per calendar month now. So group messages are your best bet.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So to be clear, this is a LinkedIn in-mail message to an individual who happens to be in a LinkedIn Group with you, is what you mean by group messages? One to one, but they are another person in the group with you?

Steve Dalton
Yes, it is not an in-mail unless you have premium, and then you will be charged an in mail for it.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, it is not an in-mail.

Steve Dalton
If you are a proud basic member, it is something totally separate. You get 15 of them instead of five.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, it doesn’t even call it an in-mail when you are in the group with them.

Steve Dalton
Yes, it is a quirk of LinkedIn, but it has been something they’ve offered for a long time and it is just so incredibly useful and free, which I love.

So join all the big LinkedIn Groups – the Harvard Business Review Group, the TEDx Talk discussion group. I’m members of plenty of groups that I don’t really engage in. I just know that there are a lot of people who tend to be job seeking in these groups. And so it gives me free access to message people that I want to get in touch with.

Pete Mockaitis
And I don’t want to get too hung up on the technicalities, but it sounds like this is a nuance that matters tremendously in terms of, like, your response rate could be decimated if you’re, you know, trying it a bit differently.

So I am finding a person who I share a group with, and then just sending the message in LinkedIn, and then that just shows up to them as not an in-mail, but a message from someone who is in the group.

Steve Dalton
Yep, you don’t even need to provide a subject line. So there’s less work for you. Even better. And they know you’re not spamming them because they can click on your LinkedIn profile. They know you share this affinity group together. It really is a beautiful thing.

But, again, you’re never trained to do this. So it’s a loophole that consistently delights. It might be the single favorite thing that I get to share with all of my audiences when I go do talks at schools or even companies.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think, if I may, the reason we love it so much is because, one, we never knew it; two, it’s so quick and easy; and, three, it makes a big impact. I mean, that’s like the sweet, sweet nectar of podcasts right there, Steve.

Steve Dalton
Just want to provide value.

Pete Mockaitis
You nailed it. Cool. All right. Well, wow, so much good stuff. So, Steve, tell me, what is something else that is new that we got to know?

Steve Dalton
You know, we talked about earlier, there are basically three ways of job searching. I think it’s also important to dispel the myths around the term referral.

So the word referral is problematic. A lot of you are thinking, “I’ve gotten referrals before, and it hasn’t led to any interviews. Like, this thing, this whole system doesn’t work.” And it’s because the word referral itself is problematic.

Now, these three phenomena I’m about to describe are all called referrals. The first one, “I don’t have time to talk, but here’s a link. Apply through that link, and you should be good.” This is especially a popular one with Mag 7 companies like Meta and Amazon. That is a referral.

I call that an online referral. Everybody has one. They are points of parity. They’re easy to get, therefore, they don’t return that much of an investment on it.

Pete Mockaitis
But it’s more than zero, like applying blind to the posting. Okay.

Steve Dalton
Yeah, so even with that referral, everyone else has one, too. They’re awash. We want human referrals. Now some of you are thinking, “Well, Steve, I wasn’t born into the right family where my dad is buddies with the CEO at the country club.” Nor was I. I call these birthright referrals.

If you have them, you’d be a fool not to use them, but most of us don’t have them. And it’s easy to think, “Everybody else has them but me,” and really nobody does. We are all looking. And those people are probably not in the job search very often because they just go from kind of nepotistic position to position.

So I call them birthright referrals. We can’t go back in time and change who we were born to and what income bracket. So use them if you have them, but I think a lot of people overvalue them. Just because you knew someone in your past doesn’t mean they’re going to be helpful or advocate for you.

The best thing you can do as a job seeker is go for earned referrals. That’s my term for someone who’s a first-gen college student who convinces someone who is doing product management at one of their dream companies to use their own social capital to introduce this first-gen college student to another product manager who may have a job opening.

That is an earned referral. You demonstrated actual skills that will be useful in any job. So why wouldn’t you put that person to the front of the line for an interview, that you can teach them what they need to know because they already demonstrate the ability to learn a critical skill for any position? But it’s important to note we are targeting earned referrals.

So when we get into these informational meetings, the final third of the book, there’s no single question you can ask a stranger to turn them into an advocate. So the important thing to note is that this is a professional intimacy-building algorithm that I call TIARA.

The best you can do from a stranger is turn them into an acquaintance. But you can’t take an acquaintance and ask them a single question that will turn them into a mentor either. The best you can do for an acquaintance is turn them into a subject matter expert.

So that’s where I recommend the Trend followed by Insight questions of the TIARA framework, T-I-A-R-A. Trend and Insight are the first two questions. Trends are macro questions. Insights are more personal.

That would be inappropriate to open with. Like, “What’s been your best professional decision so far and why?” A bit too intimate to start with, but it’s great after a big macro question, like, “What trend is most impacting your space right now, in your opinion?”

So Trend and Insight questions make people think creatively. They ask them for superlatives, they search their brain and genuinely engage with you. Now they’re feeling like a subject matter expert. And from subject matter expert, you can definitely convert someone to potential mentor by asking them Advice, Resources, and Assignment questions to wrap up the experience.

And that’s laid out in the third edition of The 2-Hour Job Search but really laying it out, it’s a customer journey that we’re trying to fit into one 30-minute meeting. So I disagree with, “Oh, I only need 15 minutes of your time.” It takes time to build this intimacy.

I also deeply, deeply disagree with the feedback that, “At the end of your informational ask, who you should speak to next?” There are lots of pieces of advice I wish would die in a fire, but that one more so than pretty much all of the other ones, because it’s a quick way to cheapen the discussion you just had.

Asking this person how they got so smart at their job and then ending it by implying that they weren’t helpful enough, or maybe this was a plan all along and you didn’t really care about their insights. You were just looking to get introduced to someone more important.

And, furthermore, you didn’t get a chance to get consent from your coworker to share their name with a stranger. So there’s so much bad about this advice. You will be going back and asking for those referrals later, but at the end of the informational is the worst time to do it.

It is the rudest and cruelest time to do it, and you will make the person who just gave you the gift of their time and knowledge lose face, which makes them not want to work with you anymore.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, Steve, there’s some passion there on this one. I can totally hear you there in that those are the vibes that I think I would feel if upon, and I felt it before. You know, it’s almost like, and I think I’m a fairly humble guy.

But if I’m really cooking with someone, right, and I’m feeling like, “You know, I really like this dude. This person’s got it going on. We’re vibing here. I really want them to succeed and win. I’m sharing the goods, the secrets, the gold.”

And then I hear, “Is there anyone else I could talk to?” That is my immediate reaction, it’s like, “Oh, sorry, I wasn’t good enough for you? With all that, that wasn’t good enough?” And so now, on the flip side, if they give you nothing good, like maybe you should ask.

Steve Dalton
I recommend, there’s a middle ground here and TIARA builds it right into the framework. That resources question is always the same. I call it the pivot question. It is always this, “What resources do you recommend I look into next?”

Pete Mockaitis
Resources.

Steve Dalton
The word resources is vague on purpose. Ideally, we’re hoping for a referral to another human being. That’s an earned referral. Some people are open with their networks. Some people may have gotten permission recently to share that person’s name.

Some people may just be excited to help you, and they will volunteer that information, “Oh, do you want to work for us? Oh, you got to go talk to Wendy. She’s looking for somebody right now. I’ll make the intro for you.”

But the key is you didn’t ask them, put them on the spot, make them lose face by saying, “Who should I speak to next?” If they weren’t ready to volunteer Wendy’s name, that would be very awkward.

So I put that at about 20% of cases when you ask the pivot question, “What resources should I look into next?” About 20% of the time, you’ll get someone who just volunteers a name to you.

The other 80% will say, “What sort of resources are you looking for?” And that’s when I recommend pivoting in the other direction, “What’s the best 10 minutes of research you do in a given day or week to stay current on your space? Is there a monthly, daily, weekly newsletter that you find most helpful, and why? Is there a conference that you prioritize attending each year and why do you find it so helpful?”

But it’s really about keeping this person’s trust and advocacy because, ultimately, you’re going to need them to risk their own social capital to make an introduction for you on your behalf.

Pete Mockaitis
So good. Thank you, Steve. Well, now can we hear about a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Steve Dalton
I’ve been reading a lot of Dungeon Crawler Carl lately, as many of my listeners out there might be. I’ve found it very inspirational, “You will not break me,” whenever you’re going through that tough period. And I think a lot of us are going through that tough period right now.

We don’t know how we can possibly tackle the beast of job searching. It will not break you. You just have not been trained for this yet.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Steve Dalton
Man, we already mentioned Dungeon Crawler Carl, so I’ll just recommend the entire set. And I also really enjoyed Recursion recently. So I like a good time travel mystery. So those would be the ones I’d keep an eye out for.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Steve Dalton
Claude used well. Use it well. Use it for what it’s good at, which is helping you figure out what you want to do, helping you understand, “What are 10 projects I would be expected to do if I were hired as a product manager for Waymo?” And see if that work appeals to you. That may help you learn you don’t even want to be a product manager.

Like, use Claude, challenge your creativity. It can help you prep for these informational meetings, “What are 10 trends that I need to be aware of? What are 10 pieces of jargon I should be aware of before talking to some product manager who works at Waymo?”

Use it for those less obvious things. Use it for things that are stressing you out and have you stuck, that email that’s tough to word, that concept you’re having trouble putting a finger on, that analogy that you’re just really struggling to come up with. But don’t use it for cover letters. Don’t use it for resumes. It’s not good at that.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget you share that seems to connect and resonate with folks, they quote back to you often?

Steve Dalton
A big discussion on the green button paradox. The green button paradox is my term for a thought experiment. I asked career coaches and job seekers alike, “Let’s say that there is a green button you can push.” And, please, join this conversation. I’d love to know your inputs and takes.

Let’s say there’s a green button you can push that will instantly download into your brain all of the whys of networking, all of the benefits from a statistical perspective in terms of your job search, all of the what’s of networking, like how to do a good informational, how to do the TIARA framework, how to write a good seven-point email, how to follow up on those meetings optimally to maximize the conversion to an interview, so it takes away all the risk of embarrassment of doing these wrong.

Pete, the only catch of it is, if you push the button, a batch of outreach initially goes out to your top six, and people expect you to show up at those networking meetings. Data shows that this is going to help you get jobs.

But what percent of job seekers do you think push the button?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, for me, I 100% would push it. So that’s me. But what do I think about most? I think they would say 70-ish percent.

Steve Dalton
The career coaches that I sampled in a recent webinar were between 20 and 30 percent thought would push the button. And that, to me, is very sobering.

Pete Mockaitis
So they thought that 20-30% would choose to push the button. What are you seeing in your survey so far of the percent who would push the button?

Steve Dalton
Job seekers had something pretty similar. It seemed like even the job seekers in this particular session were between 20 and 50 percent. So implying that under half would push the button.

I get it. Like, we are a generation now that is entering the workforce that grew up on screens with less in-real life play. A lot of our socialization is networking. We’ve worked from home for many years, even though it wasn’t our choice.

So I get all of that exhaustion, but the stakes are so high right now. So, to me, the reason this paradox has got me so obsessed is, like, I’m all about programming the button to be better at making the mechanics of outreach and networking easier and more effective.

But I think we all need to ask ourselves, “What is holding us back from pushing the button and how do we get over that?” How do we break down and formalize and institutionalize, maybe at the high school level, even, this fear? Because it’s a lot easier to learn to swim when you’re a toddler than when you’re 40 years old. You just haven’t built up the fear of it.

And I think higher education really needs to take a look at the green button paradox and figure out, “What are we doing to solve the people’s unwillingness to push the button, even though we can prove to them, this is only good for you? This is solving that pain point that you say you want solved, but it seems like the barriers.”

And it’s important to note that our brains have been, for hundreds of thousands of years, wired to protect us. It is doing the same thing to job seekers right now. Every time it comes up with a reason why now is not the right time to network, that is your brain trying to keep you safe from psychological harm.

But we need to have the wherewithal, the agency to tell our brain, to Marie Kondo our brains and say, “Thank you for your service. I know you were trying to do me a solid. The stakes here are just too high. I need to take you off autopilot right now.”

To me, the green button paradox is the next big challenge in the job search. What are we doing about getting people increasing people’s job seekers’ willingness to actually push the button if they had it presented to them? That’s, to me, the bigger challenge and that’s going to take a village.

Pete Mockaitis
And, Steve, if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Steve Dalton
Follow me on LinkedIn. I have a LinkedIn Group of about 25,000 people. I answer questions from readers about once a day. There’s usually no more than a week long queue before your questions will get greenlit.

I do corporate workshops, so if you would think, “This would be helpful for our company,” please mention me to your colleagues. Steve@contact2colleague.com is my email address for workshops and talks. If you have a job search question, I’m happy to answer it. I may direct you to my LinkedIn Group for it, though, out of fairness to those already waiting in the queue.

But please engage with this material, get curious, ask me questions, challenge the material. If something I said doesn’t make sense today, I’d love to hear your perspective because that’s how this recipe gets better over time.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge, or, kind of sounds like we covered them, but do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome their jobs?

Steve Dalton
Stay curious. This is a life skill you only need to learn once, like riding a bike. It will be with you for the rest of your life. It will help you get promoted. Keep your job when there are layoffs, find more community at work. The benefits will never stop paying off. Bite the bullet now, learn it now, especially before everybody else has no choice but to learn it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Steve, thank you.

Steve Dalton
Absolutely, my pleasure. Thanks for having me back.