Uroboros

Greg Wyatt • September 27, 2024

One thing I find curious about the advice I give job seekers is that it’s advice I try to follow myself in running a small business.

While being similar to advice I read from business coaches who actually know how to run businesses (not the “I’ll help you 100x your business over night, to 7 figures, including decimal points” types.)

I also know this - the market has changed significantly and constantly in the past few years, it’s changing now, and it will change again.

So, if advice for a job search might be helpful for running a business.

Or if that same advice might be what you really need, should you find yourself unexpectedly out of work in a few weeks’ time.

Then you might find today’s article for Jobseeker Basics an interesting read:

Ouroboros is a mythological snake that perpetually eats its own tail.

It’s the notion things never disappear, they change and are reborn.

In the same way, some of the constructive activities you do at work can support being out of work, while the skills you’ve learnt in a job search can be used to enhance work.

Today I’ll look at

  • Using your business skills in your job search

  • An annual career MOT to check what you are doing reflects your values and aspirations

  • Keeping your job search emergency kit ready at all times

  • Applying skills learnt in a job search to enhance your work

Everything feeds into itself in a way that can improve your odds at work, and when unemployed.

Using your business skills in your job search

“Oh, I do that at work, but I never thought to do that for myself,” said a talent acquisition copywriter when he was between projects.

I’d told him to promote himself on LinkedIn using his copywriting skills, and make himself a product with features and benefits.

This is the thing. While starting a job search for the first time seems alien, you already have skills you can effectively use to improve your odds straight away.

  • If you're in marketing, form a marketing strategy where you are the product. Go integrated appropriate multichannel (that’s how I recruit too).

  • If you are in sales, sell yourself. Talk to people, network, build relationships, doorknock, cold pitch.

  • If you are a project manager set a clear strategy with correct documentation, plan-do-check-act, use your methodology. 

We all have skills that can apply to a job search, so while it may feel an alien skill to have to learn, you aren't starting from scratch. 

What skills benefit your work most? How might you adopt them into this new job called looking for work?

An annual career MOT to check what you are doing reflects your values and aspirations

Which if you haven’t done at least at the start of your job search, you should do now.

Redundancy can often be an opportunity to try something brand new, without the baggage of your previous job.

This is because it breaks the inertia of your career, one where you are pulled forward by the needs of your business and job, as much as by what you think you want.

Loyalty and hard work are mostly a good thing, yet can work against you if you make all those small compromises required to fit in.

At some point down the line, the you that you want to be diverges so much from the work you, it becomes a crisis that needs resolving.

Yet, this disconnect between your ideals and what’s actually happening should be identified much earlier.

In the same way your boss will do an annual review, so too should you.

Look at all the points that make up where you want and where you need to be in your career, especially as life invariable changes in the background:

  • working arrangement and commute

  • salary and overall compensation

  • how the culture at work reflects your values as a person

  • how the future looks there compared to where you want to be

  • talk to your nearest and dearest and ask them if you are happy at work

That last point is something I hear from time to time - our emotions are often better reflect by those around us, than we can judge for ourselves.

The danger of not doing this is that, when you do find yourself out of work, you don’t take advantage of this break in career inertia.

If you go for the same jobs that were holding you back, will you be fulfilled?

Identity work is so important, whether you are unemployed or employed.

Of course, sometimes you just need money to pay the bills - that’s fine too, as long as you do it intentionally.

Keeping your job search emergency kit ready at all times

The first thing many people do when they find themselves out of work is update their CV.

Quite hard to do it meaningfully, when you have six years of experience to unpick, so often it’s easier to put your job description in.

Why not update your CV instead with every notable achievement (supported by numbers), every change in context and job title?

And your LinkedIn profile too.

Don’t worry about length, this is a personal master CV you can refer back too at any point, and is the bible of your career. These achievements also serve as reminders for interviews.

You’ll also want to keep up to speed with all the contacts you made in your last job search, so they are easily accessible when needed. Some people call this networking.

That identity work above is helpful too, so you can be laser focused at the right times.

While keeping up to speed with LinkedIn content too, whether writing or responding.

”But I don’t want to be seen to be looking for work when I’m not!”

Which leads me to

Applying skills learnt in a job search to enhance your work

I’d wager many long-term jobseekers that are keen to learn will have developed networking, interviewing and even content writing skills when out of work.

Why not apply the same skills for work?

  • Instead of writing posts, messages and comments to support looking for work… write the same to support your job. What subjects would help communicating about online, that supports the work you do?

  • Network with peers and thought leaders, gain ideas and share ideas - done judiciously, how wouldn’t this help you in your work?

  • Interviews are sales or business meetings, where you put your best foot forward while trying to gain objective information about whether you should buy. A useful skill in any context.

These are all qualities that can (if you choose) enhance what you do at work. Better yet, should the worst happen again, you’re already ahead of the game in the next job search.

And I think there’s only one thing we can be certain of in this economy - best be ready for the uncertain.

Thanks for reading.

Regards,

Greg”

p.s. I might have some availability for new recruitment projects coming up in a couple of weeks time. Drop me a line if you have a UK key hire that needs righting, recruitment writing that needs writing, or process improvement that needs uh improving.

A standard diagnostic

By Greg Wyatt • October 22, 2026
The other day I read a LinkedIn post about the iron triangle as it relates to recruitment. That you can be fast and good, but it will be expensive. That you can be fast and cheap, and it will be bobbins. Or that you can be cheap and good, but it will take longer than the heat death of the universe. At first glance it’s always made sense, with caveats, though that sense has been ablated with the promise of AI. Something that promises to be quicker, cheaper and better than people can manage. The only thing this triangle lacks is judgement-with-responsibility, something AI-style LLMs are currently incapable of, which is why they can be such problematic technology for recruitment. Though if your priority is speed, saving money, and filling jobs, the lack of judgement in even those algorithms that promise black box bias freedom might not be a problem you’d think much about. And when the top is spinning in an elegant way this might seem a standardisation you can apply everywhere, while you get on with your day job. Sadly the only place a spinning top doesn’t stop is when you were dreaming all along. AI has made me think about why the fundamentals of recruitment are so important, using judgement before we launch our projects. Which is why I like the 5Cs of project management as a way to look at recruitment: complexity, criticality, compliance, culture, compassion. With an adaptation and an additional C to be fit for purpose. It’s a great way to consider what approach to deploy: Complexity: the number of moving parts in a role, supply and demand in the candidate market, resources required to engage and bring forward the right people Criticality: the impact a vacancy has on the organisation. The opportunity a great hire brings. The damage the wrong hire can cause. And everything in between Channels: we go where the candidates are, whether at the end a headhunt, from an advert, from sourcing across LinkedIn Recruiter/equivalent tools, CV Databases, ATS records, other platforms, internal applicants, suppliers, consultants, temps, networking, referrals or even from a little black book, which I suspect will become more relevant again when data becomes noise Compliance: not just employment law, but how technology is used to find, engage and assess candidates in a fair, equitable and inclusive way Context: the full picture of the company – its organisational and local cultures, principles and values, mission, vision, goals, challenges and trajectory. The nuts and bolts, what that means for your candidates, and trying to understand the same in them Compassion: recognition of the impact a vacancy has on the employer and its team, balanced with how everyone can be brought together. And compassion for everyone that interacts with our recruitment, in process or invisibly Yes, I swapped context for culture. Hiring for context necessarily includes culture, and goes much further. And I've added Channels, which should always be established before going to market. I like these because they’re a way to ensure that how you recruit is proportionate and appropriate. They may even highlight you shouldn’t hire at all. But what you shouldn’t do is assume one recruitment process is the same as the next, nor that the investment made in reaching desired outcomes should be. What may seem expensive to you might bring an unexpected return on investment. What seems slow at the outset might bring a starter quicker than hoped – proper planning and all that. What seems good quality might fall apart, when the promises prove inadequate. That’s why it’s so important to diagnose first, before standardising. Greg p.s. You're welcome to try my free Hiring Diagnostic & Plan . It's not based on the 6Cs, which I think require more depth than a free tool can reasonably provide. Instead, it draws on principles from other disciplines: True and Fair from accounting, and Suitable and Sufficient from health and safety. It's free and private. Give it a go, and let me know if you'd like to chat through how the 6Cs might apply to your recruitment and enhance the resul 

Introduction to the hidden jobs market

By Greg Wyatt • October 14, 2026
On Wednesday 21st, I'll be doing a LinkedIn Live on The Hidden Jobs Market, joined by Paul Woodhouse. Paul is a marketing leader who has been looking for work in our challenging market. A previous role was a Hidden Job, and has also hired people himself. We'll be looking at his experiences to give a little substance to what can be a nebulous term. I'll show the steps anyone can take to become available for unadvertised vacancies, and for advertised vacancies that are filled by other means - after all employers consider more than only applications when taking a standard approach to recruitment. As a recruiter I don't advertise around half my vacancies, which might be for reasons of confidentiality, a lack of definition in the brief, a on the QT replacement for someone about to be dismissed, or mass availability of candidates. I'll use LinkedIn Recruiter to look for potential candidates, CV databases that can be more effective for immediate hires, my network for referrals and recommendations. My previous candidate pools for other vacancies - some of whom might have once open a time been applicants. Indeed, that last point shows the absurdity of much job search advice. If you apply for a vacancy on an ATS, you might be rejected, yet still be considered for future vacancies in the same employer. A hidden job hidden by an advertised job, where tailoring your CV with AI might make you less likely to be considered. Join us on Wednesday, or if you aren't free, the recording will be available immediately. Both can be found here: https://www.linkedin.com/events/7516049669924225027?viewAsMember=true . The chapter below from A Career Breakdown Kit (2026) shows a simple metaphor for the hidden jobs market, why it's such a silly term, and a better way to think about your own job search. 3 - The hidden jobs market In most of the calls I have with job seekers they will ask me about The Hidden Jobs Market. What is it? Is it real? How can I access it? Before we get into that, we should talk about tomatoes. As you read this next section, imagine a tomato is a job. So, you want to procure some tomatoes. How would you? Your local farm shop. The supermarket. Wednesday’s stalls. Maybe you subscribe to a weekly box of veg. Maybe you grow your own. Maybe you trade for the tomatoes from Tim’s allotment. Maybe you look at people funny when they ask for an intro to Tim because his tomatoes are wonderful. You likely wouldn’t buy some from Amazon - they don’t sell fresh food. Not to me anyway. Though you might buy tomato seeds from Amazon if you grow your own. Maybe even cans of crushed tomato, sauce, puree, or whatever meets your needs. As the channel you use to source tomatoes isn’t the only consideration, so too is the configuration of what you need. While you and others all access tomatoes in different ways, some of which overlap, and some of which are mutually exclusive - none of these channels are hidden. It’s just that you may not know how to access some channels, while others won’t be available to you. Now I want you to read that section again. Instead of being your desired job, you are an employer whose desired tomato is a candidate of choice. While recruitment is the inverse of a job search (more on this later), the analogy is better from the employer perspective because they are on a buyer’s journey where you are the product. Employers want to fill their vacancies through the best means. Some vacancies are easy to fill, others not so, and they will access the channels necessary to find the right people. In many situations, they won’t advertise a vacancy, which might be for reasons of confidentiality or convenience. Some say this is as much as 80%, a flawed figure which comes from a flawed survey, or perhaps it comes from a newspaper article in 1974 before computers were a thing. In my recent small-scale research, it was indicated more than 62% of vacancies are advertised. 53% responded they advertise more than 75% of vacancies. Many of the respondents were headhunters, whose business may be based on not running public adverts. I expect this will have skewed the results lower than the true figure. What employers don’t do is hide vacancies systematically. To access these vacancies, you need to understand the channels through which employers hire and invert these channels to form your strategy. Much like how tomatoes are sold through channels which consumers buy from. Is the hidden jobs market real? Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that not all jobs are advertised. Some are confidential, some for reasons as mundane as not wanting to deal with hundreds of advert applicants. No, because it isn’t a term that has inherent meaning. Speak to people who advocate for it, often a career coach, and they’ll tell you it’s anything from personal branding and networking to going direct and being referred in. When vacancies aren’t advertised by employers, they often fill them through sourcing - this is a specialist skill related to finding people where they may be found: LinkedIn, CV databases, corporate databases, GitHub, Facebook, YouTube. These are all channels you can access as part of an appropriate multichannel strategy. Which means if you have the right multichannel strategy (I call this Through-the-Line, which we’ll cover in parts 2 and 3), you access all jobs available to you, including those which are hidden and those which are in witness protection on another continent. Who are the headhunters that specialise in your domain? Who are the people who can refer you to jobs? How can you be more discoverable on LinkedIn and CV databases? How can you gain an understanding of the ways in which your ideal job is recruited, so you can take advantage of those channels? Those are better questions to answer to allow an effective through-the-line, multichannel strategy involving outbound and inbound leads. Despite me being vocal about why Hidden is a flawed notion, two people have thanked me for advice that led to their new roles claiming they’d accessed the hidden jobs market. As I gritted my teeth in hidden rage and congratulated them on their success, they unveiled the truth. What they actually did was map out their real life network of people they’d worked with and got in touch. If the people you know don’t know that you are looking for a role, what reason would they have to tell you about a vacancy? It’s simple marketing - right place (LinkedIn), right person (ex-colleague), right message (looking for work), right time (we’ve a vacancy). Of course, that takes a bit of luck to achieve the right congruence. Odds you increase through volume and follow up. And when you do find those opportunities, they are easier to win because you are a known name, not another unknown CV. There it is, the hidden tomato market.