There are 162 games in major league baseball season and the players have a saying “Every team’s going to win 54 games, every team’s going to lose 54, it’s what you do with the other 54 games that counts.”
The above quote is taken from an episode of NBC’s the West Wing. What it basically means is that there are three types of situations: those where you’re definitely going to succeed, those where you’re definitely not going to succeed, and those where you might and might not.
In job search terms, this means that there are some situations where you will definitely get the job; for example, you may be the only person in the world who can do the job, or your dad may own the company. There are also some situations where you will definitely not get the job; for example, if you’re completely unqualified for the position, or another candidate’s dad owns the company.
I’ve found that a lot of job seekers worry about the opportunities that they definitely won’t get. “Why apply?” They ask me. “I don’t know anybody there, and someone else will probably have the inside track.” Yes, maybe someone else will, and in that case you probably won’t get it.
You should still apply, though, because there are still the job opportunities that you might get – the 54 games that count. These are the job opportunities that you might get, and might not, and they also happen to be hard to distinguish from the ones that you definitely won’t get. The situations where you have a chance, but not a lock.
These situations are where job search strategies come in – they’re the situations where you need to pull out all the stops, and take advantage of every technique that you can think of, from “Hire Me” videos to interview preparation tools, to interactive learning environments like HuntingToHired that teach you everything you every technique in the book.
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