3 Reasons to Think About Your Destination When Starting Your Career Marketing Campaign.

Part III of 3 in our year-end career change series

As we approach the traditional year-end holiday week, you may be wondering “what’s next?” Layoffs have ratcheted up more than 50% year-over-year. It has been widely reported that the Federal Government reduced staff by nearly 300,000 this since January 2025. Even if you are still working in either the public or private sector, there is a good chance you are concerned about whether it is time to make a move.

Our last two posts tried to focus on the factors you may want to think about before embarking on a career or job change effort. This week, we will look at the importance of deciding what job you want to do next.

Specifically, you may want to think about the job you want next even if you feel safe now.

On a more positive note, some readers may be finishing college or graduate school this month. If this is where you are now, you are no doubt excited about the future. Now you need to face the challenge of what’s next, just like those leaving their jobs. Switching from college to work is, after all, a career change.

Whether your job ended this year, you are unsure that your job will exist next year, you are finishing school, or you just feel ready to start something new, it is a good time to think about your next goal. A specific job target is a good place to start.

Here are a few reasons to focus on a job target:

1. Employers do not fill “any job,”
2. The job target will focus your search, and
3. A resume and other job search materials should show the benefits of hiring you to do a specific job.

These three reasons to set a target are a place to begin. You will find others as you do your planning.

Employers do not fill “any job.”

Jobseekers often tell me “I just need a job.” New grads have parents that tell them to “get a job.” Experienced workers who have been downsized need to support families.

AI, I’ve been told, allows jobseekers to apply for thousands of jobs. Recruiters have told me AI systems can insert skills needed for the job into an application whether the applicant has these skills or not. Theoretically, if you apply for every job, you will get a job by random chance. It’s more likely, though, that you will get no job.

You are unlikely to find work by applying for “everything, everywhere, all at once” because employers have specific business challenges to address. And they need to know about the skill, experience, and education that will allow you to meet their needs. They don’t need someone that says they can do “anything” or “any job” because they need a paycheck or health insurance.

A job target focuses your job search.

Where would you look for “any job?” You can probably leave the job title field blank on many job search sites and get pages upon pages of results. But few, if any, of the leads will be in your commuting area or match your skillset. You can search for any job in your local area and get slightly better results, but most of the jobs will still not match your skills, experience, and education. Narrowing a search to jobs in your local area without specifying the job you want and the jobs you are qualified to fill will still get many useless results. It would be little better than asking an AI to apply for every job on the Internet for you.

Your search will be more practical when you specify the title of the job you want. And if the job search website you are using allows you to specify years of experience, you may get even better matches.

Many jobs are never posted online. Even that hypothetical AI that applies for every job on your behalf would not find them. That means you will have to seek out people in your network or people they know to find these jobs. This makes it even more important to concentrate your search on a job target because your contact won’t know what business opportunities you can address unless you tell them.

In other words, it is important to select a job target whether you search online or search primarily through networking with other people.

A resume should show the benefits of hiring you for a specific job.

Resumes that do not specify a job target are ineffective. For example, I have had clients who are qualified for work in vastly different fields, such as engineering and law. An entrepreneur or senior leader seeking engineers will look for very different skills and experience than the partner in a law firm seeking attorneys. It is possible, of course, to show both fields on the same resume so automated searches in both fields pick it up. But leaders in either field could see the jobseeker as not being committed to either career.

A client got results by collaborating with us on a resume emphasizing the work he truly loved–engineering. Then, we were able to concentrate on expertise in specialized software for drones, rather than on his ability to build legal databases. Kate Wendleton, a well-known career coach and author in the 1990s said in one of her books, “if your job target is wrong—or nonexistent—everything is wrong.” Marketers would probably say you have to know what service you are marketing in order to target your ideal customers—employers. You will get better results when you start with a job target, whether the DOGE or your corporate leadership downsized you, you just finished school, or you want a new challenge.