Most job search advice is built for obvious candidates. If you are making a clean move, the normal playbook can work fine. Tighten the resume/CV. Fix LinkedIn. Apply properly. Interview well.
But that advice starts to break when your move needs explanation. For instance:
- You want to change country. Or industry. Or function. Or all three at once.
- Maybe you have a background that makes perfect sense in conversation but looks weird in an applicant tracking system.
- Or you are senior enough that there just aren’t many real opportunities for someone like you in your city.
- Or you are trying to do something adjacent enough to be plausible, but different enough that a hiring manager will hesitate if all they have is your resume/CV.
A relationship-first job search is worth considering for all those cases.
I have hired 200+ people and interviewed 1000+ across different kinds of roles and companies. Based on that experience, I think a lot of smart candidates are using the wrong strategy for the kind of move they are trying to make.
I also know the candidate side. As I wrote elsewhere about my own move, “It took me 172 applications and 8 months to land my first role in the Netherlands from Canada. Looking back, I could have cut that effort by 75% if I’d known then about relationship-first job searches.”
A relationship-first search is not for everyone. But for the right person, it can increase your odds massively.
What a relationship-first job search actually is
A relationship-first job search means you stop asking applications to do all the work.
You focus on a relatively narrow set of companies where you could genuinely see yourself working. Then you proactively build relationships with people inside those companies. You learn from them. You understand their team, their company, their challenges, and how someone like you might fit. You keep those people informed about your search.
And if timing lines up, you are no longer a random applicant coming in cold. You are someone they know. Someone they have spoken to. Someone they can picture. That matters a lot.
“A resume/CV is flat. A person is not.”
If your story needs a little explanation, you are asking a busy stranger to connect dots they do not have time to connect. That is a bad bet.
If you’re intrigued, you can estimate the odds a relationships-first approach might help in your case with this calculator:
The main alternatives, and why they break
1. Blind applications
This is what most people default to because it feels efficient. And now with AI, it is even easier to do more of it, faster. The problem is that speed does not fix bad odds.
If you are applying to roles where hundreds of people can plausibly apply, your resume/CV gets just seconds of attention. If your move is non-obvious, those seconds are not enough. Your resume/CV may be good. Your actual story may be strong. But the reader does not have the context, patience, or incentive to give you the benefit of the doubt.
So your application disappears into the void, and if you’re lucky, a month later you get a “thanks, but we found someone more suitable” email.
One pilot user put this more bluntly than I could: “My application through the front door… will get trashed. It will just get thrown to one side because it’s always the risky option. Whereas if I can get in the room with the right person, have that coffee… then that’s doing so much more work.”
SIDEBAR: The hiring manager is not sitting there waiting to discover hidden talent
A lot of candidates imagine a hiring manager carefully reading every application and trying to find the most impressive person. That’s not what’s happening, ever.
Usually the hiring manager is stressed, understaffed, and already doing part of the missing person’s job. They needed someone yesterday. Hiring is now one more big project on top of the actual work they are already struggling to keep moving.
Then the applications come in. A few are good. Many are weak or total junk. And even when the role is specialized, the pile can still be absurd. We got over 300 applications when I was hiring a lawyer at Salv in Tallinn (a city of just 0.5M people). That is for a role with very clear qualifications. At that volume, nobody is lovingly reviewing every CV and open-mindedly piecing together your story. You do a quick scan and start looking for reasons to cut the pile down fast.
And the hiring manager usually cannot just decide alone anyway. It is a committee. Other people need to be convinced. Everyone has slightly different preferences. The process drags on. Meanwhile the team is still understaffed and the pain is still real.
So what do they actually want? Usually not a once-in-a-generation genius. They want to get to a top three quickly. They want someone decent, competent, enthusiastic, and pleasant to work with. Someone who can do the job well. Someone whose story makes sense for the role, so they believe that person will actually want the job and stick around.
2. Acquaintance referrals
This is better than applying cold, but it is not enough to build a serious search around. First, most people simply do not know that many relevant people in companies where they want to work. Typically, you might get 2 or 3 referrals? 10 max. It’s not nearly enough just from a numbers standpoint.
And even when they do, those people are often not in the right team, not close enough to the hiring decision, or not skilled at positioning you well. Your cousin, a junior engineer at a 500-person company has never even met someone from Legal team where you’re looking for a role.
And even a friendly referral can be weak if the person knows you socially rather than professionally. They might like you, but they may not know how to explain why you would be excellent in that particular job.
So unfortunately, a lot of these referrals don’t work out that well. They’re a bonus, occasionally, but can’t be your main strategy.
3. Taking a lower-tier job just to get in the door
I understand the logic. Get inside the company somehow then work your way up later. Sometimes that works.
But hiring managers are not stupid. When they see an obviously overqualified person applying for a lower-level role, they see risk. They think: this person will not stay. This is a temporary move. We will spend all this time hiring them, onboarding them, training them, and six months later we will be hiring again. From their side, that is a bad deal. They bin your application immediately to avoid the risk.
So you can end up in a strange trap where you are overqualified for one set of roles and underqualified on paper for the roles you actually want. But YOU KNOW and I KNOW you’re perfect for the job. So what can you do?
What the relationship-first process looks like
This is not vague networking. It is a sales process. Don’t let that scare you though - the steps are straightforward and anyone can do them.
1. Start broad, then narrow hard
Make a big list of companies that could employ someone like you. Not just the five sexy brands everybody talks about.
There are usually far more relevant companies than people think. Depending on your city, country, and field, there may be 50 to 500 possibilities. Some of them will not be well known by outsiders. That is fine. They do not need to be cool in general. They need to be cool to you.
Then you prioritise. This matters because you cannot work 50 companies at once. You can work maybe five or ten properly at a time.
2. Find the right people inside those companies
You seek out people who could plausibly be your future manager, your manager’s manager, or a credible mentor figure in the area you want to move into. The closer they are to the work you want, the better.
Then filter those people down too. Not everybody is worth reaching out to. You can only work with perhaps 10-15 at a time. You can always add more later.
3. Reach out for a semi-casual conversation, not a disguised job ask
The ask is not, “Can you get me a job?”. The ask is a thoughtful, low-pressure conversation. You are trying to learn. You are trying to understand the company and the role better. You are trying to understand whether a team like theirs could be a fit.
If you do this well, roughly 2 or 3 out of 10 messages will turn into conversations. That is fine. If you have a good system and the people and companies mapped out, you do not need every message to land.
And the misses tell you something too. If you reach out thoughtfully to several people from the same company and nobody is willing to talk, that is information. Maybe the place is too frenetic, too cold, or too internally stressed to be a good fit anyway.
4. Run good conversations
Think 30 minutes. Usually on Zoom. You’re interviewing them. You ask about their job, their challenges, their team, how they got there, what advice they would give someone like you, and what someone should understand before trying to join a company like theirs.
The point is to build trust and learn what matters, not to impress as you might in an interview. Useful information matters too, but it comes after the person decides you are thoughtful, normal, and worth helping.
5. Follow up
After the conversation, say thank you. Then keep in touch. Roughly once a month is plenty for most searches. Tell them how your search is going, what you have learned, what you have done since, and maybe how their advice changed your thinking.
With these follow ups, you are staying on the radar. People help people they like, understand, and remember.
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And that’s it. 5 basic steps that anyone can do.
If you’re intrigued about the relationship-first concept, and want to see how well it might work for the move you’re thinking of making, give it a try here:
Pilot learnings
This approach is strongest when your move is non-obvious. I’ve worked closely with about 15 people over a pilot over the past couple of months. Here are the people and career moves where this relationship-first approach made the most sense for.
- C.M.: Moving from civil engineering into product lead or head of operations type role at a tech company in a relatively small UK city.
- E.M.: aiming for a very senior operational role with limited opportunities in her city and no sensible way to just search “worldwide” for the right next move.
- R.P.: a strong sales leader trying to move from Finland to Singapore, but with no real local connection there, which makes him look super risky from a hiring manager’s perspective.
- I.G.: moving from financial crime in a large bank to financial crime in a crypto startup in London, where competition is huge and companies will reasonably question their startup fit.
- A.R.: aiming to move from senior private-sector roles into the public sector, where opportunities are limited and institutions are be skeptical about motivation, pay expectations, pace, and fit.
Note: names withheld because they’re mostly still working and wouldn’t want their manager to know they’re planning a move
These are exactly the kinds of cases where the normal process strips away too much context. A hiring manager sees risk. A relationship-first process gives you a way to lower that risk before the formal process starts.
Why this works
First, people remember people. If somebody likes you, respects your initiative, and understands what you are trying to do, they are much more likely to give you a shot. Not because they are doing you a favour. Because now you’re a real person, not a resume/CV in a stack of 300 just like it.
Second, this approach signals guts. Sending a thoughtful outreach message takes nerve. Most people will not do it. The people who do are already behaving differently from the pack.
Third, you hear about things earlier. People leave. Teams change. Hiring plans get approved before a job post exists. Internal conversations happen before the market sees anything. The people you have built relationships with are closer to that information than you are. Sometimes they’re even the people deciding.
Fourth, you learn the real shape of the job. Ultimately, companies hire people to solve problems. If you have had a few smart conversations first, you know their problems better. You know their language. You know the KPIs, success metrics, constraints, and internal realities that never show up clearly in a job description.That makes your interviews much better. It also tells you when a company is wrong for you before you waste a month chasing it.
Fifth, and maybe most importantly, this gives you a small network of insiders who can keep an eye out for you. If you have 5 to 15 strong contacts in a space, and you stay on their radar, you now have experienced people informally watching for relevant opportunities. Maybe someone on their team is leaving. Maybe they just got approval to hire. Maybe a friend at another company asked them if they know anyone good. You cannot see those opportunities from the outside. They can.
How much can it improve your odds?
I do not want to oversell this. No honest person should promise that a few coffee chats turn directly into a job. But if your baseline odds from a cold application are terrible, improving them by 10x or 20x is not crazy.
If applying cold gives you a 0.5% chance (1 in 200 cold resume/CVs sent), and a relationship-first approach gets you to 10%, that’s massive. For most people, it really is somewhere in the neighborhood of a 10x-20x improvement.
But of course: there’s no free lunch. A relationship-first approach does take real effort. You have to prioritise companies, identify people, send good outreach, prepare for meetings, and follow up well. That is extra work. But it is not 10x or 20x more work. So if the upside is that large, the math starts to look very good.
I built a calculator for you to estimate how much your odds improve with a relationship-first approach as compared to applying cold. Check it out here:
The obvious concerns
“This sounds like a lot of work.”
Yes. It is. But you are not just doing dummy work. You are learning every step of the way. You learn about the company. You learn about the market. If you are changing industries, you learn how the industry actually works.
And a lot of the fiddly parts can be made as systematic as possible. That is part of the reason PivotDesk exists.
“I do not know how to do this.”
True. Almost nobody was taught how to do this. You need a system and some good guidelines. But once you have done it a handful of times, it gets dramatically easier. Fortunately too, recipients are more forgiving than people think. They can feel that you are taking a chance. They can see the initiative in it and appreciate it.
“It seems cringe.”
Also true. Nobody loves selling themselves. Not even most salespeople. But if you do this well, it is not slimy at all.
You are not cornering someone. You are not demanding a favour. You are having a short, engaging one-to-one conversation with possible future colleague, possible future manager.
For the other person, again if you do it well, it will be genuinely enjoyable. They get to talk about their work, share what they know, and maybe help someone thoughtful who’s excited about learning from them. Who wouldn’t like this?
Where PivotDesk fits
PivotDesk is designed to help people actually run this process well. Not just the first message. The whole system. Prioritising companies. Choosing the right people. Reaching out properly. Preparing for conversations. Following up well. You do the work, and the software guides you and keeps you on track, moving forward fast.
Final thought
A lot of people are not bad candidates. They are just using a job search strategy that is badly matched to the move they are trying to make. If your next move is straightforward and applications are already working, great. Keep going. If your move is non-obvious and cold applications are not working, know that there’s another way that might work better.
You can estimate the difference a relationships-first approach could make in your circumstances with this calculator.