It’s Not You, It’s the Market: What to Do During a Long Job Search (using transferable skills)

Noelle, host of We Lead Anyway, reassures listeners that a long job search doesn’t mean they’re doing anything wrong, citing shrinking white-collar hiring, an average six-month search, and misleading headlines about low unemployment. She reframes “side hustles” as using skills you already have—like customer support, coordination, project management, virtual assistance, or even mobile car detailing—to earn income while you wait. She emphasizes realistic expectations (many side hustles bring in about $200/month), encourages selling real skills, and suggests using AI to work faster and charge for outcomes. Freelance or contract work is presented as a bridge that keeps money coming in, skills fresh, and adds current experience to a resume.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Welcome back to We Lead Anyway. I'm Noelle, senior leader, career coach, and your host. Let me start with something I need you to hear before we go one step further into this conversation. If you have been applying for jobs for weeks, maybe even months, and your inbox is nothing but graveyard of, I'm sorry, but we've decided to move forward with other candidates. I need you to know something right after I take a drink of this coffee. You are not doing anything wrong. And I mean that. And I'm not just saying that because I too am in the same boat. Somewhere along the way, I personally convince myself that a long job search means I didn't try hard enough. My resume broken. Or I'm just not good enough. I am here to tell you today that is a lie. So let me show you the receipts. Here's what's actually happening that we're not hearing enough about because my personal experience is I've never been without a job longer than six weeks. So what I've read is that professional white-collar hiring has been shrinking for more than two years straight. The average job search right now lasts hold on to your shorts. Six months. Six freaking months. And last year, for the first time since 2021, there were more people looking for work than there were jobs to fill. Six months when you have to pay rent, six months of not getting your nails dip, six months of not knowing where your next paycheck is coming. That's crazy. Okay. And then, and then there's the gaslighting. You turn on the news and you hear, well, the economy is strong and unemployment is low. And look at these wonderful numbers. Okay. Unemployment is sitting around 4%, which sounds low. Sounds lovely. But that little number does not count how long people are stuck searching. And doesn't count how many of those jobs are open in the fields that you're in. They might not even be the fields that you're actually in. So the headlines telling you that everything is fine while you're on your 214th application, wondering what the heck is wrong with you, is asinine. Nothing is wrong with you. The math is genuinely harder than it was three years ago. All right. So I want you to say it with me. It's not me. It's the market. Thank you. Okay. So if it's going to take a while, the real question becomes well, what the crap do I do in the meantime? I can't just sit here and wait for unemployment to come in or for someone to ask me for an interview. And this is where I want to gently push back on how we talk about side hustles. Now, I know that not everyone listening is a director or a manager or in leadership. A lot of you might even be earlier in your career or you just stepped into leading a small team for the very first time. So being a fractional executive probably isn't up your alley. But the whole side hustle world was not built for you. It was built to sell you a course on flipping sneakers. So I just want to reframe this whole thing. You don't need a side hustle. You need to notice that you already have skills that people will pay for. Right now, to to today, junior, think about what you do all day. If you answer emails and you speak with frustrated people and you talk them down off the ledge, that's escalations or that's customer support. And a small business will pay you to run their inbox and their chat. Let's say you're really good at keeping the schedules or the project tracker. I hate project trackers, by the way. But you like to chase down the details that nobody else remembers because you can do it with your earbuds in and you don't have to talk to anyone. That's coordination, it's project management. And overwhelmed business owners will pay you to be a virtual assistant. I was looking at some executive assistant roles. Homie, they are up to six figures. They are paying $106,000 for executive assistant roles. That is crazy to me. When I was an executive assistant really early on in my career, I made $16 an hour. But there are a lot of things you can do. And I was thinking, maybe it's not a skill that you use every single day. Maybe you do work in an office, but you have a car that you worked really hard for and you keep that car in an impeccable condition. Okay. You wax and you wash and you polish it. And in order to keep your car the way that you want it, you purchased a bunch of equipment for its upkeep. Could you then use that equipment on your neighbor's cars? Could you create maybe a mobile detailing business? I, for one, get my car detailed every single month. He just comes to me and he's a young guy and he's making bank, by the way. All right. So the cool part is none of that requires you to invent a brand new personality or to buy a ring light that I'm using right now. But it does require you to take the things that you're already good at and offer it to just one person who needs it. It's why I do this podcast. I have dozens of people's promotions, job offers, salary negotiations under my belt. I know I'm good at what I do. I'm a great people leader. And it's what I love to do most. So if I can't focus on it at a certain job because they really just want me to drive numbers, I'll do it here on YouTube or wherever you're listening, Apple or Spotify. I didn't have to create a whole new business. I just changed the landscape a bit. Now, let me keep it all the way real with you, because I'm not about to blow smoke like some hustle bros do. No shade to the hustle bros. But the internet promises passive income of like six figures while you sleep. And the truth, the typical side hustle makes around $200 a month. $200, as opposed to $10,000. The folks pulling in the real money are not the ones doing surveys and spinning some delivery app well. They are the ones that are actually selling an actual skill, something that they do every single day. So if you try this and you don't make $10,000 in your first month, that doesn't mean that you failed because it was never a realistic number to begin with. But a few extra hundred dollars a month that covers your car or your insurance, that's a win. While you're searching for work, take the win. Don't let anyone out there diminish that. And here's the gift in the curse. But you can actually use AI for your side hustle. You can lean into AI to do the same work in a fraction of the time, which means you can take on a project, deliver it faster, charge for the result instead of the hours. Just work smarter and get paid for the outcome. That sounds like poetic justice to me. Now, I know a lot of people, including myself, are like, well, I just need to focus on looking for a job. And if I start a side hustle or something, I'm not committed to getting a real job, right? You're nine to five. This is not you giving up on a real job. I want to completely annihilate that mindset right here, right now, because picking up a freelance or contract work during a long search, that's not a step down. That's that's a bridge. And it keeps money coming in so that you're not making scared and desperate decisions out of fear. It keeps your skills sharp instead of rusting while you wait. And listen, it keeps a current date on your resume too. So when somebody finally asks, well, what have you been doing all this time? It's been six months. You haven't been working for six months. You have an answer that you can say with your whole chest. I've been consulting. Oh, I've been taking clients. I have been building something. And that's not a gap. That's initiative. And any hiring manager worth working for is going to say it exactly that way. So here is where I land today. You are allowed to make money on your own terms while you wait for the right door to open. And who knows, if you master it, maybe you can do both. You can stack paper that's not considered giving up or failure. You can't just sit around waiting for something to happen with the market or for AI to collapse because, honey, I do not see that happening. But I just want to validate that the long search is real. The exhaustion is real. We're still out here showing up and trying to figure it out. Okay. And that's the whole point of the show. When it is hard, when it is unfair, when the numbers are stacked against us, we lead anyway. And I am proud of you for doing all you can to keep your chin up and your head above water. So I want to hear from you. What's the one skill that you do every single day that you've never once thought of something that a person would actually pay for? Even if you're a gamer, get creative. Drop it in the comments. And if you have a topic you'd like me to discuss, email me at noelleadsanyway at gmail.com. And if you're interested in personal or professional development or coaching, visit leadwithnoelle.com. And until then, hang in there, y'all. Go take up space.