Through The Line - Jobseeker Basics VII

Greg Wyatt • November 18, 2025

The following is Chapter 20 from A Career Breakdown Kit, my guide on navigating a BANI jobs market.

BANI stands for brittle, anxious, non-ambiguous and incomprehensible - if you're stuck in a long-term job search this may strike a chord.

However, if you're just starting out, you can avoid it becoming BANI by setting out on the right path - this won't guarantee an outcome, but will make your search simpler to navigate.

This chapter is Through-the-line, and it's the top level strategy for accessing your individual market. It's based on much of what comes before, such as framing your job search as a product marketing launch, mapping your market, inverting recruitment channels, appropriate multichannel (go where your jobs will be) and in a more down to earth way "How I'd do it" from a couple of weeks ago.

On that 'inverting recruitment' point, this means how you look for work broadly mirrors how your ideal job is recruited for. And in the same way, I take a Through-the-line approach to filling my vacancies, not all of which are publicly advertised.

Unlikely other chapters, this doesn't entirely stand on it's own merits - it's deeply interconnected with the rest of the book, and assumes you have already done the work to establish which channels will be most effective.

You can access of the book for free on Substack, or if you want to support my work, you can buy a copy on Amazon (I'll share links to both in the comments section).

Through-the-line

How do we put together these principles to form an appropriate multichannel strategy?

You may have gleaned I don’t like the term hidden jobs market.

Yet, there’s no getting away from three facts:

Not all vacancies are advertised publicly
Not all advertised vacancies are filled by advert applicants
Jobs might be created or filled outside of traditional hiring activities

How can we best create an accurate, representative, consistent, and replicable strategy for your whole job market?

If you accept the ideas from the last three chapters, then there is a simple term that can underpin your strategy:

Through-the-Line

In marketing, this is an integrated strategy that combines above-the-line with below-the-line, as well as approaches that involve both at the same time.

You integrate these into one strategy to tackle your whole market suitably.

What is above-the-line?

This is an approach to marketing that captures interest in the broadest way possible, through volume-based media.

Typically, this creates inbound interest, where the consumer makes an enquiry, takes action, or goes out and buys the product.

Examples:

John Lewis Christmas Advert, or any advert on TV, online, in the press
A trailer for a film
You might say playing a single on the radio is marketing for the album

Examples in a recruitment campaign:

A job advert
Social media content

What is below-the-line?

This is a targeted approach that reaches a specific person or group of people.

Typically, this is interest created through outbound activity, where the seller or marketer takes action to reach you.

Examples:

A telesales call
Direct mail
Personalised email marketing

Examples in a recruitment search:

Contacting candidates through LinkedIn or CV databases
Gaining referrals and recommendations

What about when both happen?

Example:

Coca Cola’s Share a Coke campaign. Think about everywhere you came across it online, on social media, the press, TV, in shops, the bottle you drank from

Many recruitment activities can be above- and below-the-line at the same time.

Advertising a vacancy, while sourcing
Headhunting, while asking for referrals, and promoting the vacancy on social media

What complicates matters in a job search is that while the employer is a buyer, you are too. It’s your decision to buy, if you accept a job offer.

As well as inverting the channels, you invert these steps with an above-the-line and below-the-line approach that mirrors how recruiters and employers can find you.

Effective applications where the reader can see your candidacy from your CV, resume or cover letter
Appropriate response to social media presence
Discoverable LinkedIn profiles that prompt action
Discoverable CVs on CV databases
Networking for referrals and recommendation

These directly mirror the recruitment-centric approaches above.

You can build on the inbound activities above with proactive outbound activities:

Personal Branding (or rather, purposeful content)
Guided or speculative outreach

These are all activities that are formed from your strategy, which have different chances of success.

Your activities can combine inbound and outbound, above-the-line and below-the-line:

Networking involves multiple one-to-one conversations, with potential of tapping into further networks and knowledge
Building a relationship with the right recruitment agency might lead to multiple vacancies
An advert application on a job board often secures your CV for their CV databases. The application to one may make you discoverable to multiple agencies and employers. How can you leverage this?

There is a difference from business marketing.

You’re reading this because you’re in a tough market. Your odds of any of these activities paying off are low because of the state of the market.

If you do these measures effectively, you optimise your odds of securing a role.

Unlike companies who need multiple ongoing customers - you only need one job.

Some vacancies are skills short - you may secure a role straightforwardly from applying for an advert. Others will be too few in number for the skilled candidates available.

Try to learn the state of your market, to inform what your strategy looks like.

I hope you’ll agree this is a clear and consistent way to look at your job search.

Done effectively, it will access advertised and unadvertised vacancies.

This means you don’t need to worry about the hidden jobs market, because your approach implicitly accesses all jobs available to you.

Your Through-the-Line jobs market.

Next week's Chapter will be "From headhunted to overlooked"

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Why five? Innovation from Iteration, pt 1

By Greg Wyatt • February 26, 2026

So here were are, the start of a new series. This series may be around 10 editions, looking at the things other industries do that we can implement into recruitment. These were written 3 years ago, right at the start of the AI zazzle, and in some ways have dated quite a bit. In others, the way in which they haven't dated at all, because the principles of how we live our business lives can be universal. So, I'm not sure yet, how much editing I'll do, whether there will be any inclusions, or whether I'll leave articles intact, as a moment in time. I've learnt all of these notions from candidates and clients, as I came to understand the function of their vacancies. Hearing about the daily practice from people doing jobs, I couldn't help but notice the same relevance in recruitment. So while these articles are hardly comprehensive, perhaps they'll make you look at your candidates differently, in what we can learn from them, and how that might improve our recruitment. Why five? December 2022 Ask anyone involved in active recruitment what their key problems are, and they’ll likely talk about skills shortages and candidate behaviour. On the face of it, problems which are out of our control, worthy of complaint with little opportunity to find improvement. But what if these were issues that weren’t entirely out of our control? What if we could apply a replicable process to understand what’s really going on, and how we can make a difference? Fortunately, we needn’t invent the wheel, as other industries have already done this for us. One such is 5Y, or Five Whys, a problem-solving technique that was developed by Toyota in the 1930s. It's part of the Toyota Management System that has inspired much of my work. Five is the general number of “Why?”s needed to get to the root of a problem. Often you can get to the heart of the issue sooner, sometimes later. Often there are multiple root causes. More than just solving problems, it’s about establishing practical countermeasures to prevent these problems from coming up in future. 5Y is an example of Toyota’s philosophy of “go and see”: working on the shop floor to find out how things work in practice to find ways for iterative improvement. This isn’t a theoretical idea to try out on a whim – it’s based on grounded reality and almost always works. There are two costs – time and accountability. Here’s a practical example, then a recruitment one. (Names have been removed to protect my identity) Problem 1 : The children were late for school. Why? Traffic held us up. Why? We left the house late. Why? The children weren’t ready on time. Why? Their school uniforms weren’t prepared. Why? We hadn’t set them out the night before. Here the countermeasure is to get everything ready the night before, rather than blame traffic for being late. Perhaps we might have gotten to school on time without heavy traffic, but that is an element out of our control. Of course, here there is another root cause – very naughty children – but better to focus on the simple changes. And sometimes traffic is the root cause after all, once you’ve ruled out other elements in your control. (2026 note: my eldest now often drives my youngest to school. A time laden solution I hadn't considered three years ago. Now I don't care if they're late 😆) Problem 2: Candidates keep ghosting us. Why? They weren’t committed to responding. Why? They didn’t accept my requirement for a response. Why? They saw no value in my requirement. Why? I didn’t create an environment where this requirement has value ( root cause 1 ). Or because they are very naughty candidates, with a bad attitude. Why have we allowed someone with a bad attitude in our recruitment process? Because we didn’t prequalify them well enough ( root cause 2 ) The first root cause is something we can work on by giving candidates what they need, building trust, and working to mutual obligations. There are many ways to do this – I’ve already talked about examples in previous newsletters. It comes down to good candidate experience and reciprocity. The second root cause requires us to work harder at understanding candidate needs, aspirations, behaviours and attitudes at the outset of a recruitment process. There’s a reason for their behaviour. We can be accountable for finding it. That’s no mean skill to develop, yet an essential one for anyone whose core responsibility is recruitment. And it’s hard to do in a transactional volume process, so the question then becomes, does your process help more than it hinders? You can apply 5Y to any issue you come across, as long as you are prepared to be accountable. At worst you may find that the things that were out of your control are at fault. In this case, you are at least armed with good information to report to your stakeholders, by ruling out other possibilities. What’s the point of doing all this? For me it’s continually improving how I recruit, with the consequence, in the example above, that I am rarely ghosted at all. And you can 5Y any issue you come across. Are poor agency CV submissions their fault, or in part down to your briefing and process? Are skills genuinely scarce, or is your requirement unrealistic? Is it true that your agency hasn’t listened to you, or do you engage the right partners in the right way? 5Y has the answers. Regards, Greg

Map the Market. Jobseeker Basics XVIII

By Greg Wyatt • February 23, 2026

What follows is Chapter 21 in A Career Breakdown Kit (2026) . It's a good example of how a job search is an inverted recruitment exercise, but also how the same principles from recruitment can be applied in a job search. Market mapping is one of the first steps of a search process in what is often called headhunting. Here though, instead of an exercise that helps find a person for a job, you help find a job for you. This can be in one chunk, at the outset, and iteratively, as you learn more information. It's a great example of how LinkedIn can be used as a data repository, given the vast majority of professionals are present here. And if they are present here, the insight that is their careers is too, allowing you to identify potential viable employers, who works there, and therefore where else they may have worked, with further potential hiring managers. The snake that eats its own tail. Try doing the iterative work above, every time you come across someone new, whether in an application or in networking . You can use this to build out your network, identify companies to contact proactively. Simon Ward and I will talk more on this in our LinkedIn Live on Tuesday February 24th at 1pm GMT. You can join us, and view the full recording afterwards, here: Is The Nature Of Networking Changing for Job Hunters? If you happen to read this as a hiring authority, market mapping is one of the invisible processes in a structured search. It can often take me 80 to 100 hours to fully map a role for potential viable candidates, given I try to find non-traditional candidates as well as those that are easier to find through sourcing. 21 - Map the market Market mapping is a common activity in executive search. Why wouldn’t you adopt the same approach in your inverse of a recruitment exercise? The idea is to fully understand your market, so that you are better able to navigate it. This is a summary chapter because market mapping is both a strategic and a tactical exercise. I’ll cover some of the How of mapping in Part Three. There are three ways in which to map the market. The vacancies you are qualified for This is about determining which vacancies you should focus your attention on. In which domains does your capability directly apply? This could be context related, if your expertise is in start-ups, growth, downsizing or other contexts. It could be industry related - your process manufacturing expertise might directly apply in food, plastics or pharmaceuticals. It could be job related, with the right applicable skills. Establish where there is a market for you, and if what you offer is needed by that market. Advice on the transferable skills trap (p55) and whether you are qualified (p178) to apply will help. The geography of your job search Where are all the employers and vacancies that you can sustainably commute to? A geographical map can help you target opportunities by region. What resources are available to help you with this map? Searching online for local business parks, even driving around them, can give a list of viable companies to contact. Directories and membership hubs. Local newspapers, social media stories. If you see a company you like the look of, say from an advert, search on their local post code. Who else might be there? The chapter on doorknocking (p241) has more ideas. The people of your network Every time you come across someone you might build a relationship with, connect with them on LinkedIn. Then check out their career history. Who else have they worked with? Where else have they worked? This works for peers, hiring managers, and recruiters - a headhunter in one company may well have worked in a similar domain in a previous one. Is there anyone at these previous companies you should introduce yourself to? What about their listed vacancies? Building out a map of relevant recruiters to develop relationships with (if they answer the phone) can lead to vacancies. Treat it as an iterative exercise. Check out the chapter on networking (p236). This map isn’t just about potential opportunity. It’s also about information that might be helpful now and in future. This might be for job leads. It might be industry insight you can share through content. It may even be topics for conversation in interviews or with peers. Make sure you track it in the right way, whether through Notion, Excel or other resources you have available. With any information, check it is accurate, then prune appropriately. Prioritise on degrees of separation (closest first) and context fit (where what you need is most closely aligned with what you offer).