Instead of lying in wait for recruiters, track their every move by setting small, mostly harmless traps to track whether or not they've opened your email.
Focus when setting aim for jobs, as it is best to target your arrows solidly on one location or job type if you want to leave behind your days of gathering Lyft rides, Wag walks and Airbnb renters and catch the legendary beast of company-sponsored healthcare.
Make sure your resume is updated to include only relevant and recent kills, even if the most sentimental for you is remembering the look on Dan Beyer’s, your Southern Regional Middle School Spelling Bee competitor’s, face when you went in for the kill with your correct spelling of “deification”.
Sound your loudest howl so that the entire village knows you are on the hunt and they can refer you to their uncle who freelanced for your dream company for a few months.
If no one has responded to your howl, make sure to send a follow-up howl that is more specific and actionable.
Navigate the forests by reading moss signs, footprints, and trade magazines.
Keep in mind how your former conquests have sharpened your skills and made you a worthy competitor when creating your lists of ‘Target Jobs’ (Writing TV, Novels, Poetry, Music, The Things That Make Life Worth Living) and ‘Achievable Jobs’ (Writing Emails).
Make sure you can concisely speak about your legacy as a great and mighty warrior, the expectations of being one of the few providing for the entire village and why your love of storytelling makes you a great fit for this Office Coordinator position.
Organize your networking contacts by species, genus, family, order, class, phylum, kingdom, and domain of their professional website.
Identify a time when you feel most attuned to the tiniest shifts in the leaves, the slightest change in the wind, the faintest whiff of excrement, and plan to use that as a regularly-scheduled appointment with yourself to send out semi-desperate networking emails about arranging a “little bit of time to grab a cup of coffee.”
Join a group of professional, like-minded hunters, so you can be invited on their next chase and perhaps get access to their membership directory.
Wildly shooting arrows in every direction on Indeed.com, Zip Recruiter, and the underbelly of LinkedIn should make-up no more than 20% of your time.
Your time is best spent reaching out to other hunters, former hunters or head hunters to see if they know anyone in need of your uncanny ability to write clever titles and deliver sharp-nose-exhale-laugh copy.
Keep in touch with every person that you interact with on the hunt because you never know which arrow salesman might be cousins with Samantha Bee.
Show your dream company your most impressive work by hanging your greatest taxidermied prize outside their window because thanks to the gig economy people sometimes don’t want to pay your work until they have seen it.
After the interview, be sure to follow up with a blood-soaked thank-you note including well wishes for your interviewer’s son’s Star-Wars themed bar mitzvah this weekend.
Before important networking encounters, force the severed head of your enemy to tell you that you deserve more than just a day-job, you deserve an emotionally-fulfilling career that allows you to do what you love and make rent.