Changing the Narrative: Unrealized Earnings and the Job Search | Allen Walker

The job search is brutal. It feels like a hopeless exercise in futility.

Countless applications sent out, barely a positive response to make you feel like you’re doing something right. It all starts to feel pointless. No wins to show for the work you’re putting into it, no acknowledgment for the emotional labor spent trying to authentically connect with companies.

For every time you’ve written, “I’m excited about the work your company is doing to launch innovative products changing the world,” how many times has a real human written back and said, “I’ve read your résumé, and I see the amazing person you are”?

The job search is a dehumanizing process, and even more so in the age of AI where it’s less about connecting with people and more about gaming machine algorithms. But let’s not dwell on that. Instead, let’s talk about a healthier way to engage with the process. A way that puts you back in control and puts money in your pocket.

The Hypothetical You’ve Been Waiting For

What if I told you that you’re making up to $10,000 a day doing exactly what you’re doing right now?

It’s a work-from-home gig with flexible hours, no annoying boss, and zero crypto schemes. You don’t have to lick envelopes or help North Korea bypass sanctions. Every day, you’re just waking up and putting money in your pocket without any extra work or effort.

The catch? You need to change your perspective.

That dehumanizing, soul-crushing activity above, the endless loop of rejection and ghosting? Well, you’re getting paid for it. You just might not have realized it yet.

Reimagine Your Job Search as a Sales Pipeline

Sales reps live and die by their pipeline. It’s what drives success. And you should think about your job search in these terms, too.

A sales pipeline tracks all active deals and assigns each one a potential value based on the likelihood of closing. It turns rejection into math, and math into motivation.

If a sales rep knows that they close 20% of the deals they pitch, and each closed deal is worth $1 million, then every pitch they make has an expected value of $200,000. Even if the first four pitches bomb, the fifth one pays for all the rest.

Now apply that same logic to your job search.

Let’s say your target salary is $200,000, and you expect to submit 1,000 applications before landing a job that meets your expectations.

That’s a 0.1% conversion rate.

The expected value of each job application you submit today is $200 ($200,000 × 0.001).

You can reframe that relationship a few ways, depending on what motivates you:

Total value of jobs applied to before expecting an offer: $200M (1,000 applications × $200K)
Number of days to hit your target pipeline: 100 (if you “apply” to $2M worth of jobs per day)

So instead of viewing this process as a loop of rejection, think of it as pipeline building. Each application adds value. Each conversation compounds potential.

You’re not waiting to be chosen. You’re hunting your next big win.

More to come later. I’ll be looking at other variables that impact conversion rates such as marketing material quality, job ad/company quality, market forces, career level, salary expectations, and social media engagement. These factors are going to impact job search efficiency.