Why Your Career Change Efforts Aren't Working: Five Reasons You Are Not Getting Interviews

You want a new career – a different role, a new industry, or both. You have built a solid set of skills and experience, and many are translatable – project management, people management, budget oversight, research, analysis, and more. Yet, your applications do not lead to interviews and your attempts to network do not yield referrals. What are you doing wrong? Here are 5 common mistakes aspiring career changers make that prevent them from getting to job interviews:

You expect your resume to do the work

I once coached a seasoned healthcare professional who wanted to switch industries. With 20 years under her belt, of course, her resume screamed healthcare, so applications to job postings went unanswered. Yes, she could make her resume more translatable by taking out obvious healthcare references (e.g., writing “data” instead of “clinical data”) but she will still have all healthcare brands on her employer list. Her resume will never support her career change adequately. Therefore she needs to stop passively applying to job postings and focus her efforts on actively networking. By networking, she can identify specific companies, then specific decision-makers in these companies who can hear out her case and buy into it before the resume becomes a factor. Networking is so effective because many jobs are unadvertised or posted well after they’re available, so when you take the focus off of postings, you rediirect your energy towards the more productive hidden job market.

You expect your network to figure out where you belong

If you do proactively network, you still have to do it properly. Many career changers give a laundry list of what they’ve done and ask their network where they might fit. That’s a lot to ask –here’s my story; you figure out the ending! Instead, you need to know the ending -- exactly which roles you are targeting -- so that when you do highlight your background, you show exactly how your specific skills and experience translate. One lawyer I coached actually got defensive when I gave her this advice, saying it was obvious that legal skills translate and that she couldn’t possibly know what the ideal roles are because she was coming from the outside. This is precisely why you need to research and identify the roles yourself. If you don’t do this ground work, you just highlight you’re an outsider who really doesn’t know this new area. Why should a busy employer with needs to fill pick you over someone who already does know where they fit and how they can contribute? Why should a plugged in networking contact refer you and take the risk this referral will reflect badly on them when you won’t do some basic background research? How can you say you’re genuinely interested but be unwilling to dive in?

You expect your old network to have new ideas

But you counter: how am I supposed to get this insider knowledge of company roles and the decision-makers in areas where I have never worked? It’s true that you won’t get a detailed org chart of your dream company from an Internet search. You will need to network for this information, and because it’s a new area for you, you’ll likely have to expand your network. Your existing network is probably comprised mostly out of past employers from the industry you’re leaving or past colleagues of the role you’re leaving. This old network won’t know the new area. So build a new network targeted to the new area – join professional groups, attend conferences, scour your existing network for people who might have already made the change. Former classmates are not necessarily in your old area. People you know from community affiliations or other outside-work activities will represent a variety of industries and roles. Social media can be used to build a new network in the new area you want.

You lead with your salary expectations

OK, so you’ve moved your focus away from passive job postings and onto networking. You’ve resolved to better understand your new target industry and companies and pick specific roles where you can make a contribution. Even if you do all this, you still need to pick the right roles to go after. One pitfall here is picking too big a role in terms of level or scope of responsibility as your first role in your new career. I see this most often with experienced professionals jumping from private sector to non-profit or from a higher-paying industry to a lower-paying one. As a recruiter, I once interviewed a consultant who was vying for an Executive Director role at a non-profit. She had managed projects with similarly-sized budgets and teams, so she felt she matched the operational requirements of the ED role. However, management responsibilities in consulting are not the same within the industry and more importantly, she had no fundraising track record which is critical to most ED roles. Anything less than an ED role felt like a step back because her compensation as a consultant translated to an ED salary. But she was comparing apples to oranges, and the lens she was using from her old area was blinding her from seeing the more appropriate jobs in her new area. You won’t always have to take a pay cut to change careers, but you might.

You choose certainty over experimentation

I once coached a very experienced, very smart financial services professional who wasn’t sure exactly what she wanted to do but was 100% certain it wasn’t her current job. She didn’t do any of the above research or targeted networking because she wanted to first be clearer about what she wanted. So she focused on personality testing and other internal-facing activity, waiting for more certainty before launching an actual job search. This lasted two years. Then she came to see me, and we picked something in our first hour together, and though this area turned out NOT to be her ultimate destination, the research, networking, and other external-facing activity gave her more clarity that led to her new career. In career change, it is unlikely that you will have absolutely certainty about your next best move. More likely, you will need to experiment – read about different roles and industries, talk to people in different areas and in different stages of their career – in order to understand other areas enough that you can clearly decide your interest level. Don’t be afraid to start your search and refine along the way.

Career change is a process with many small steps and refinements along the way. If you make some of the adjustments suggested above, you can get job interviews for your new target career. In my next post, I’ll cover five common mistakes career changers make at the job interview stage. Follow me to be alerted when my next post comes out.

Caroline Ceniza-Levine is co-founder of SixFigureStart career coaching.