How to find a job in two easy steps

Young woman job searching on laptop

3 mins, 4 secs read time

Finding a job and making sure it’s the right role for your next career move is never an easy task. It’s critical to your long term growth and success – and, given the current economic climate, incredibly challenging and even a bit risky. So how do you ensure you’re making the best move for yourself? In this article, we’ll dive into a few ideas that will help you reveal that perfect opportunity.


Create an “ideal job profile”

In recruiting, we start the hiring process by listing the role’s high-level objectives and goals and then identifying what attributes are needed to achieve them. This allows us to easily determine what we’re looking for and removes bias from the process while helping us create an ideal candidate profile. We can then use this profile to inform our hiring decision once we’ve met with the final candidates.

You can use a similar approach when searching for a new job and company.

Evaluate your professional goals and identify what type of position or company would best help you achieve them.

Be sure to categorize which are absolute must-haves and which attributes are simply nice-to-have – add these criteria to the list to make your ideal job profile and start the search.

While you’re actively looking for your next role, compare each opportunity and company against your ideal job profile. Reference employer review sites like Glassdoor that provide testimonials from current and past employees and get a sense of the interview process. These reviews and awards like Glassdoor’s Best Place to Work show whether the opportunity is more or less aligned with what you’re looking for in terms of salary, culture and growth.


Example ideal job profile list:

Must-haves:

  • Located in New York City
  • Annual salary over $80K
  • Role as Content Specialist or Marketing Manager
  • Marketing team of at least 5 people if company is over 100 people
  • Prioritization of DE&I in both hiring and workplace culture
  • Clear career ladders and growth opportunities
  • Paid parental leave
  • Remote working option
  • A mission that aligns with my personal values
  • Flexible PTO
  • Glassdoor rating over 4.0


Nice-to-haves:

  • Winner of workplace culture awards
  • Catered lunches


Assess your application experience

Once you’ve found a job you’re ready to apply for, consider the experience you’ve had with the company as an applicant. This is often a good indication of what your candidate and employee experience would be like. Here are some questions to ask yourself that will help you assess your experience:

  • Does their website provide information about what it’s like to work at the company?
  • Do they use systems like Greenhouse that make applying simple?
  • Did you receive a timely response about next steps?
  • If not, is the company honest and transparent about their hiring process and where you stand?


All these efforts to set you up for success as a candidate show the company will also likely care about your success as an employee!

If you land an interview with the company, ask questions that will help you get to know the company better and evaluate this opportunity against your ideal job profile. While the questions should be specific about what you’re looking for, some helpful topics to cover are company culture, growth opportunities, the team’s happiness and passion, salary expectations and work-life blend (this is especially important as distributed working has become the norm).

Creating a structured and thoughtful way of approaching your job search will ensure you have all the right information needed to determine where you’ll grow your career next.


Ready to do the best work of your career? See our open roles here. If you’re interested in joining Greenhouse but don’t see an applicable role, please complete a general department application to keep in touch.

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Michelle Yoshihara

Michelle Yoshihara

is a Team Manager of Talent Acquisition Operations and has been with Greenhouse since 2017. When she’s not finding new ways to use data to tell a story about recruiting, she’s trying new recipes, crafts or online workout classes.

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