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Job Search Fundamentals That Never Change, with Enrique Ruiz

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Job searching has changed a lot in 25 years, but the fundamentals haven’t. On this bonus episode of Find Your Dream Job, Mac joins Enrique Ruiz on the All In Recruiting Podcast to share the three questions every job seeker needs to answer: What do you want? Where do you want to go? What do you offer? Mac talks about his own periods of unemployment and the lessons they taught him about networking, referrals, and why applying online isn’t enough. 

He and Enrique also dig into what employers get wrong — from vague job postings to ghosting candidates — and why hiring is a branding experience. Whether the job market is booming or tough, someone is always getting hired. Listen in to learn how honing the fundamentals helps you ride the ebbs and flows of any economy and stand out from the competition.

About the Host:

  • Enrique Ruiz is the founder of STRM Enrique Ruiz – Recruiting and the host of the All in Recruiting Podcast. He helps engineering and construction companies hire the people who design and build the world around us.

Resources in This Episode:

Transcript

Find Your Dream Job, Bonus Episode 94:  

Job Search Fundamentals That Never Change, with Enrique Ruiz

Airdate: August 3, 2026

Mac Prichard:

This is Mac Prichard, founder of Mac’s List.

As a listener to Find Your Dream Job, I know you’re interested in learning how to find work and improve your career.

I’m often asked by other podcasts to share insights from my work with the job seekers and employers who use Mac’s List.

So every other week we’re publishing one of these conversations.

Here’s one of my guest interviews that I think you’ll enjoy.

Enrique Ruiz:

All right, everybody, welcome to another episode of the All In Recruiting Podcast brought to you by the Purple Acorn Network.

Today, I am so excited. Like, I’m so pumped to chat with one of the people that I admire here in the Pacific Northwest.

I’ve followed him from my earliest days in recruiting, from when I was a young, young, young before the gray, the beard recruiter, Mac Prichard. Mac Prichard, welcome to the All In Recruiting Podcast.

Mac Prichard:

It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me on the show. Enrique, what an honor.

Enrique Ruiz:

Mac, every time I talk to you, I think about my younger days and recruiting and watching you, seeing you, you know, the Mac Prichard list, all these things. Today I want to talk about all the things that we talked about in the emails and on LinkedIn.

But I really want- I mean, you do this all the time. You have your own podcast, but what I tell people is let’s let’s pretend we’re in a, you know, four- to five-minute cab ride.

And we’re in it together. Share with me your career journey, like, and how you got to where you are today in like a quick cab ride.

Mac Prichard:

Well, I run a regional job board, Macslist.org. We serve employers and candidates in Oregon and Washington State. And it’s what’s called a niche job board.

And Enrique, in a good niche job board, any board really is a community, and it exists both online and in real life. And I came to this work accidentally. My career has been in communications, working in government, politics, and nonprofits.

But it turns out that the skills you need to thrive in communications are ideal skills for running a job board, too, because it’s all about building community and connecting people and communicating and listening.

And our mission at Mac’s List is to help people find the jobs that matter and help employers find the best candidates. And being a connector and a communicator and a community builder helps us accomplish that mission.

And that’s what we do, and we do have a podcast like you, and every week I talk to a different expert about the nuts and bolts of job search, and I’ve learned so much from our guests, and most importantly, the knowledge they share has been invaluable to our community and our listeners.

Enrique Ruiz:

And take me back to those earlier days, Mac. Like, what made you start it? Like, how did it, like, you know, you know the stories of like Amazon in a garage, all these big companies, like where did you start? Like how did it start?

Mac Prichard:

Well, Mac’s List started because I had two long periods of unemployment, once in my twenties and once in my thirties. In those experiences, it taught me the importance of learning job search skills, Enrique, but they also taught me the value of networking. And as you know, you’ve worked as a recruiter and in HR.

Good networkers not only ask for help, but they also give to others, and they do it without any expectation that they’re going to get anything in return. And my way of doing that was to share job postings. And I started doing this 25 years ago. Actually, it was in August of ‘01, so almost 25 years.

And I did it for almost a decade without running it as a business because I found it was a great way of helping others, but also of staying in touch with my network. But finally, I was running a public relations company at the time.

I did that successfully for fifteen years, and I found myself paying someone to send out these postings because I was getting so many at that point and so many people were on our email list that I turned it into a business, and that’s when I started macslist.org.

Enrique Ruiz:

That’s so cool. That’s, and that’s when maybe I was starting it back in the early career now, like, look at this list of jobs. And I tell you every time I used to call the people who were…

Mac Prichard:

I used to do the same thing.

Our mutual friend Agnes Zach called me up, and she complained about me poaching from her list. So you were in good company, Enrique.

Enrique Ruiz:

Yep, yeah. No, it’s awesome. And I mean, there’s so much I wanna talk about, but I mean, I know we have only a short amount of time here. Mac, how would you, in your time, kind of see the job, like the different evolutions of the job market from, you know, let’s just say twenty years ago, from when it started, twenty-five years ago.

How would you describe the ebbs and flows of different markets during different years, different economies? Like what have you seen? What are the biggest moments that you have

That you have experienced in the different job markets that you’ve seen.

Mac Prichard:

Well, let’s talk about what hasn’t changed or what has changed, rather. And that’s the tools. How we look for work. We’ve got different tools, and they’ve got pluses and minuses, but they’re different than they were when I first came into the workplace a long time ago and certainly when Mac’s List started in two thousand and one.

Job boards were a novelty twenty-five years ago. And many people were still fretting about what kind of paper they should choose for their resume that they were going to drop in the US mail.

So it’s easy to apply for jobs now, thanks to technology, job boards, and other online tools. But the paradox is that because it’s so easy, there’s more competition if you’re all you’re doing is applying online. Right. And let’s talk about what hasn’t changed, and that’s the fundamentals.

When I talk about the fundamentals, Enrique, this is something I’ve certainly learned through my own reading and running a job board that serves thousands of employers, and we get more than sixty thousand people a month who come to our website.

But it’s also something I’ve learned from interviewing career experts like you on my podcast every week for almost 10 years now. And the same ideas and the same strategies keep coming up again and again.

And they’re true today, and they were true back in the nineteen seventies when Dick Bolles published that book, What Color Is Your Parachute?

Enrique Ruiz:

So now we’re out of the cab, we’re in the hotel lobby, and you were

Mac Prichard:

Yeah, I know, I’m droning on. Yeah.

Enrique Ruiz:

No, this is great. So what are the fun, like what when someone’s listening right now, what are in your opinion the fundamentals that are like the laws of physics, the laws of the of the job search? What are they?

Mac Prichard:

Three things. The first thing is to know what you want. Yes, you can there are lots of jobs you could do, and you can keep your options open. But if you’re doing those two things, applying for jobs you could do and keeping your options open, you’re making your search much longer and harder than it has to be. There are, if you do the work, the self-assessment, and you reflect on your goals, and you’re clear about where you want to go next, probably only two or three jobs that you really want to do.

And our challenge when we’re looking for our next position is to know what we want and communicate that to others. And when we do that, when we’re specific about the one or two jobs that really interest us, we