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:
- Connect with Enrique on LinkedIn.
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 we make it so much easier for people to help us. And it focuses us because we’re only applying for the jobs we want, not the positions we could do.
Enrique Ruiz:
So I mean, I love that. Know what you want. So for someone listening right now and they’re in their mind like, how do I know what I want in this crazy economy? What are two things they can know? I mean, you said self-assessments, but like what can they do? What can someone do to know what they want?
Mac Prichard:
Well, I think my experience has been both personally and in talking to hundreds of candidates over the years, is that it’s inside us. We know what we want. Sometimes we’re afraid to say it because we think it’s unrealistic or it’s a big change, or we think it’s unattainable. And if you’re not certain, the best way to get clarity is to talk to people who are doing the work you want to do.
And ask them how they made it happen. And I think most importantly, Enrique, take those internal objections –– and we all have them, no matter how successful we might look from the outside –– take those objections we’re carrying around in our heads and turn them into positive questions.
So you might think, gosh, I’ll never get that job because I don’t have this degree, or I didn’t work at that company, or I don’t know these people. So when you meet with people who are doing the work you want to do, ask them, well, what advice for you would you have for someone who studied this topic in college, but now wants to work in this field and hasn’t had formal training?
Maybe that’s the objection you’re carrying around. So you’re turning it into a question, and you’re gonna get insights, you’re gonna find out if it really matters or not. And you’re also gonna get advice about how to overcome that objection.
And if you have five or ten conversations like that with people who are doing what you want to do, and you address the objections that you think are stopping you from accomplishing that goal, you’re gonna figure out pretty quickly whether A, you wanna do it, B, how to make it happen.
Enrique Ruiz:
I love that. So that’s number one. Well, number two.
Mac Prichard:
Know where you want to go. So you can go on Mac’s List or LinkedIn or Indeed, or on our site you’ll find hundreds of jobs. On Indeed and LinkedIn, you’ll find, yeah, tens of thousands of jobs.
And many of them you could do, and maybe you really do. I’m in Portland, Oregon, and want to move to Florida. But in the end, if you know what you want, they’re probably only a few, and I’m not talking just about the job title, but things like the commute or hours or on-site versus hybrid.
We’ve all got a list of things that matter to us. And if you put in the time to make that list, and you think about the values that are important to you, and you do the homework, you’re gonna discover that there probably are only a few dozen companies or employers rather who offer those opportunities. It takes some homework to figure that out.
But when you do that, here’s what happens. Instead of looking at all the positions you could do, you focus on the 20, 25, 30 employers who offer what you want. And then you can actually go out and talk to people inside those organizations. Because when you know what you want and where you want to go, then you can start building connections that are gonna generate referrals and uncover jobs that may never be advertised.
And you know, as a recruiter and a hiring manager, Enrique, how important connections and referrals are when hiring decisions are being made.
Enrique Ruiz:
They’re, they’re literally I always tell people it’s how the world works. Like it’s kinda like, you know how we don’t well, I don’t understand how, like, a cell in your body works, like how it all kind of does the work. It’s like, yep, the energy just becomes energy and then your body moves, you know.
I don’t know how it all works, but it’s how the world works. Like referrals, connecting a friend with the resume to the email to the person of a friend of a friend, and it’s like, perfect conversation, let’s go with this, like I don’t know how it all does it, but it’s how it works.
Mac Prichard:
It is how it works. And sometimes when I tell people about the importance of referrals, they think, gosh, I’m doomed. I don’t know anyone. And of course we all know someone. And I would also challenge anyone listening to reflect on the best jobs you’ve had in your career, maybe the best one of all. And I predict that a referral or connection played a part in that.
And the reason it mattered was the person making the connection or referral knew what you wanted and what you could do. And the other reason it mattered, and your hiring manager or have been a recruiter now, and you know that recruiters want to reduce risk.
And one of the ways to do it –– it’s not the only way –– is they rely on referrals and recommendations. Right. And again, I would challenge your listener: anyone who’s listening to the show or watching it has probably done their share of hiring.
And we’ve all sat at that desk, and we’ve had to go through an inbox with 50 applications, or maybe they actually got printed out. In whatever the format, your challenge is to get to the 10 you’re gonna contact for the phone screen. So yeah. So how do you do that? Well, if I’m looking at that stack online and you, Enrique, send me a text that says, you should talk to Mary.
“She’s great. I worked with her, or I knew her through this association.” That’s not gonna give Mary the job, but I’m gonna pull up that application, and I’m gonna study it carefully. And the odds of Mary getting the phone screener have just gone up immeasurably.
So, when you’re looking for work, one of the things you have to do is look for ways to generate those referrals and make those connections. And if you know what you want.
And where you wanna go, it gets a lot easier to have conversations that will produce that result. Right.
Enrique Ruiz:
So we start with like the heart, you know, what do you want? Then you kinda go a little bit more, okay, let’s go out a little bit. Where do I wanna go? So then what’s the third thing?
Mac Prichard:
What do you offer? nd we all have strengths. Every one of us is unique. There’s something that we do that nobody else does. And there are many, many things that we do well. And our challenge, when we’re doing a search and throughout our career, as we manage our careers, is to understand w not only what makes us different, but what we offer.
And one of the things you need to do as you go out and you talk to people at your target employers is get a good sense of the employer’s problems. Because as you know, again, you’re a recruiter; employers hire problem solvers.
There’s something that’s keeping that hiring manager up at night. And the more you know about that need, the more you can show that you’re the person who can solve that problem.
Enrique Ruiz:
And so if someone does the work, because it’s it’s it’s work. I mean, I have helped tons of people kind of maneuver through kind of what you just kind of put forward, your kind of theory of how to get it going career-wise. Like, let’s dive into current times today, right? We, you and I, we’ve been in the industry hiring, posting jobs for a couple of decades now, right?
What are people what are you seeing that people are struggling with right now? Like, and what do you what are some kind of potential suggestions or ways to maneuver through those struggles today?
Mac Prichard:
Well, the first thing I see many candidates struggle with is the fundamentals. Not being clear about what they want and where they want to go, and not understanding what they offer.
Enrique Ruiz:
How do you communicate to people the reality that there are fundamentals, right? Like I always think about things through analogies, or like I like you if someone I mean, there’s only one Michael Jordan or one Caitlin Clark once in a while, right? Like that just they just have the thing, the ta the God-given talent, right?
But like I have to teach my kids how to dribble the ball, how to shoot the ball. Like the fundamentals are crucial. So how do you tell people? “Hey, you know, person looking for a job or trying to get engaged in the job search. Like, there are fundamentals that you need to work on.”
How do you break that bubble? Because it is work and people don’t like to, you know, I don’t, I don’t necessarily enjoy bench pressing ’cause my muscles get torn up, but I know I have to do it to get stronger. So how do you give people how do you tell them, like, hey, you gotta hit the fundamentals first?
Mac Prichard:
Well, I want to acknowledge it’s challenging because often what happens, and this happened to me early in my career, is you inadvertently do things that lead to great jobs. So in my case, the first job I got after college was something I wanted very much to do, which was to work on a US Senate race, and I answered a newspaper ad, and I thought, that’s how you get a job. In an ad.
The next position I had was with the human rights group in Washington, DC, where I’d done an internship when I was in college, and so because I worked there and I showed what I could do, I was invited to come back.
And the third position I got was within another city, another human rights group, and I was reaching out to my network, just asking if people had heard of opportunities, and I was very specific about what I was looking for, and that led to a referral.
So I say all that because I thought, I know how to look for work, and I didn’t because I lucked into these positions, and/or I instinctively did things that were part of what people who master the fundamentals do.
Enrique Ruiz:
You intuitively knew how to work like the fundamentals.
Mac Prichard:
I did until I didn’t, Enrique. And that’s when I hit my first long period of unemployment. And I was out for eight months. And at the end, near the end of that period, my wife was working at Northeastern University.
We were living in Boston, and she asked someone at the Career Services office to meet with me, who took me through the fundamentals. She said, What’s your goal? Where do you want to work? Tell me about what you want. And what makes you different?
And so, after talking with her and reflecting, I thought, well, I’m in Boston, Massachusetts. I’ve worked in communications for nonprofits and in politics. I want to work in a communications job in government or politics here in Boston. And she said, Well, who do you know who does that work?
I said, Well, I know a few people. So why don’t you reach out to them and have conversations with them? Right. And I did that. And two months later I had a great job. So, and you would think, all my problems are solved, but there was another long period of unemployment in my thirties.
The point I’d like to make for listeners is, you know, looking for work can be challenging, but like any skill, you can learn how to do it well. And like any skill, if it’s hard, you may, like me, want to avoid it or procrastinate.
And again, I remember several times in my twenties thinking, thank goodness I’ve got a job. Now I don’t have to worry about that. And that’s you really do have to not worry about your career, but manage it throughout the forty-plus years you may be in the workplace.
So I would say, you know, pay attention to job search skills and recognize that it can be like any new skill: hard to learn in the beginning, but if you’re smart and accomplished, and I know your audience is, you will learn these skills, and you’ll not only learn them, you’ll make them produce the results that you want.
Enrique Ruiz:
What one thing I would add is I think a lot about, like, I mean, I live in Portland, Oregon, right? So like, in my younger recruiting days, I was working on staffing, and I had to really understand Portland, the city, Portland, the geography, bus routes, like east and west side of Portland. And as I’ve grown in my career, I’ve had to do that, but for the country, right? Because I have clients all over, right?
Different states, different cities. And so as I’ve learned about the national economy and national hiring, I’ve kind of learned that the hiring world is ebbing and flowing all the time.
And I think now, and I would love to hear your thoughts on this, like now more than ever, you know, job searchers need to be able to have the fundamentals learned quickly so that they can engage quickly.
The good thing is that because of the advancement of technology, they can. Like you can, you don’t have to go to like 10 conferences, meet with people, shake their hands at the booth, give them the card, follow up the next Monday, hey, at the booth. Remember me.
Now it’s like LinkedIn, like you have so many tools like LinkedIn and things like that to be able to do the networking, the connecting. Because back in the day, like me, my in-laws, they both worked at the same company for like thirty years.
And then they have like the tip, like the great American Dream, right? They worked for the company for 30 years, you retire, you got your pension. Now they like RV the country and have a blast, you know, come visit once in a while too. Love that. But that was a different time.
And so now, I mean, you probably know that like the average person works at a company less than five years, sometimes way less than that. So the networking, I always tell younger people or anybody in general, like if you have a full-time job, you should be having at least three conversations with other companies, just conversations, like networking conversations.
What’s going on in the industry? What are you guys doing? What are new things coming up? You know? Because now more than ever, companies are laying people off left and right. They’re optimizing with AI, they’re becoming more lean, and people will get laid off.
Like my in-laws, thirty years at the same company. Can you imagine that? I just cannot.
Mac Prichard:
I think. Yeah. Well, speaking as a time traveler who entered the workforce in nineteen seventy-nine as a college intern, there’s even in the eighties and nineties, Enrique, there were there was a lot more movement in the workplace than there was in the fifties and sixties and seventies when people did stay at an employer for life.
So what you just described is certainly still true at big employers. You and I are both in Portland, Oregon. Intel is a big employer here. And I know you have it as have I, run met and known people who have spent several decades at Intel and now in their fifties and are being let go. And in economies, you asked, you know, what about today’s economy? How have you seen the work job market change over the decades?
Economies wax and wane. There have been recessions and booms. And when things are hot, as they were for job seekers in twenty two, and when it was truly a job seekers market, you will get contacted by recruiters. But that doesn’t happen very often. I hadn’t seen that happen since the nineties. And even then, the fundamentals do matter when because you gotta know where you wanna to be.
You don’t wanna try something that isn’t gonna be a good fit, that doesn’t match your goals, no matter how attractive the salary or the compensation package might be. And fundamentals matter even more when times are tough for job seekers because there’s more competition.
Enrique Ruiz:
What would be your biggest advice or suggestions, not only for job searchers, but like for the hiring people that are in this market who are hiring? Like, should people have more empathy for the job searcher? How would you like, cause if people are gonna work their buns off to work the fundamentals, like how does the hiring side treat the fundamentals, if that makes sense?
Mac Prichard:
Sure. Well, let’s break it into two parts. For candidates, I would say don’t wait to be picked. Don’t wait to be picked. If y you get clear about what you want, where you want to go, and what you offer. And then chase employers, not jobs.
Go out, you know, spend a portion of your time looking at the computer, looking at job boards like Indeed or LinkedIn or Mac’s List, but most of your time you should be out talking to people about what you want and where you want to go and what you offer. For employers, whatever the unemployment rate or the number of applicants, treat hiring as a branding experience.
Because if people have a bad experience with you as a candidate –– if you ghost people, you don’t get back, you don’t respect their time –– those candidates not only will remember, they will tell their family and their friends for a long, long time.
Enrique Ruiz:
You mentioned earlier, man, it escapes me, but it kind of made me think, well, the three fundamentals, right? Mm-hmm. When you were talking about the fundamentals, I thought to myself, companies should in their own way communicate their fundamentals, like what they would love in a person, what they expect in a person or..
Mac Prichard:
Yeah, you asked me for one tip, so I went with branding experience. But to your point, I, as I’m sure you do, and I know why this happens, but it makes the hiring so much harder for employers. Too many employers dust off old job postings. They don’t include salary ranges; they don’t communicate what the hiring timetable is, who’s gonna be talking.
They treat hiring as some kind of CIA secret process. And I think they’re getting bad advice, or they don’t know how
Enrique Ruiz:
I don’t want to say it, but I’ll say it’s like release the process, release the hiring process. Yeah. We want to know the files of the hiring process for this company.
Mac Prichard:
Yeah. Give feedback. But most importantly, be clear about what you want and what you need and what you’re gonna pay, and put that down in the job posting. And as you communicate with clients or candidates, if you’re not gonna go with someone, tell them that and tell them sooner rather than later. Nobody likes to get that message, but they’d rather know rather than be out there hanging out.
Enrique Ruiz:
There’s an opportunity for business here. Like, how can we make it so that people share, like, their, you know, what their fundamentals are, what they want, where they want to go, all those things. And then the company somehow mirrors to them, like, hey, here’s we’re we’re in the office every day. Mm-hmm. You gotta come in; that’s how we work.
That is our fundamental business model. We work, we come in, and here’s what we pay, and here are the hours, and we also like to do a little meeting at three o’clock every day and high-five each other because it’s part of the culture. Whatever. I’m making stuff up, right?
And companies should say, that’s us. That is us. And if you don’t want to work here, it’s okay. Yeah. Don’t apply. Yeah. I think I think that there’s like this tension between the two the two worlds, right? I was at an event, and I was in, Mac, you you were MCing, I think.
And the thing, remember the person that was like, I wanna apply to this job, but it says they’re hybrid and I don’t wanna be hybrid, I don’t wanna go in. And I’m like, and all the recruiters were like, you know, kinda like they were being nice. Yeah. And I was like, Don’t apply.
Mac Prichard:
Don’t apply if that’s what you don’t want. Yeah.
Enrique Ruiz:
No, the world that I try to tell people, like the way that the world works, is not gonna bend to you. You gotta go to where, as you said, do the fundamentals, work the fundamentals, and you’ll find the companies that are telling you, Hey, you don’t gotta come in. We’re working from home.
Mac Prichard:
Yeah, yeah. There’s a large number of employers that offer hundreds remote jobs. There are perhaps fewer of them this year than there were in twenty and twenty-one, but they’re out there, and your job as a candidate is to find them and focus your energy on the employers who offer what you want. Because you’ll thrive there and your career will flourish as a result.
Enrique Ruiz:
Be happier; everything will be exponentially better for your life outside of work. You won’t dread going to work because you don’t gotta go to work or whatever the thing is, right? Whatever it is that you feel you want in a job, if you could do the fundamentals and you could decipher this, that’s the thing.
I feel like sometimes employers don’t communicate it really well, so it’s hard to decipher the employer’s fundamentals. And I think that’s a big opportunity for employers to share.
Mac Prichard:
I agree. And I think just as many applicants struggle with learning job search skills, many employers, particularly the ones that are smaller in size, face the same struggle with hiring. And as you know, most employers don’t add an HR person until they have twenty-five or thirty employees. So many of the organizations that use our job board have a person posting who was trained in something else. They weren’t trained in recruitment.
So often when you’re applying for a job, the recruitment process is being managed by someone who just hasn’t had formal instruction on how to manage that. And the experience that you have shows it. And just to, but employers have to invest in that because again, hiring is a branding experience. Good hiring is a good business practice.
Enrique Ruiz:
I agree. I think the onus should be on both sides. Like the onus should be on the person that said, I don’t wanna, like I want to apply to this, but I don’t want it to be like that. It’s like no, no, no, no. You need to do the work.
You need to do, like, as a job searcher, you need to do the fundamentals so you can really understand yourself and know where you want to go. And I think employers need to work hard at, like, communicating, like, billboard it. Hey, this is what we are about.
And I don’t think companies, for example, like I don’t think companies that are like in the office or don’t have all the shiny bells and whistles, like I don’t think those kinds of companies should be put down or like, you know, put on blast or anything. Cause I just think it’s their company. Yeah.
Like, who are we to tell a company how to run their company? You know, like if someone came to my house and they said, Hey, I think the dinner table should be facing this way, and can you change the AC temperature to that? I’m like,
This is my house. Yeah. No. I think the onus should be on both sides. And I think that’s a really hard conversation to have because it’s tough out there. You know.
Mac Prichard:
It is hard. I mean, when we’re recording this, if you’re a travel nurse, this is a golden age. There are plenty of jobs in that field and in healthcare in general. But hospitality is still strong. But you and I both happen to be in Oregon, and construction is tough right now; many professional jobs and technology are really tough.
No matter how low the unemployment rate, there are always parts of the economy, even when others are thriving, that are in the weird paradigm.
Enrique Ruiz:
It’s a weird paradigm to live with. I posted about it the other day. I said it’s interesting that we can be, you know, like you said, travel nurses hiring like crazy, or even like some hospitals go on protests and they gotta hire protest nurses to come in and fill in while the nurses are protesting. Like, like that part is like hiring like crazy, right? And then we see in the same, you know, news cycle, we see X company lays off 5,000 people.
So it’s definitely like an interesting paradigm to live in right now, where it’s sometimes you feel like the cringe of or the heartbreak of like, man, that’s so tough. But then you’re like, my gosh, this new pop-up company is hiring like crazy. It’s like, wow. So it’s like you’re right. On the job searcher side, you gotta you gotta maintain the fundamentals.
You gotta, because if you do, then you could ride the ebbs and the flows of whatever’s gonna happen. Big layoffs, big hiring, right? Right. Ride the waves. Yeah. High or low.
Mac Prichard:
Because even when times are tough, somebody is always getting hired. The competition is more intense, and the number of applications is much higher, but somebody’s gonna get an offer. But whatever the unemployment rate, whether it’s in the low single digits or high, or goodness knows I hope it doesn’t hit double digits again, one strategy that isn’t gonna work is only applying online.
If that’s all you’re doing, you’ve got a tough row to hoe ahead of you. And because again, we’ve talked about how hiring works, the importance of referrals and connections, how managers are trying to reduce risk, and how knowing what you want, where you want to go, and what you offer will help you stand out from your competitors.
If you’re not doing that and you’re just hitting easy apply, you’re making life much harder for yourself than it has to be.
Enrique Ruiz:
I love it. We can leave it there, Mac. I love it. I hope that the listeners on this podcast can, you know, really work on the fundamentals. I think they’re easily, like you, you, you we don’t need to teach a course necessarily on, like, hey, do these three things. I think people can do them intuitively. So do those. If you’re listening, do the fundamentals and subscribe to Mac list.
Mac Prichard:
And let me just add, I had to learn them the hard way, Enrique. So I made every mistake in the book earlier in my career.
Enrique Ruiz:
I mean, that’s kind of what I do with this podcast, cause I’ve been in all these different positions. You know, I’ve been laid off, I’ve been unemployed, now I’m an entrepreneur, you know, kinda want to be an entrepreneur in Portland. And I’ve seen it, I’ve seen it all, and I’ve seen it through like this lens.
I mean, for the Pacific Northwest, like you mentioned, Intel. When I worked in staffing, it was people like big companies like Nike would hire a lot for like a while, and then every six or seven years they’d be like, boom.
Layoffs, and it wasn’t anything crazy. It wasn’t like a pandemic or new AI technology. It was just like, economics 101. You know, like every seven or eight years, you kind of have like this correction in the economy for jobs, and big companies like Nike kind of have to, you know, ride those waves too.
So yeah, I think such a good conversation, Mac. If you’re listening, when you close this podcast, subscribe to Mac Prichard’s list.
Great content, great podcasts, great jobs on the board. Such a legend in Portland, Pacific Northwest. So cool to spend some time with you, Mac. Thank you so much.
Mac Prichard:
Quickly, please connect with me on LinkedIn. When you do reach out, please mention you heard me on Enrique’s show. Our podcast is Find Your Dream Job. You can find it wherever you get your podcasts.
And while our job board is focused on Oregon and Washington at macslist.org, there is a wealth of information both about hiring and how to look for work that works anywhere, no matter where you might be living.
So Enrique, thank you for the opportunity to be a guest.
Enrique Ruiz:
I hope we can come back and talk again in the future, and I’ll jump on your podcast again whenever you want me. And yeah, thank you all for listening, and we’ll end it there. What a great conversation with Mac today. Great person.
Make sure to follow him on LinkedIn, check out his podcast. And yeah, more to come, more episodes to come in the future. Thank you for listening to the All In Recruiting Podcast, part of the Purple Acorn Network. So excited to have you all here. Make sure to go to PurpleAcornNetwork.com and follow us on LinkedIn.
Wherever you’re seeing this, click the link, comment, and make a suggestion for future episodes. So happy for you all to be listening and on to the next one. Thanks.
Mac Prichard:
Thank you for listening to Find Your Dream Job.
You can support our show and help others find it by leaving a review and rating on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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This show is produced by Mac’s List.
Susan Thornton-Hough schedules our guests and writes our newsletter. Lisa Kislingbury Anderson manages our social media and creates our transcripts.
Our sound engineer and editor is Megan Hattie Stahl. Our music is by Freddy Trujillo.
This is Mac Prichard. See you next week.