R-Strategists and K-Strategists

[00:00 - 02:24] Going back to how to frame your job search, how to know when to put in more effort, when to put in less, whether you should cast a tight net or be very focused. I want to use an analogy here, which is going from evolutionary biology. So in evolutionary biology, you have our strategists and case strategists. Our strategists are organisms that have a lot of different offspring. This could be hundreds to the thousands. And the offspring generally have a pretty high death rate. This strategy works very well in volatile environments or places where there's a lot of evolutionary pressures like lots of predators or whatever. Most insects would be our strateg ists, right? Not all of our arachnids as well that have very many children and many of them will not make it to adulthood because they'll get eaten by birds or other insects. Sea turtles are probably another example. You've probably seen that kind of sad David Attenborough documentary where you have thousands of baby sea turtles hatching to the beach and then the dramatic music sting starts and then they start crawling towards the beach and you get a flick towards all of the sea birds and the various predators that come during hatching season. So this is what our strategy just is. You're applying to a lot of jobs. You're surrounding stuff everywhere to see what sticks, but you're obviously going to have a very low success rate, right? Because people will have more tailored, more precisely delineated cvs that are going to rank higher for the job. Case strategist is an organism that has a smaller number of offspring but invests a lot more energy and time into each one. So most mammals would be case strategist. Humans are obviously case strategist and this is well suited for stable environments which is maybe a bit of an oversimplification. But one thing that stands out to me here is that this analogy should be taken with a little pinch of salt and should be context aware. So obviously if you're already in a row and you're not in a rush to leave, you should be more like a case strategist. You should be tailoring, you should be selective, you should be very specific and higher, you reach out to jobs because you're doing it from a place of some leverage, right?

[02:25 - 03:17] If you're more urgently seeking a job, I don't actually recommend going full our strategist because quantity is not going to beat out quality. I can recommend maybe doing a bit of both, right? Having some jobs that are maybe further swings and applying with less tailoring to your resume on the off chance that there's not a lot of applicants or about your basic resume impresses the either AI system or the recruiter, you never know. And then for jobs that you're very suited for that you have a lot more to say about a lot more of a case strategy and get very specific, get very tailored. Again, this is just an analogy but I think it's a helpful mode of thinking when you're trying to decide how many jobs you should apply to Harry Shib's cast the net.