#44 You're panicking about the wrong number

"I keep getting to hiring managers and stalling out."

I hear some version of that every week. And on its own, it tells me almost nothing.

Here's why. Say your direction's settled — you know the role, you know the industry. That same role still shows up in the market wearing wildly different shapes. A 25-person seed startup and Stripe might both be hiring the exact title you're going for, in the exact space you've picked. They are not the same conversation. Stage, size, who you'd be talking to, what they think they need — all of it changes what it takes to make them see you.

So even inside one clear direction, the live versions of your role sort themselves by how hard the sell-in is. One where you're the obvious shape and they get it immediately. One that's a real fit but takes some translating. One where you can absolutely do the job, but the gap between what you've done and what they think they're looking for is wide enough that the pitch is the whole battle.

Three very different amounts of work to make someone see you. But the effort gets dumped into one pile, and then the results get read as one number. "I'm not converting with hiring managers."

Past which version?

I watched this recently with someone sitting on exactly that spread, convinced the market was bouncing him. We went back through where his hours had actually gone over six weeks — and most of them had gone to the hardest sell. Of course his conversion looked rough. He'd been spending his energy on the version of the role that takes the most work to land. When we isolated the one he was the obvious fit for, the picture was completely different. Same person. Same résumé. Different sell-in.

The part worth screenshotting: "not making it past hiring managers" isn't a result. It's a blended average — and it's hiding the fact that your effort went to the roles that were always going to take the most convincing. You're reading it as a verdict on you when it's a verdict on where your energy landed.

This one stings specifically because you know better. You can recite the difference between an input metric you control and an output metric you don't. You'd never accept a single output number with no input breakdown and call it a finding. And then you run the highest-stakes project you've got — your own search — staring at one blended number and drawing conclusions about your worth from it.

I learned this the slow way, breaking into a new industry myself. The moment I started tagging where my energy was actually going, where to focus got obvious fast.

One thing to try this week: don't change anything yet. Go back through everything you've sent in the last month and tag each one by how hard the sell-in is — obvious fit, some translation needed, heavy lift. Then read your conversion inside each tier instead of across all of them. Most people are surprised by the split.

If you do that and the picture surprises you, hit reply and tell me what you found.

Chat soon,

Mel

P.S. The hardest sell quietly eats your energy because it's usually the exciting one — the new space, the dream-stage company, the reinvention story you get to tell yourself. It's also the heaviest lift, so it costs the most per application. Exciting and expensive is a brutal combination. Worth noticing how much of your week it's eating.