Stop looking for a job. Start designing your next move.

Most job searches look like this: an uncomfortable event happens — a restructuring, a boredom threshold, a birthday ending in zero — and the scrolling begins. Job boards in the evening, a CV tweaked at midnight, applications sent into silence. Three months later: exhaustion, and no clearer sense of direction than on day one.

The problem isn't effort. It's that a search without a strategy can't converge. Every attractive-looking vacancy pulls you in a different direction, and your CV — trying to please everyone — convinces no one.

Here's the alternative I use with coaching clients and teach at SSE Riga: treat your next move the way a strategist treats a market entry. A good next move starts as a hypothesis — then you test it.

1. Write three plans, not one wish

Plan A is your ideal move — the role that uses everything you have and stretches you where you want to grow. Plan B is the pivot — a strong, safer application of your existing strengths. Plan C is the safety net or the wildcard — the option you'd take if timing forced your hand, or the long-shot you'd regret not naming.

Then pressure-test each one against three filters: geography (where you'll actually work, including the remote question — answered honestly), industry (including the ones you're not willing to serve), and working conditions (the non-negotiables you'll otherwise discover in month two of a job you already accepted).

Running three half-committed identities in parallel is the most common failure mode I see. Three plans are healthy — as hypotheses with an expiry date, not as permanent hedges.

2. Build a keyword bank from real ads

Collect ten real vacancies in your Plan A lane — not fantasy roles, ones posted this month in your market. Extract the requirements that repeat. That list, not your job title, is what recruiters' filters and hiring managers' eyes are scanning for. Your CV and LinkedIn should speak that exact language wherever it's honestly yours.

This step also delivers uncomfortable, useful news early: if the repeating requirements include something you don't have, you've just found your development plan — while it's still cheap to fix.

3. Keep one master CV; send many targeted ones

Maintain a single master archive of every achievement you've ever delivered — with the scope, the action and the number attached. It's not a document you send; it's the warehouse you pick from. Each application then takes minutes: select the six achievements that answer this ad, in this ad's language, one page, done.

Without the archive, every application is an evening of reinvention. With it, targeting becomes cheap — which means you actually do it.

4. Set a decision date

Optionality quietly becomes avoidance. So put a date in the calendar — four to six weeks out. On that date, count the real conversations each plan has generated, and drop the quietest one. The market has voted; your job is to listen and concentrate your effort where the signal is.

The point

A designed search is not slower than a scrolling search — it's dramatically faster, because every application compounds instead of starting from zero. And it changes how you sound in the room: people who know exactly what they're looking for are simply easier to hire.