- Clarity: Stop applying harder and start getting clearer. Define what you’re no longer available for, what energizes you, and what life you’re building. Clarity moves you out of the spiral and into strategic momentum.
- Momentum: Shift from mass applying to real conversations. Reconnect with former colleagues, attend events that genuinely interest you, and identify companies you’re authentically curious about. Build relationships from a place of who you are — not desperation.
- Accountability: You don’t have to do this alone. Having a partner who provides insight, coaching, and governance changes everything. Anna applied to 180 jobs over four months with minimal results. Within four months of working through this framework, she landed a leadership role — better pay, healthier culture — that was never publicly posted.
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Detailed Transcript
Welcome to this five-part short series I’m calling the What Now? series. These five short episodes are designed to address the most common situations women like you are facing in your careers so that you can solve them now and build your brave career, a career where you stress less and you enjoy more, where you work less and create more impact.
And yes, a career where you earn more. Let’s go.
Welcome to the Build Your Brave Career podcast, where we flip the script on the tired stereotype that women in and around the tech industry have to be stressed out, overworked, and underpaid. I’m Nicole Trick Steinbach, the international bravery coach and your host. Forget what you’ve been taught.
Bravery is not a personality trait available only to the brash. Bravery is a skill, and you already have it, which is great because building the skill of bravery is the most powerful way to creating the career and life you really want. As you build your brave, you will stress less, work less, and then earn more.
This podcast will help you do just that. Let’s dive in.
This is the last episode in the “What Now?” podcast series. Today, we’re gonna talk about something that, for me, and for many people is maddening, is infuriating, is rage-provoking because today we’re gonna talk about the job market. There’s so many job postings, but where are the real jobs?
Before we get there, let’s level set. We’ve talked through career confusion, career exhaustion. We’ve talked about being passed over. We’ve talked about the fear of layoffs, and now we’re talking about the process that is currently being on the job market.
There are women in tech who spend hours rewriting their resume, tailoring their application, networking into that company.
Maybe that’s you: you’re applying. You’re qualified. You’re experienced. You’re doing everything right, and it’s not moving forward. You’re getting those very cold, very strange–
Can we talk about how strangely formatted these automatic rejection emails are, and that they come at like 2:12 AM is weird, right? Can we all agree that that’s weird?
If that’s happening to you, I need you to hear me so clearly, please. You are not imagining it, and you are definitely not alone. Because yes, of course, of course there are real positions available, but not all of them.
In fact, some of them are data mining efforts. They’re collecting your information for future marketing and sales. Some are pipeline building for future potential talent possibilities. Some are salary research, so they get you to put in all your information, and then they see what you’re willing to work for, and then they create the benchmark on that. Some are compliance postings for jobs that already have a chosen candidate, but they have to post it so that they are compliant.
And some, woo, can you tell how upset I am about this?
Some are simply companies trying to appear like they are growing when they are not. They’re showing their investors, they’re showing their customers and their potential customers, “Hey, we’re growing. Look at our job postings,” when in reality they’re not.
Those are ghost jobs.
If you’re applying and hearing nothing or getting endless automated responses and again, strangely formatted emails at 1.15 in the morning, that does not automatically mean you are failing. It means you are participating in a system that is increasingly disconnected… that’s the nicest word I could find for it, disconnected.. from actual hiring of actual humans. And honestly, like you can tell I am really upset about this. This is, this is not even low integrity.
This is bullshit.
And if it is messing with me and I’m helping women on the job market, imagine how much it’s messing with people who have gone through career confusion, career exhaustion, maybe passed over, maybe a layoff, and they’re attempting to grow their career.
If that is you, stay here because we’re going to talk about your situation. I’m going to share a client story and then we’re going to walk through how you can get past endless cycles of applications and rejections and no news and into the driver’s seat, into the control of your next steps.
After a while, it’s normal that you begin questioning your experience, your expertise. Your confidence and your self-concept start to shrink and morph. You start wondering if your skills are outdated or you’re too old or you’re too experienced or you’re too female or you’re too blonde or you’re too all the things.
Quite frankly, you look around at other people announcing their new jobs online and you think, ” what is wrong with me?”
The whole time you’re spending your mornings, your afternoons and your evenings rewriting resumes instead of resting.
You’re checking email as soon as you wake up with anxiety. You’re carrying around what one of my clients called her ‘invisible container with hope, exhaustion, rejection, self-doubt, and no lid.’
For so many women in tech, there is yet another layer below all of this: that’s the reality, you have already spent years proving yourself in rooms where you had to work harder to be seen as credible in the first place.
You had to work harder and longer and be more educated and more concise and more skilled and more impactful to even be seen, to be perceived as belonging.
So when all of this is true, and you can’t get to that next job, of course it feels frustrating. Of course it’s deeply personal. Of course the constant question is, ” But what now?”
How do you stop spiraling in confusion? How do you stop spiraling in application after application, rejection after rejection, and the pain and the frustration and the disappointment and the annoyance and the knocks on your self-confidence, and start moving forward with clarity, with strategy towards a real career step?
You know my answer: the Build Your Brave framework.
The first part of the Build Your Brave framework is clarity because first you have to be super clear about what’s actually happening.
Most people like you, mid-level, senior professionals, you’re still using a career strategy that doesn’t work on this market.
All those customized resumes? Those thoughtful cover letters? The applications over, over, over playing the numbers game? It doesn’t work.
Statistically, the traditional online application process is the lowest probability path to getting hired. The correlation between companies with very low maturity and traditional hiring paths is almost a one-to-one. You don’t wanna work for companies that have low maturity. This is why it feels so draining.
You gotta get clear. You gotta stop putting emotional energy into a system that isn’t designed to create opportunity. In fact, it’s designed currently to data mine, to pipeline build, and to do salary strategy.
The answer is not apply harder. The answer is get clearer.
So I’m gonna give you a few questions ’cause that’s where you’re gonna get your answers, your clarity.
What are you no longer available for? Sometimes that’s the easiest place to start. What are you no longer willing to do?
What environments drain you? What kind of management style drains you? What kind of leadership can you not have anymore?
Then turn it around.
What energizes you? What kind of manager and environment and leadership are you looking for? What impact matters to you now in your career?
Then the big one: What life are you building, and how does your career support that?
It’s the clarity that moves you from searching from a title and a company name and staying trapped in the spiral and all the noise.
This is the clarity that’s deeper, that sets you up for momentum that’s strategic. That’s calm, that’s confidence, that’s building, and that changes everything.
Right here in the two first phases, clarity and momentum of the Build Your Brave framework, I wanna share a client story because I believe it makes it very clear.
She gave me permission to share her first name and story specifics because, quote, ” I really want others to know how to get away from the panic and get in to the next phase.” End quote.
All right, here we go. Anna is a, or was a senior program leader. She had more than fifteen years of experience in tech.
She was described as brilliant, strategic, deeply respected and quote, “The kind of person everyone relied on when things got messy” in her last performance review.
Shortly after that performance review, she got laid off. At first, she handled it the way most high ch- high achievers do. She treated the job search like a full-time job.
You’ve probably heard that as well, right? She woke up every morning, and she was determined to quote, “Outwork the problem.”
She submitted applications before breakfast, she was on LinkedIn through lunch, and she was doing networking in the afternoon and the night. And then she went all the way through the new job pro- postings, did her resume revisions on the weekends, and put in those applications, ad nauseam for four months.
For four months, she pushed harder and harder.
She knew, she had experienced, and she had been told that effort would eventually equal results. She needed to play the numbers game and outwork the problem.
By the time Ana reached out to me, she had applied to 180 roles.
180 roles.
She was definitely outworking the problem, but the results after four months and 180 applications: she had a handful of recruiter screens. She had many automated rejection emails with weird layouts. Come on, what is up with the layouts? And why are they coming in the middle of the fricking night?
So weird.
She’d had two interview processes that had suddenly just disappeared, and one final round interview that after seven, seven rounds of conversations ended in, ” We’ve decided to pause hiring for now.”
When she reached out to me after four months of this, she was exhausted. Think about that episode I made about career exhaustion, she was beginning that career exhaustion spiral because she was starting to lose herself.
In fact, when we first talked, and again, with her permission, she said something that brought tears to my eyes. She said, ” I don’t even feel like myself anymore. I knew I was good at my job. Was I wrong? Now, now every time I open LinkedIn, I just feel panic. What is wrong with me?”
I think so many women understand that feeling. The hard part is not just the uncertainty, not just the rejection. It’s the prolonged lack of a next step that not only messes with your finances, but also your identity.
Anna had gone from a respected leader, a high performer, a person who was known and trusted, to a person who was constantly refreshing her inbox and her LinkedIn, hoping someone would give her a chance, someone would validate that she was at least capable, if nothing else.
That’s what this market can do to you if you stay stuck.
We changed everything. The very first thing, and I think the scariest thing I had her do, was she had to stop mass applying. Not because she wasn’t ambitious, not because she gave up, but because that strategy was tearing her down with almost no results.
She immediately got 15 hours a week back I think that she was underestimating. I actually think she got more back, but that’s between you and me.
We redirected her energy completely. She started having real conversations again, not asking for jobs, conversations. This is part of momentum, having conversations, having interest interviews.
She reconnected with former colleagues that she really respected.
She reached out to people doing work that she admired. She met with them. She learned about their careers, their companies. She talked about herself, her strengths, her growth goals, her experiences, what she was looking for and hoping for, and crucially, what she enjoys in life.
She attended industry events. And yeah, she had to feel lots of feelings because she is not an extrovert and she doesn’t really enjoy people. But she attended industry events that actually interested her, and she was networking out of interest, not out of obligation.
She explored new technologies. She learned a new process. She even tried out new hobbies based on the people that she met.
She became radically clear about the kind of leadership and culture she wanted to be in next. Then she volunteered with an organization she thought lived the culture that she wanted.
She met more people. She got more clear. She got better at introducing herself. She had more conversations. It just snowballed.
In parallel, she identified a very small group of companies she was genuinely curious about and began building authentic relationships inside of those ecosystems.
Note: there’s a difference here. She didn’t make a list of target companies. She identified authentic, genuine curiosity, and then the companies.
Because here’s the important part. She was no longer, and this is the accountability of a Build Your Brave framework, she was no longer trying to convince people to hire her. Instead, she showed up as herself, who she is and who she wanted to become, experienced, thoughtful, strategic, reliable leader.
Within six weeks of working together, her entire energy shifted. She rested. She enjoyed. She laughed. Her confidence came back. It grew.
Within 10 weeks, she was in five, five high-level conversations about roles that had never and were never publicly posted.
Within four weeks, she accepted a leadership role with a vendor for one of those interest companies. That role had better compensation, stronger boundaries, fewer time zones, and a healthier culture than the job she’d been laid off of.
That role was never listed online. Never.
Same market, same candidate, completely different strategy. A brave strategy. A strategy rooted in clarity and momentum and in accountability with a partner supporting her with insight, consultative coaching, and governance, me.
oh, and, uh, by the way, she is still to this day getting those rejection emails from all those old applications randomly showing up in her inbox. I mean, ugh, this job market is maddening, maddening.
Here’s the deal, if you are like Anna, there’s so many job postings, but where are the real jobs? Or you’re stuck in this spiral and it’s exhausting you and you want to move forward. Or you’re seeing other people announce their career steps and all you feel is dread and why me?
Please, please hear me. This is not just a you problem. It’s a market problem. It’s a strategy problem.
Once you understand that, you can stop making this all dependent on whether or not someone says yes. Because in a lot of cases, there’s nothing to say yes to. Those are ghost jobs.
You can stop measuring yourself by silence or rejections. You can stop believing your capability and your career rest inside of an algorithm.
Instead, you can build clarity, relationships, feel your feelings, take aligned action, build your brave and become the woman you want to be.
That’s where the real opportunities live.
If you’re feeling this, if you’re exhausted from applying You’re full of noise, and you’re starting to lose yourself like Anna did. I wanna invite you. I have a short-term, high-impact coaching experience, and it’s specifically for women who are solving an immediate career issue like this.
We will get very clear about your strategy on the job market. We’re gonna rebuild it around how hiring actually works right now.
We are gonna strengthen, yes, your visibility, but also your confidence and your self-concept.
We’re gonna create a focused, brave, iterative action plan together. That action plan leads to real opportunities and no more endless applications.
You don’t need another generic career checklist that doesn’t work. You need your clarity, your strategy, your type of support in a way that actually feels human again.
When you work with me, it is work together. The details are in the show notes, or you could just reach out to me directly.
Until then, please stop measuring your value or your success or your future through job postings and rejections that were never, ever real to begin with.
Your next career phase is possible. There are real jobs available. There are real unidentified needs in companies you are okay working within, in managers you want to work in, for products that you can believe in.
To find them, you need a smarter, a modern, and a braver way to get there. I can help. Reach out.
If the Build Your Brave Career podcast is helping you flip the script in your own career, if it’s helping you reduce your stress, work smarter, or create more income, please share this with a friend. Till next time. You are already brave. Now, go build your brave.