Ex-Google: 3,700 Applications. 0 Offers.

So this gentleman here, John Marcus, used to work at Google and he got laid off about two and a half years ago during that big wave. And since that time, he has applied to 3700 jobs and has emailed more than 2,200 founders. And his summary is simple. I'm getting nowhere. And he says here that he's burned through his savings. He's been evicted. He's living in his car. And on the surface, this is the nightmare that we are all afraid of, right? The thing that literally keeps us up at night. You do everything right and you keep applying and you keep, you know, you're doing the thing you're supposed to do and nothing happens. But to me, this story hides a deeper truth and it's amplified. It's exacerbated in this economy, but it's true in every economy and it's this. You cannot build your career by coming through the front door with the masses. Okay? The the door is too crowded. It's standardized. It's designed to filter you out. And if you want leverage in your life, you need systems that get you brought in through the back where you're welcomed in as a specialist. So, I want to talk about what's really going on here behind the scenes. And then I'm going to tell you exactly what I would do if I woke up in this position tomorrow. But first, I want to tell you a story from early in my career where I really learned this lesson the hard way. So when I first started my career, I worked in commercial real estate in LA and I was the junior guy and my job was to walk buildings on Wilshire Boulevard and source deals. And so one day I found this accounting firm that needed to move. And I noticed that they had a relationship with somebody that my boss knew who was the president of the Grammys at this at the time. I saw a picture of him on their little magazine that they published for their firm that they sent to clients or whatever. So we got the introduction, we landed the deal, and it was this huge $500,000 fee. And I ran the whole deal. I did all the paperwork. I did the tours. I did the grind. I did everything. And then the check came in and I was all excited to see what I would earned. Out of this 500k, I made something like $15,000. I was furious. I thought I'd get at least 30% something from this deal, right? And so anyway, I spent the next day stomping around. And then I thought, okay, how else can I handle this? So I sat my boss down and I asked, what would I have needed to do to make 50k or 100k or some, you know, a bigger number? and he drew a really simple diagram. Now, I don't remember the precise things he drew there, but the gist was this. He showed me for doing the work, you get this slice. For controlling the opportunity, you get the majority. So, he made one phone call, controlled the relationship, controlled the trust, controlled the opportunity, and for that call, for owning the leverage in that situation, he made the overwhelming majority of the money. And that moment permanently changed how I view income. Hard work does not determine value. Control determines value. So if you enter into someone else's system as a role filler, you're going to get priced like one. That is one of the key mistakes that I see in this post. And there are three structural lessons inside of it. The third being one of the most profound shifts in my entire career. The first lesson here is applying harder is the wrong game. So this gentleman put it has put out 3700 applications. There is no shortage of effort here. There is no shortage of hustle, right? But it's not leverage. This front door of job boards and ATS systems and resumes, it's designed to keep you out because the more that you compete with everyone else, the more you get compared and volume increases competition. It's simple supply and demand, right? If there's more perceived supply, demand, price goes down. So effort alone does not create advantage. Right? That's the first lesson that I learned and what I see here. The second is this idea of competing in the title economy. It's an identity thing. Right? So when your identity is your job title, you are standardized. If you see yourself as a marketing manager, a product manager, talent partner or whatever, why do titles exist? In a market, we commoditize things to create par between goods, right? Because the more of there's replacement of the same thing, the more price gets pushed down. So these titles are built to put you in comparison in competition against thousands of other people because they show they create parody. So if 10,000 people can hold your title, you are in a commodity market and by definition that's true, right? So commodity markets are going to pay commodity wages. I talk about this as the titled economy and I see this as keeping people who are smart, talented, experienced, stuck and competing in categories that are designed structurally to make them replaceable. At a higher level, how I think about this is every household, whether we like it or not, is a business, right? You have revenue and you have expenses and you have risk. And if you have one job, what that really means in structural terms is you have a consulting business with one client. So you have a 100% concentration risk. Something you would never think about doing in an investment portfolio. In any business, what I know from advising, you know, hundreds of tech companies at this point over my career is that the hardest thing in any business is not doing the work. It's creating the customer. So when your only method of customer creation as a person seeking jobs is job boards, you're running in a very fragile system. It's you have a fundamental distribution problem. And then this third lesson, and this is something that truly changed the way that I saw my career, my world, and changed everything for me. Um was this notion of specialized versus broad expertise. So look at how he describes himself in this post. He says, "I've placed engineers and finance execs in marketing and I've worked across industries and on the surface like a lot of us do this. This sounds flexible, right? But what broad expertise does is it makes you sound helpful." But specific expertise is what makes you expensive and you do not want to be busy, right? We talk about in the freelance formula that generalists get busy, specialists get rich. And you don't want to be busy, right? You want more work, less time. I've had in that program, I've had 1500 people come through that thing. The biggest push back I get is around narrowing. People are afraid to niche. I have never had someone niche down and tell me that they regret it. But I have so many people stay broad for years and they feel stuck. So in my own life, when I went from copywriter to me, originally the way I positioned was cop was messaging strategist for series A B2B tech. I did the literally the exact same thing. It it was different positioning. It was 10x the income, right? generalists go through the front door. Specialists get invited invited in. So when I was a copywriter, I was charging 75 bucks an hour and there's a bunch of other people who can conceivably write the same thing, right? But when I developed expertise around this very specific promise, I stopped competing on hourly work, right? Same brain, same me, different same skill set. By the way, I didn't get any better at what I did. Well, over time I did, but at that time I wasn't any better. But instead of that hourly rate, I went from uh 75 bucks an hour to it was 15, 25, 50, and 75 as as time went on. 75K. And it was all about positioning. If I were him, here is exactly what I would do. No shame. He's clearly working hard. But there's this quote from Edward Deming that I always think about in my own life, which is every system is perfectly designed to get the results that it gets. So, we need to redesign this system cuz it's clearly not getting the results that he wants. By the way, if there's some part of your life like we have systems in our lives, whether we consciously build them or not. So, if there's some part of your life, you're in an income plateau or you're whatever it is, right? Ask yourself, what is the system I've created that is keeping me stuck in this space? And then how do we how do I redesign that system to create a different uh a different outcome? So, the first thing I would do is identify the buyer in the moment of need. So, every single hire, whether it's full-time consulting, freelance, whatever, happens because of a moment of need, right? They're not hiring because of generosity. Something needs is breaking and it needs being done, right? There's a funding deadline or a compliance risk or product launch or whatever, right? So, I would start by saying, who is this real buyer? And then, what moment were they in when they needed me? So, when we look at this post, we can say he's placed security engineers from the FBI and CIA backgrounds. He's done VC back security, government adjacent contractors, late stage startups, right? He's got all these different buyers. These are multiple potential niches that he might focus on. And what he then does is describe skills instead of moments of need, right? So he says something like, I place engineers. What I do is say something like, I help series A cyber security startups hire cleared engineers fast enough to secure enterprise contracts. That's a very different thing, right? Now you're not labor. You're solving a real bottleneck. And that recog that specialized expertise separates you. And by the way, over time you create this virtuous cycle where the better you get at that thing, the better you are at that thing. And you soon become the only one anyone wants to do that thing. And now you're not competing with a million other talent people. You're in a category of your own where you dictate your own rates. The second thing I would do is I would collapse my launch market. If more than a thousand companies can hire you, you are way too broad. Specificity creates scarcity and scarcity creates leverage. Instead of being hirable by everyone, you need to be obvious to someone. You're now not applying for things. You're building relevance. You're creating leverage in your situation. It's the same skills you already have. The third thing I would do is I would build direct distribution. If job boards are your only distribution channel, meaning the way that you contact your market, that you sell your skills, you have no leverage cuz you are in a line with everybody else. I would build direct relationships, targeted outreach, visible expertise, and most importantly, a small owned audience. Even a hundred relevant decision makers in your niche is more powerful than 3,700 anonymous applications. And I would build that distribution so that I was never relying on a job again. Because once you control the flow of opportunity, you are no longer at the mercy of this filtering system. Literally, five align buyers can change your income trajectory permanently. The fourth thing is I would stop broadcasting desperation. It's a human thing and I completely understand where he's coming from, but markets reward control and confidence. When you broadcast this need, what you're doing is signaling a lack of alternatives. When you speak with precision and clarity, you signal authority. And this precision is going to expand your perceived value. Right? The desperation is going to compress it. So when I look at 3,700 applications, what I don't see is a guy who's unemployable. I see a guy who is competing in a commodity market. And the wage strategy is fragile. The title economy is fragile. It is putting you in a bucket with everyone else. Applying harder is not going to save you, but positioning smarter will. You do not win by walking through the front door with everyone else. You win by becoming the specialist that they bring around the back. If you want to go deeper into how to architect this for yourself, the freelance formula walks you step by step through defining your buyer, your moment, building leverage around it, and if you want to rebuild it directly with me, the positioning sprint is where we do that work together. Links are below and I'll see you in the next

"Every system is perfectly designed to get the results that it gets." ____________________ The System (Scale to $500K+) https://www.brendandell.com/freelance-formula-299 *Currently only $99 for next 50 students with code Transform Work with Brendan (Positioning Sprint – application only): https://www.brendandell.com/positioning-sprint _____________________ 3,700 job applications. 2,200 emails to founders. 0 offers. A former Google employee says he’s burned through his savings, been evicted, and is living in his car. This is the nightmare scenario for many professionals in today’s job market. But this story is not just about layoffs or a broken hiring system. It exposes a deeper structural problem that most smart people never see. In this video, I break down: • Why applying harder is often the wrong strategy • The hidden danger of the “Title Economy” • Why broad expertise keeps you stuck • Why every household is a business with real concentration risk • How to shift from commodity labor to specialized leverage • Exactly what I would do if I were in this position tomorrow The front door of the job market is crowded, standardized, and built to filter you out. If you want leverage, you need to be brought in through the back door as a specialist. This video is for professionals who are: – Facing layoffs – Stuck at an income plateau – Sending out hundreds of job applications with no traction – Worried about the future of work and AI – Trying to become “unfireable” in a fragile economy Applying harder will not fix a structural positioning problem. Positioning smarter will.