Candidate Market Fit.

Objectives and fit are different questions

We've written before about career and professional objectives: the Obvious, the Ambitious, the Pivot, the Dream and the Right Now job. That's direction. It's about where you'd like to end up.

Candidate Market Fit is narrower and more useful when you're actually applying. It's the overlap between three things:

• what you want
• what the market is hiring for
• how the market sees you

That third one is the awkward part. You might want to be a product designer. There might be product design jobs. But if nothing you've done yet reads as design experience to someone spending a few seconds on your CV, there's no fit, and no amount of applying will create one. Naming that gap is not defeatist. It's the thing that tells you what to do next.

Where the idea comes from

Candidate Market Fit comes from Never Search Alone by Phyl Terry. It's a book about running your job search with other people rather than alone, and it's the backbone of a free volunteer-run programme of Job Search Councils: small peer groups of job seekers who work through the process together. Thousands of them have run. They're free, and they're open to everyone from students to CEOs.

The book's central exercise is a document that job seekers write about themselves, known as the Mnookin two-pager. You write down what you love doing, what you hate, what you must have, what you won't accept, what you're good at and where you're headed. Then you go and talk to people about it, and you keep changing it as you learn.

We'll be honest about one thing. We're an app. We can talk this through with you, then build CVs positioned around the role you choose. We can't be a room full of people who've been through the same thing. If that appeals, join a council. It costs nothing.

The Candidate Market Fit concept and the two-pager exercise come from Never Search Alone by Phyl Terry. Every dollar of book sales supports the free community. Learn more at neversearchalone.org.

This is harder when you're starting out

Most published examples of this exercise were written by someone with fifteen or twenty years behind them. A Director of Product listing what they hate about feature factories. A VP naming their minimum compensation. If you're leaving school, finishing a degree or eighteen months into your first job, reading those will make you feel like the exercise isn't for you.

It is. You just have to run it differently.

Someone with a long career is summarising evidence. You're forming a hypothesis. That's a different job and it needs different rules.

Use whatever you've actually done. A Saturday job, a placement, a group project, running a society, a summer in a warehouse, freelancing for your cousin's business. All of it tells you something about what you like and what you're good at.

Guess, and mark it as a guess. You're allowed to write "I think I'd like working with customers" and note that you haven't tested it. That's more honest and more useful than a confident sentence you made up.

Expect it to change. This is not a one-off exercise. It should look different in three months, and it should look different again after you've had a few real conversations.

Start with what you hate

Here's the part people get wrong. They start with "what do I want to do", stare at it and write something that sounds impressive.

Start at the other end. It's much easier, and it's more truthful.

1. What did you hate? Think about every job, placement, project or module you've done. What made the day drag? What did you dread? What made you look at the clock? Be specific. Not "boring work" but "being on my own for six hours with nobody to talk to". Give this fifteen minutes and get as much down as you can.

2. Turn the hates into loves. Go through the list and flip each one. Hated being alone all day becomes wants a job with people around. Hated being told to just do it becomes wants to understand why. Careful though: the opposite of something you hate isn't always something you love. Sometimes you just want it gone, and that's fine, it belongs in the next list instead.

3. Write your must-nots. The things that would make you turn down an offer or walk out in the first month. If you're stuck, use the bad boss question: have you ever had a bad job or a bad manager? What did it teach you about what you won't put up with again?

4. Turn the must-nots into must-haves. "Not commission-only" becomes "a real salary I can budget against". "Not a two hour commute" becomes "under an hour door to door, or remote".

5. Strengths and gaps. What are you genuinely good at, including things you don't enjoy? And what are you missing for the jobs you're aiming at? The gaps aren't a confession. They're your list of what to learn or evidence next.

6. Now write the statement. One sentence, and only now, after everything above.

Some examples of what that looks like in practice:

• I'm looking for a junior marketing role at a small agency, where I can make things and see what worked.
• I'm looking for an operations coordinator role at a logistics company, where the day has structure and I'm around people.
• I'm looking for a graduate software role at a company with other engineers, where seniors review my code and teach me.

Notice what those have in common. A job title someone is actually hiring for. A kind of organisation, not a specific company. And a condition that matters to the person writing it.

How many should you have?

Two or three. Not one, and not eight.

One is too rigid when you're early in your career and genuinely don't know yet. Eight isn't a strategy, it's applying for everything and hoping.

Here's the test for whether two targets are really different: would they need different CVs? If you'd send the same CV to both, it's one target described two ways. If the summary at the top would have to change, and the order of your experience would have to change, they're genuinely two, and you should write and tailor separately for each. If you're just out of university, our graduate CV guide shows how.

A common and sensible pair is the obvious one and the ambitious one. The role your experience points at, and the role you actually want. Run both, and learn which one is answering.

It's a draft, and that's the point

Terry is blunt about this in the book: don't let perfect be the enemy of good, just start. The first version is meant to be rough. You get clarity by going and talking to people, not by thinking harder on your own.

So go and use it. Talk to people doing the job you think you want. Ask what their week actually looks like. Ask what they wish they'd known. Stay quiet and listen rather than pitching yourself. Then come back and change the document.

There's a neat signal for when you're getting somewhere. When you stop making big changes to it after each conversation, you're close. Until then, keep editing.