If you have been laid off recently, or you are still employed but spending your evenings on LinkedIn wondering why your job applications keep disappearing into the void, this episode is for you.

The 2026 job market is brutal. Mass layoffs across tech, design and product roles. AI absorbing entry and mid level work. Hundreds of resumes per posting. Recruiters ghosting. ATS filters. Hiring freezes that get announced and then randomly extended. If you are an experienced professional in your late thirties, forties or fifties, you are also competing with younger candidates who cost companies less.

I recently had Joseph Louis Tan on The Gyaan Project. He has seen both sides of the hiring table. He walked away from a 200k role, with a mortgage, two boys under four, and no real backup plan, to coach experienced designers who have hit a wall in their job search. His clients are landing offers for roles that were never even posted.

What he shared reframed how I think about job hunting in this market. So I am putting it down here as ten practical shifts. None of these are hacks.

1. Enter through the backdoor

The traditional job search path looks like this: scroll LinkedIn jobs → upload resume, fill out the same form again → click submit → wait → repeat. Then the silence and doubts creeping your mind.

Joseph calls this the front door. And the front door is broken in 2026.

Picture a club. There are three queues outside.

The first is the main queue.

Hundreds of people, sometimes thousands, all trying to squeeze past the bouncer. In a job hunt, the bouncer is the recruiter or the applicant tracking system. Their job is not to find you. Their job is to filter you out so the hiring manager does not waste time.

The second queue is the VIP line.

The referral queue. Someone inside the company brings you onto the red carpet. Faster response, yes, but you still pass through the same bouncer.

The third entrance is the staff door - ‘the backdoor’.

This is the backdoor. It is how the staff walk in. It is the conversation that happens before a role is posted. It is the coffee chat that becomes “we are about to open a role, you should apply when it goes live.”

Joseph shared a real example. For a lecturer role at NTU in Singapore, the director reached out to him on WhatsApp for a casual chat. By the end of that chat, he had an informal offer. The role was posted online later the same day, purely for compliance. He was already in.

This is not rare. About 70 percent of roles are part of the hidden job market. They either never get advertised, or they get advertised after someone is already shortlisted. The front door is shut for most of the real opportunities in tech, design, product and other senior roles.

So maybe stop measuring your week by “how many applications did I send.” Start measuring it by “how many real conversations did I have.”

2. Know your own archetype

If your job search has stalled, you are probably one of three types. Joseph sees these patterns in every cohort of designers he coaches. He calls himself all three at different points in his 18 year career.

The over applier.

Does everything right on paper. Tailors the resume for every role. Polishes the portfolio. Applies to 100, 200, sometimes a thousand roles. Then doubles down on what is not working. Sends more applications. Tweaks the resume again. The system is selecting against them and they are just adding more fuel to it. Confidence erodes by month four or five. Eventually they start wondering if they should even stay in their field.

The drifter.

They have reinvented themselves multiple times across their career. Opens the job board, scrolls through postings, and nothing pulls them forward. So they wait. Waiting for clarity to arrive on its own. But clarity does not come from thinking. It comes from conversations. Meanwhile the resume gap keeps growing and slowly becomes the story they have to explain to every recruiter.

The veteran.

Fifteen plus years of experience. Hardest time of the three because they never had to sell themselves. Work always spoke for them. Referrals showed up. Then the market shifted and they did not. Their LinkedIn profile reads like a list of job titles, not a story. The depth of their experience is buried.

Be honest. Which job seeker type are you right now? Naming it is the first step towards getting clarity.

3. Stop blaming the ATS

The myth that the applicant tracking system is auto rejecting your resume is one of the most damaging beliefs in the modern job search.

Joseph built the workflow for one and has interviewed hundreds of recruiters about how they actually use these tools. The ATS is mostly an organisation system. The only thing that auto rejects you is the knockout questions. Do you have a visa to work here. Yes or no. That is the filter. Beyond that, a human, usually a recruiter, is still reading.

So if you are not getting interview callbacks, the ATS is not the villain. The signal you are sending is unclear. That is fixable. But you have to stop blaming the machine and start auditing what you are actually communicating in your resume, your LinkedIn profile and your portfolio.

Pull up the last five applications you sent. Read your resume the way a recruiter would. In ten seconds, can they tell what unique problem you solve?

4. Get clarity about yourself before you fix your resume or portfolio

Most career advice in 2026 goes straight to the tools. New resume. Better portfolio. Sharper LinkedIn headline. Learn the latest AI tool. None of that moves the needle in your job search if you are not clear about yourself first.

He compares it to fixing your boat when you do not even know where you are going. Maybe you need a different vehicle entirely.

Three questions every job seeker should ask themselves:

What problems have you actually solved in your earlier job? What is the common thread across your roles?
What are your real strengths? Why does the room shift when you walk in? Not your skill, your judgment.
What unique problems are you positioned to solve that someone else cannot?

Once you can answer these 3 questions honestly, the resume, portfolio, LinkedIn profile and outreach all become translations of something you already know.

Joseph’s point was that visual craft and technical skill are now table stakes. Figma themselves shared that 60 plus percent of files on the platform are made by non designers using generative AI. So the differentiator has moved. It is now your ownership, your decision making, the judgment you bring beyond the skillset. The same is true across product management, engineering, marketing and most knowledge work in 2026.

5. Not “I” to but “you”

This is where most cold outreach on LinkedIn dies before it begins.

Look at your last cold message to a hiring manager or recruiter. It probably starts with “I am interested in the role” or “I have five years of experience in” or “I would love to connect because I am exploring opportunities.” Every sentence begins with I.

A hiring manager reads dozens of these LinkedIn messages a week. They all sound the same. They all feel like a pitch from a job seeker to a gatekeeper.

Flip the LinkedIn outreach. If you want someone to be interested in you, you first have to be interested in them.

Look at their LinkedIn profile. Did they move from a big agency to an in house role? Did they jump from a large company to a small startup? Did they pivot from consumer to B2B? There is always a story behind those moves. Lead with that. Ask about that. Make the first message about them.

Before you send your next LinkedIn cold message, write down one specific thing you are genuinely curious about in the other person’s career. If you cannot find that one thing, you have not researched enough.

6. Earn the conversation

Even with a thoughtful opener, most job seekers fumble the ask. They end with “Can I get 30 minutes of your time” or “Can I pick your brain” or “Would you mind reviewing my portfolio.” Each of these costs the other person real energy.

Back when Joseph was hiring, he would spend 10 to 30 minutes reviewing portfolios people asked him to look at. Sometimes he would even record a Loom video. What did he get back? Thank you. Or silence. The exchange of value just was not there.

So he recommends - end your LinkedIn message with a multiple choice question. Something the other person can answer in five seconds.

Example. “When you made that shift, was it the mission of the company that pulled you in, or the scope of the work?”

Or. “When you joined that team, was it the people that drew you in, or the problem space that got you excited?”

It is a two hit combo. First you get them to connect. Then you get them to reply. From there, the informational interview breathes on its own.

People are smart. They can spot a “let us grab a coffee so I can pick your brain” message from across the room. You cannot skip to the ask. You have to earn the conversation first.

7. Design the “tell me more” moment

When the relationship works, there comes a moment where the other person turns the conversation around. “Enough about me. Tell me about yourself.”

This is the moment in any informational interview or networking conversation where the dynamic flips. You are no longer a stranger asking for something. You are a peer worth knowing.

But you cannot force this moment. You earn it by listening first. People rarely get asked thoughtful questions about themselves. Not even by their spouse, Joseph said. When you do it, it lands as a gift.

We are hyper connected but not close. Closeness is built one real conversation at a time.

In your next networking conversation, aim to ask three good questions before you share anything about yourself. Notice how the dynamic shifts.

8. Give before you ask. Always.

This is the one piece of career advice almost no career coach gives. Most coaches push you to do more. Better resume. Better portfolio. Learn a new tool. Apply to more roles.

Start by giving.

Go back through every job you have held. Pull up the people you genuinely worked with. The ones who helped you. The ones who shaped how you think. The ones who gave you a chance when you were not ready. The colleague who covered your back when the deadline was coming.

Write each of them an unrequested LinkedIn recommendation. No agenda. No “by the way, I am looking.” Just a note that says, “I was reviewing my career recently and realised I never wrote you one. Here it is.”

No ask. No follow up. Just give.

Joseph has 77 plus recommendations on his LinkedIn profile. What happens next is that conversations restart. Relationships rejuvenate. Goodwill accumulates. And weeks or months later, when you actually need help in your job search, you do not have to ask. People reach out to you. He called it karma. He figured the Indian readers would recognise the word.

In his own career across nine different chapters, the roles that mattered did not come from the strongest portfolio. Sometimes his portfolio was not even ready. They came from relationships he had been building before he knew he needed them. Especially in Asia, in markets like Singapore and India, trust has to come before the ask. You cannot go straight to “let us grab a coffee so I can pick your brain.” It reads wrong and people can feel it.

9. Conversation > Application

Here is the math on job search response rates that should help gain a nuanced perspective.

If you apply through a job board like LinkedIn or Indeed, your callback rate is between 1 and 4% on a good day. So out of 100 job applications, you might hear back from one or two real people.

If you reach out warmly to people inside your target companies, the response rate is 20 to 30%. So out of 10 well chosen LinkedIn messages, you can expect two or three real conversations.

That is five to ten times better. And the conversations are with the actual humans who decide hiring. Not the recruiter. Not the applicant tracking system. Not a black hole.

End of the day, people hire people. They do not hire applications. They do not hire portfolios. They do not hire resumes. They hire people.

10. Depth > Volume of job search

This was the line Joseph closed our conversation on, and it might be the most important one for any job seeker in 2026.

Go for depth over volume. Go for the quality of conversations, not the quantity. You do not need 200 of them. You need three, four, five real ones. That alone can move you further than 100 applications.

His clients typically build a target company map of 10 to 15 companies. Inside each, they identify around 10 people to connect with on LinkedIn. Not to ask for a job. To start a conversation. To be top of mind. To bring an idea or a perspective that is relevant to what those people are dealing with.

This is the bit most people get wrong. They think the backdoor job search means a clever shortcut. It is not a shortcut. It is the longer, slower, more human path. It just happens to also be the one that works.

Build that target company map this week. Ten companies you would love to work at. For each, three people you could reach out to. Start with one.

This conversation with Joseph has many more insights, so do give it a listen. If you wish to get in touch with Joseph, please reach out to him at CareerCreators.com. He has a six week The Backdoor program that help you land the right role paying $30K to $80K, more than you expected. Through direct conversations with hiring managers. Without feeling pushy, applying online, or getting ghosted. Of course, Joseph is on linkedin with 40K+ followers, has helped 50+ Designers land their dream job.

If you know someone navigating layoffs or a long job search, share this with them. Sometimes the most generous thing you can do is hand someone the right door.

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