Unlock your career potential with personalized job search strategies. Find your professional niche for success and fulfillment as an ADHD/Autistic Professional.

I am thrilled to introduce you to an insightful article penned by Scott Birkhead, a distinguished guest writer for The Brain Dump Blog and a recent guest on the Beyond Autistic Burnout talk show, which I had the privilege of hosting alongside him yesterday. Scott's wealth of experience as a 30-year veteran recruiter shines through in this article, "Finding Your Professional Niche: A Blueprint for Personalized Job Searches."

In a world where authenticity and individuality are increasingly celebrated, Scott's words provide a valuable guide for those seeking to discover their unique professional path and unlock the full potential of their careers. His wisdom has the power to transform the way you approach job searches and pave the way for more fulfilling and purpose-driven work. Enjoy this insightful journey into personalized job searches and the remarkable impact they can have on your professional life.

-Carole Jean

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My first coaching client was someone I worked with for several years professionally. 

She was a unique human being. Introspective, a lover of people, very good at what she did, but lost in the job market. As her role at a long-time employer evaporated from something she loved into something she had to get away from, she found that she couldn’t get traction in her job search.

As I worked with her, she rediscovered that she intrinsically knew who she was, what was important, what problems she could solve better than anyone else, and how her approach was different and valuable. There was this incredible sense of alignment: her values, how those showed up in her work, what problems those led her to focus on, her specific method of solving those problems, and what skills and experiences she had gathered over the years. 

Many people do what she does professionally. NO ONE does it like her. 

I found the same alignment in my second coaching client, and the third and in every single one since. 

None of them are the only people who can do that job. All of them ARE the only ones who do it their way. All of them create patterns in their lives based on that uniqueness. 

You do too. When you are overtly aware of those patterns, you can much more readily attract the attention of hiring managers who have problems you can solve, where your uniqueness helps you stand out! Those are, in essence, problems you’ve been thinking about and solving your whole life…you’re attuned to them in ways very few others are. 

When you find hiring managers with problems you’re uniquely wired to solve, you:

• Move to the top of their list of candidates. 
• Generate much deeper, more effective interviews. 
• Get the ‘benefit of the doubt’ that you can learn new tools and pick up skills. 
• Get to offer faster, for more money. 
• Have a much more effective ramp-up period. 
• Find yourself in work you LOVE instead of work you do for the paycheck. 

There are two ways this happens. 

First, you get lucky. You apply for tons of jobs, do interviews, get ghosted, and finally find someone with a job who gets you. Most often, you end up settling for a role with SOME of what you hope for because it offers some things you need. 

The second way is that you reverse-engineer what you’re looking for based on your unique patterns. You STOP applying to so many jobs, STOP interviewing with people who don’t get you, and go find people who are much more likely to get you. You concentrate your search around the authentic you. 

It’s not easy. It takes time, introspection and personal effort. 

But the reward IS NOT just the ability to find a new job. It’s the ability to find the right work WITHIN whatever job you have or get next, to shine in that work, to get recognized, promoted, offered additional responsibility, to make a bigger IMPACT. 

Authenticity is literally the way to ‘more’ professionally, at every level.  

After a recruiting career that’s covered 40,000 or so filled jobs, I can tell you our job search process craves authenticity, but does not readily engineer it.

Authenticity has to happen at the person-to-person level, and you may have to take control and engineer it rather than wait for some company to be good at it. 

Here’s the path:

• Examine and ARTICULATE your values (from multiple perspectives…what do you believe, and what are you doing.)

• Look at the patterns in your life: who you’ve most consistently been, problems you’ve solved, challenges you’ve risen to (both what you can remember, and what others close to you can remember.)

• Examine your strengths and your needs (these are often connected.)

• Put the picture together and distill it down to the core elements. 

• Flip it. Ask yourself, “Who has a job where I’d be the natural top choice?” NOT what company…think about the human being. Imagine them sitting at their desk, buried in a Wednesday’s worth of meetings, reports, data. 
• What are their problems?
• How do they feel about those problems?
• What are they doing every day?
• What are they angry, sad or hopeful about when they think of those problems?
• How do they articulate those challenges…literally what do they say?

• Then go look for them.
• Look for clues in the job ads. 
• Look for clues in their career site (who else are they hiring)
• Look for clues in their news (new leadership, new products, mergers…good news and bad news).

• Talk about their problems, in their language, relevant to your experience. 
• In your applications, notes, InMails, emails…voice messages…
• In your resume 
• As you answer interview questions.
• When you talk about compensation and negotiate offers. 

• Stop ONLY applying online. 
• When you see a job, apply on their career site, then find human beings to talk about the problems to:
• Recruiters
• Potential hiring managers
• Potential peers
• Or anyone else. 
• More shots on the high-match jobs, FEWER applications to jobs where you won’t be seen as unique. 
• Or at least, more time/focus - make hard choices, spend more time on likelier matches. 

I help people learn and implement this in their lives. I help people looking for new jobs, people looking at their current situations, and people looking at their next potential role inside organizations.

Scott Birkhead has been in the recruiting industry for almost 30 years, and has been professionally coaching career professionals for fifteen of those. His focus is on helping people understand themselves, and find ways to align their daily work experience to their personal truth. 

🔗 Connect with Scott Birkhead: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottbirkhead/

If you've been in the job search for a few weeks or even months, you may be experiencing burnout and as ADHD/Autistic professionals that burnout impacts your job search because it impacts your ability to maintain focus, brain fog may be entering, navigating and managing all the moving parts from job posting, cover letters, follow ups and more.  Take the Spicy Pepper Burnout Quiz today and discover what level of burnout you may be experiencing and get your first steps to restoration based on your results so that you can go into the job search and interview process feeling energized and carry that energy and focus into your new position.

Take the QUIZ today and discover your path to energy and restoration today.