The popular adage goes “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”

It’s quite on point because having measurable goals will make you focus on them, and thus help you move forward to accomplish them. This applies to your job search as well.

In this article, I’m going to advocate using numbers to ensure success during your job search. I believe you can approach it like any work project that has measurable sets of goals.

How to break up the job search into numbers

Work backwards

Take the end goal you want to go after, in this case it can mean getting a job, and think about all the stages of the process. For example before you get that job you need to have a number of in-person interviews, phone interviews, people looking at your resume, and making contact with potential jobs. Write all the steps out.

Figure out your conversion rates

Now that you have the steps of your job search funnel you can add some numbers to it. For example, let’s hypothetically assume that you need to get 10 interviews to get 3 job offers from which you can pick 1 dream job. So how many phone interviews do you need to have? You can estimate that number after conducting maybe a few of them and measuring your current conversion rate. You can do similar calculations for the other steps of funnel.

Network size

One of the most important numbers to consider during your job search is the size of your network. While I don’t advocate arbitrarily connecting with everyone on LinkedIn, strategically leverage your network to grow the amount of referrals. Keep in mind that every connection in your network has multiple connections of their own – so this number will grow exponentially as you build your first level connections.

It’s all about trial and error

As you start figuring out the numbers that hopefully get you your desired result, feel free to tweak the numbers in your funnel to better reflect the reality of what you’re seeing. This is a fluid process you can improve on each week and each month.

Everyone’s job search funnel will be unique according to your circumstances, abilities, and effort. However, thinking about the job search in terms of numbers will help because it will give you a sense of control over the process. You can tweak certain parts of the funnel to achieve the results you want.