3 rings. But 1 rules them all.

An email landed in my inbox this week that stopped me mid-coffee.

It opened with a line I didn't expect: "There's one kind of person who will never be my client… or my friend. A victim."

Harsh. It stuck with me anyway.

I see good PMs falling into a similar trap every single week.

The market gives you every reason to fall into it.

Roles get pulled. Recruiters go silent for weeks. You reach the final round and lose to "someone with a bit more experience."

So much of this is genuinely out of your hands.

Navigating the job market is easier when you focus on the parts that are.

It's not your CV.

It's not your network.

It's not even how good a PM you are.

It's whether you believe you have agency.

Psychologists call it an internal locus of control—the belief that your actions, not luck, drive your results.

Here’s a way to think about it:

First: could you do something this week to make your job search worse?

You’re nodding your head, aren’t you?

Then: could you do something this week to make it better?

Still nodding your head, right?

You just admitted you’re in control.

Not of everything.

Of enough.

Enough that what you do this week can make next week look different.

Picture your job search as three rings:

I didn’t do well in handwriting growing up, okay?

There’s what’s outside your control

The hiring freeze. The 600 other applicants. Whether the recruiter ever replies. Experience you don’t have. Ghost jobs (I hear that one a lot).

Then there are things you can influence.

What a hiring manager remembers about you. How a panel reads your evidence.

And finally the stuff within your control.

The roles you target. The stories you prepare. The questions you ask. Your follow-ups. The network you have (or keep building).

Too many job seekers waste their time, emotions, and energy into the outer ring.

The more you live out there, the more powerless you feel.

Most job-search advice tells you to do more. More applications. More outreach. More volume.

When you're stuck at the final round, more volume is the wrong lever.

I want you to spend less time focusing on the things you can’t control, and more on the things you can.

In practice, it looks like this:

You can't make a recruiter reply.
You can close your outreach with one specific, ask.

You can't add five years of experience.
You can change how clearly you make them picture you doing the job.

You can't control the panel's mood.
You can walk in knowing the biggest problem that role exists to solve.

If you're not sure what to fix first, start with the questions you ask. I put together a full set of questions to ask your interviewers for exactly this.

One more thing, because it's the part people resist.

The belief that you're in complete control isn't always true.

Some of this really is luck and timing, and I won't pretend otherwise.

But believing you have agency is almost always more useful than believing you don't.

It points you at the one ring you can actually move.

Pick one move this week that sits completely inside your control.

Just one.

Maybe you rewrite your three best stories to open with the result.

Maybe you send two outreach messages with an ask.

Maybe you ask your next interviewer what problem the role really needs to solve.

The market is genuinely hard right now.

You're not powerless in it.

Work the ring that's yours.

Wishing you success,

James