The Rule of Three

Most job applications are cover letters for the wrong job.

Sending your CV to twenty positions and hoping one fits is a volume strategy that signals, to every hiring manager who reads it, that none of them were chosen. The CV that fits everything fits nothing. And yet the default advice, from career coaches, from well-meaning colleagues, from every article about “maximising your chances,” is to send more. Apply widely. Cast a wide net. The net metaphor is the tell. You cast nets for fish you haven’t chosen yet.

The first decision in a job search is the one most people skip: what do you actually want, and what can you actually do at a level someone would pay for. Not what sounds good on a CV. Not what you’ve done before by accident. What you want and what you’re genuinely good at. Write both down. If the list is short, that’s useful information. If the two lists barely overlap, that’s the real problem, and no volume of applications will fix it.

Apply to two jobs, maximum three. The three where both lists align.

Before you send anything, sit with the job description long enough to feel the tension in it. Every role description is written by someone who knows what they lost when the last person left, or what they never had and need now. Read it for that. What does this company need someone to solve, and do you solve it. If the answer requires you to squint at your own experience and interpret it generously, the answer is probably no.

The overlap between what they need and what you want has to be real before you apply. A thin overlap doesn’t become a good job after you accept the offer. It becomes a role you perform without conviction, in a company that can tell, until one of you ends it.

The CV is not a record of everything you’ve done. It’s an argument that you are the right fit for this specific role.

Most CVs are archives. Chronological lists of titles, responsibilities, and outputs, formatted to look comprehensive. A comprehensive CV signals that you haven’t chosen. The hiring manager reads it and sees someone who might fit, somewhere, somehow. That somewhere is never a specific enough reason to call.

Rebuild the CV for the role. Keep what’s relevant, cut what isn’t, foreground the evidence that speaks to their specific problem. A CV built for one role will feel different to the person reading it. They won’t always know why. They’ll feel chosen, because they were.

Before you send it, ask someone whose judgment you trust to read it cold and name the three strongest elements and the three biggest weaknesses. A trusted colleague works. An AI tool works too if you prompt it precisely: give it the job description and your CV and ask for both. Write down all six. The weaknesses will surface in the interview whether you prepare for them or not. The strengths won’t, unless you name them deliberately.

The interview is where most people lose what the CV earned.

They arrive prepared to answer questions. The better preparation is to arrive knowing what you want to leave behind. Three things. The three attributes that matter most for this role, that you can demonstrate with specific evidence, that you want in the room after you’ve left. Every answer is an opportunity to return to one of the three. Not mechanically, not as a script. As someone who knows what they bring and keeps finding ways to show it.

The hardest question in most interviews is also the laziest one: where do you see yourself in five years. It’s lazy because it’s rarely about five years. It’s about whether you’re committed, whether you think in terms of growth, whether the company is a stepping stone or a destination in your mind. Most candidates answer it literally, which produces answers that are either unconvincing or accidentally honest in ways they didn’t intend.

Reframe it. Tell them you want to answer from a different angle, and then give them three levels.

The first level is immediate: what you deliver in the first six months. Specific outcomes, specific problems solved, specific things the team has that they don’t have now. This tells them you’ve thought about the role concretely, not abstractly.

The second level is medium term: what you build in two years. Skills developed, relationships established, systems improved. What looks different in the company because you were there long enough to shape something.

The third level is longer: what the company has at five years because you were part of it. This is the level where you speak to the company’s direction, not just your career. It requires you to have done the work before the interview, to know where the company is going and to have a genuine view on how you fit that trajectory.

Each level has to be specific to their business. Specific enough that you couldn’t have said it about a different company in the same industry. If you can, you haven’t done the (home)work.

The three-level answer does something else, quieter than the content. It shows how you think. It shows that you hold short, medium, and long term in your head at the same time, that you don’t optimise for one at the expense of the others. That’s what most hiring decisions are actually about. Not whether you have the skills on paper, but whether you think in a way the company needs.

After the interview, most people wait.

Send a short note the same day. Thank them for the time, one sentence, without performing gratitude. Then use two or three sentences to remind them of the three things you want them to carry. Not a summary of what you discussed. A final, quiet argument for why those three things matter to their specific situation, stated as if you’re still in the room.

The note does two things. It separates you from the candidates who don’t send one, which is most of them. And it gives the hiring manager something concrete to bring into the conversation with whoever else is deciding. People who make hiring decisions talk to each other. Give them your argument in a form they can repeat.

Volume feels productive because it feels like action. Sending twenty applications in a week produces the sensation of momentum. What it produces in practice is twenty signals that you haven’t chosen, arriving at twenty inboxes where someone is looking for exactly the opposite.

Precision feels risky because it requires you to decide before you know the outcome. Three applications means three chances, and three chances feels like not enough. But three applications built with this kind of care, for roles where the overlap is real, produce a different kind of conversation. One where you walk in already knowing what you’re there to argue.

Every hiring manager who reads a CV built for them specifically knows the difference in the first thirty seconds. Or even twenty…