Hey Reader,

I’ve spent this week building something new, and it sent me back about six years.

Back to when I was in the gambling industry, applying for football jobs, and hearing nothing at all.

I had a sports coaching degree. Specialised in performance analysis.

Little of it was any use for recruitment analysis. Because it wasn't really a publicly knowledge at the time. There were little resources for recruitment analysis.

I’d done placements at Leeds and Bradford on the performance side. Didn’t enjoy it. I didn’t want that long term.

So there I was. Six years into Sky Bet, wanting to work in football, with no idea how.

I couldn’t code.

I didn’t know what Tableau was.

I’d never worked inside a club on the recruitment side.

And I didn’t know one person who could tell me what to do about any of it.

Roughly, this is what I looked like.

Four areas. Twelve things inside them. Almost all of it at zero.

The thing I've been building is a free assessment across those same four areas. Twelve questions, a couple of minutes. Click here if you want to take it for yourself.​

What I did about it was apply for jobs.

More applications. A better CV. Cover letters I spent whole evenings on. Roles I had no business going for.

Nothing came back, and the silence made me try harder at the same thing.

I did some daft stuff around then, too.

I once tagged twenty people in a post hoping they’d notice me. They didn’t. A couple of them blocked me.

That’s what it looks like when you want something badly and have no idea how it works.

What actually changed things was a lot simpler.

I started asking people basic questions. Where do you get the data. How do you get it into something usable. What are you making those visuals with.

This helped me learn, and also grow my network.

Then I copied what I saw them doing. Recruitment plans on Nottingham Forest, out in public, for free, with almost nobody watching.

The work wasn’t good at first. It didn’t need to be.

It needed to exist somewhere new people could find it.

It still took over two years. But the reason I ended up working in football full time is that a head of recruitment already knew my work before we’d ever spoken.

That’s the whole point, really.

I was never short of effort. I just put it in the wrong place for a long time, because I couldn’t see which part of that picture was actually stopping me.

You don't know, what you don't know at the end of the day.

Liam