A Practical Guide to Getting Paid While Everyone Else Is Refreshing Their Cover Letter
Ah… it’s another Monday.
You spend three hours tailoring a resume for a role that may or may not exist. You write a cover letter that threads the needle between “confident professional” and “please, I have rent.” You submit through an applicant tracking system that was designed, apparently, by someone who actively hates human beings. Then you wait.
And wait.
Then you get a rejection email that’s so automated it doesn’t even include your name correctly. Or worse, you get nothing at all. The application disappears into a void so complete it makes you question whether the job posting was ever real, or if it was just some sort of elaborate psychological experiment being conducted on the American workforce.
Meanwhile, somewhere in a glass-walled conference room, a hiring manager is telling their team that “there’s just no good talent out there.”
This is the job market in 2026. It is, to use the technical term, absolutely brutal.
Here’s what I’m going to tell you: stop doing that.
Not because perseverance isn’t a virtue. Not because the job market will magically improve if you just believe in yourself hard enough. But because you’re playing a game that’s been fundamentally rigged against you, and there’s a side door that almost nobody is talking about.
The actual way to get a job right now is to not get a job.
Stay with me.
The Great Hiring Paralysis
Something strange is happening in corporate America, and once you understand it, you’ll see opportunity where everyone else sees a wall.
Companies need things done. They have problems. Real, expensive, urgent problems. Marketing campaigns that aren’t converting. Technology systems that need building. Operations that need unfucking. Creative work that needs creating. The work hasn’t disappeared. If anything, there’s more of it than ever.
But hiring? Hiring has become corporate kryptonite.
Here’s what’s happening behind closed doors in conference rooms you’ll never see: executives are terrified. Not of the work—of the commitment. The AI transition has everyone’s underwear in a twist. Nobody knows which roles are going to exist in eighteen months. Nobody wants to build a team today that becomes obsolete tomorrow. The uncertainty isn’t a bug; it’s the entire operating system right now.
And then there’s the employee burden. Oh, the employee burden.
Every full-time hire comes with a bureaucratic tail that would make Kafka weep with recognition. There’s onboarding. There’s HR paperwork. There’s benefits administration. There’s payroll taxes. There’s insurance. There’s the legal exposure. There’s the knowledge that if this person doesn’t work out, there’s going to be a performance improvement plan and documentation and more HR involvement and potential unemployment claims and the whole grinding machinery of employment law.
A hiring manager once told me, only half-joking, that bringing on a new full-time employee requires roughly the same emotional commitment as adopting a medium-sized dog from a shelter with behavioral issues. You’re responsible for this creature now. Forever. Or at least until the relationship deteriorates to the point where separation becomes more painful than continuation, which is its own special kind of awful.
So what do companies do? They freeze. They post jobs but don’t fill them. They interview endlessly, searching for a mythical candidate who is somehow both a unicorn and also willing to accept a salary from 2017. They wait. And wait. And wait some more.
But here’s the thing: the problems don’t wait. The problems keep getting worse. The marketing still isn’t converting. The technology still needs building. The operations remain thoroughly fucked.
This is where you walk in through the side door.
The Reframe: Same You, Different Packaging
What if I told you that the same companies ghosting your job applications would happily pay you money—sometimes quite a lot of money—to solve their problems, starting as soon as next week?
The difference isn’t your skills. The difference isn’t your experience. The difference isn’t even the work itself.
The difference is how you’re packaged.
When you apply for a job, you’re asking a company to make a long-term commitment to you as a human being. You’re asking them to bet on your future. You’re asking them to absorb all the risk and all the overhead and all the bureaucratic nightmare that comes with bringing someone into the organizational family.
When you show up as a consultant, you’re offering something entirely different. You’re offering a solution to a specific problem, delivered over a specific timeframe, for a specific price. You’re offering low commitment. You’re offering an easy yes.
Three months. One quarter. A defined engagement with a defined scope and a defined end date.
There’s no onboarding dance. There’s no benefits negotiation. There’s no worrying about whether they’ll have to fire you someday. There’s just: here’s a problem, here’s someone who can solve it, here’s what it costs, here’s when it’s done.
For a company paralyzed by hiring anxiety, this is like offering a glass of water to someone dying of thirst. They’re not committing to you forever. They’re committing to a quarter. And if the AI apocalypse comes in month four, well, your contract already ended anyway. No harm, no foul, no unemployment claim.
The irony is almost beautiful: by asking for less commitment upfront, you often end up getting more opportunity overall.
Building Your Consultant Identity
Here’s where people get stuck. They think becoming a consultant requires some kind of mystical transformation. They imagine they need certifications or decades of experience or a corner office with a view. They think there’s a gate somewhere with a gatekeeper demanding credentials.
There isn’t.
Update you LinkedIn bio, get a check cut, and boom, you’re in business.
Becoming a consultant is primarily a matter of deciding that you are one and then presenting yourself accordingly. This sounds flippant, but it’s genuinely how it works. The difference between “unemployed person looking for work” and “independent consultant with availability” is almost entirely one of positioning and self-presentation.
Let me walk you through how to execute this.
Get a Website
You need one. Just one page. Nothing fancy. Something that looks professional and loads fast and clearly communicates what you do and who you do it for.
Framer, Webflow, Squarespace, Carrd—pick one. They all work. You’re not building a complex web application; you’re building a digital business card that doesn’t embarrass you.
Your website needs three things:
First, a clear statement of what you do. Not a list of skills. Not a resume in paragraph form. A clear articulation of the problem you solve and the value you provide. “I help B2B companies fix their marketing operations and actually start generating leads that don’t suck” is better than “Marketing professional with 8+ years of experience in various marketing disciplines including digital, content, and strategic planning.”
Second, some evidence that you can actually do this. Case studies if you have them. A portfolio if it’s relevant. Testimonials if you can get them. At minimum, a bio that establishes you know what you’re talking about.
Third, a way to contact you. This seems obvious, but you’d be amazed.
That’s it. You don’t need more pages. You don’t need a blog (though it doesn’t hurt). You don’t need fancy animations or video backgrounds or any of that. You need something clean and professional that a decision-maker can look at for thirty seconds and think “yeah, this person seems legitimate.”
Give yourself a promotion
Pick a title to run with. Fractional CMO. Fractional CTO. Marketing Consultant. Creative Director. Operations Strategist. Technology Advisor. Whatever fits what you actually do and sounds like someone a company would pay money to.
The “fractional” framing is particularly useful for executive-level positioning.
A fractional CMO is someone who provides the strategic value of a Chief Marketing Officer without requiring a $300,000 salary and full-time commitment. You’re offering a slice of expertise. A fraction of the role. It’s a built-in explanation of the value proposition.
But pick something. Own it. Put it on your website, your LinkedIn, your email signature. Stop being “seeking new opportunities” and start being “Fractional [Whatever] helping companies [solve specific problem].”
Your pitch
This is crucial. You’re not selling hours, you’re selling impact. You’re selling an outcome delivered over a timeframe for a price.
Here’s why this matters: when you sell hours, you’re inviting endless negotiation and scope creep and the slow erosion of your boundaries. When you sell a packaged outcome, you’re creating clarity. The client knows exactly what they’re getting, exactly what it costs, and exactly when it’s done.
Your three-month package might include a specific deliverable (a complete marketing strategy overhaul, a technology roadmap, an operations audit with implementation), a certain number of hours per week or month, regular check-ins or reports, and defined milestones.
Price it at a number that makes sense for the value you’re providing, not the hourly rate you’d accept as an employee. Remember: you’re solving a problem they can’t solve themselves, without any of the overhead they’d incur by hiring someone full-time. That’s worth something.
How to Reach the Decision-Makers
You’ve got your website. You’ve got your positioning. You’ve got your package. Now comes the part that separates the people who succeed at this from the people who build a website and then wonder why no one’s finding it.
You have to actively go get clients.
I know. Groundbreaking insight. But the number of people who skip this step or half-ass it or try it for two weeks before declaring it doesn’t work is staggering.
Here’s the actual process:
Build Your Target List
Not every company is right for you, and you’re not right for every company. Spend real time thinking about who can actually use what you offer, who has the budget to pay for it, and who you can actually reach.
Industry matters. Company size matters. Growth stage matters. A scrappy startup with twelve employees has different needs and different budget realities than a mid-market company with 500 people.
Start with a list of 50-100 target companies. Yes, that sounds like a lot. You need volume because most of your outreach won’t get responses. This is not a reflection of your worth as a human being; it’s just how outreach works.
Find the Right People
You want to reach decision-makers. Not HR. Not recruiters. Not the generic contact form on the website. You want the person who actually has the problem you solve and the authority to hire someone to fix it.
For marketing consulting, that might be the VP of Marketing, the CMO, or at smaller companies, the CEO or founder. For technology work, the CTO or VP of Engineering. You get the idea.
LinkedIn is your friend here. So is a bit of creative Googling. Finding people’s email addresses is easier than you might think, and there are tools designed specifically for this.
The Outreach Itself
Cold email still works. It works better than most people think, if you do it right.
The key is to not sound like every other piece of spam clogging their inbox. Don’t lead with your resume. Don’t write a novel. Don’t use phrases like “I hope this email finds you well” or “I wanted to reach out to explore potential synergies.”
Lead with something relevant to them. A specific observation about their business. A genuine insight about a problem they might have. Something that demonstrates you’ve done even thirty seconds of research and you’re not just spraying the same message to 10,000 people.
Then make your offer. Clear, concrete, low-commitment. “I help companies like yours [solve specific problem]. If you’re dealing with [symptom of that problem], I’d love to have a quick conversation about how I might help. I do three-month engagements specifically so there’s minimal risk on your end.”
That’s it. Short. Clear. Relevant. Easy to say yes to.
And then you do it again. And again. And again. Volume matters. Persistence matters. The person who sends 100 thoughtful outreach messages will get more responses than the person who sends 10. This is just math.
Phone Calls
Yes, really. The phone still exists. People still answer it sometimes. And a phone call, while more intrusive, is also more memorable. You stand out because almost nobody does this anymore.
I’m not saying cold call exclusively. I’m saying don’t rule it out. Mix it in. Some people will be annoyed. Some people will be impressed by the initiative. You need to be comfortable with both responses.
Either way, you’re already doing a version of this when sending countless resumes or filling job applications. This is just a pivot.
Time To Execute
Let’s say your outreach works. Someone responds. You have a conversation. They’re interested. You close your first three-month contract.
Congratulations. You now have several things you didn’t have before:
Money. Actual money, coming in, on a predictable schedule. This matters a lot.
Credibility. You can now tell future prospects that you’re not just theoretical—you’re actively working with clients. Past tense experience is good, but present tense engagement is better.
Access. You’re inside a company now. You’re learning how they work, who the players are, what their real problems are (spoiler: they have more problems than the one they hired you to solve). You’re building relationships with people who could hire you, refer you, or become your champions.
Options. At the end of three months, you’re not starting from zero. You’re starting from a position of known quantity.
Here’s where the magic happens: once you’ve spent three months solving problems and not being a nightmare to work with, everything changes. The company knows you. They trust you. They’ve seen what you can do. And you have options.
Option A: The Upsell. Your three-month engagement ends, and you propose a longer engagement. Maybe a full year. Maybe an expanded scope. You’ve proven yourself, so the “yes” is much easier than it was the first time.
Option B: The Employment Conversion. Sometimes companies realize that they don’t want to lose you, and they’d rather bring you in-house. If that’s what you want, you’re now negotiating from a position of strength. They already know what they’re getting. There’s no interview uncertainty. The offer conversation is fundamentally different when you’ve already been delivering value for three months.
Option C: The Departure to New Horizons. You complete the engagement, add it to your portfolio of successful work, and go find the next client. Your consulting practice grows. Your reputation builds. Your inbound inquiry volume increases. You stay independent because you prefer it that way.
None of these options are available to someone who’s been applying to jobs and getting rejection emails for six months. All of them are available to someone who got in the door through a low-commitment contract and proved themselves.
One Uncomfortable Truth
I want to be honest with you about something: I don’t actually know how hard the job application process is right now because I don’t do it. I just read about it in the news, on X and on Reddit. It seems like a bloodbath.
The truth is I’ve been self-employed for long enough that my experience is all on the client acquisition side, not the job application side.
But here’s what I do know: People aren’t getting jobs, but I am getting clients.
That might sound like bragging. It’s not meant to. It’s meant to illustrate that the difficulty isn’t “getting paid to do work.” The difficulty is specifically “getting hired as a full-time employee.” These are two different challenges, and one of them seems dramatically easier right now than the other.
The reason is exactly what I’ve been describing. Companies have problems. Companies have money to spend on solving problems. Companies do not have appetite for the commitment, overhead, and risk that comes with traditional employment.
As an independent consultant, you’re offering to solve their problems without triggering any of their commitment anxiety. You’re the easy button. You’re the low-risk option. You’re exactly what they want, packaged exactly how they want to buy it.
The irony is that by asking for less: less commitment, shorter duration, a defined scope, you’ll often end up getting paid faster and sometimes more overall than you would through the traditional hiring.
The Mindset Shift You’ll Need to Make
The hardest part of all of this isn’t the tactical execution. It’s the mental model change.
If you’ve spent your career thinking of yourself as someone who works for companies in exchange for a salary, the idea of positioning yourself as an independent expert who sells outcomes feels like putting on a costume. Imposter syndrome kicks in. You think: who am I to call myself a consultant? Who am I to charge these kinds of rates? What if they find out I’m just a regular person?
But the reality is everyone is just a regular person.
The consultants at McKinsey are regular people with suits and slide decks getting busted using ChatGPT. The freelance designer charging $200/hour is a regular person who learned Figma. The fractional CMO commanding five-figure monthly retainers is a regular person who did marketing for long enough to get good at it.
The “expert” framing isn’t about pretending you know everything. Its all confidence. It’s about acknowledging that you know more about your area than the people who need help in that area. That’s all expertise is. That’s all it’s ever been.
If you have skills that companies pay for and if you’ve ever held a job, then you can package those skills differently. You can sell them as solutions rather than offering them as labor. The value is the same. The packaging is different.
And in this market, the packaging makes all the difference.
Final Word for the Skeptics
Maybe you’re reading this thinking it sounds nice in theory but wondering if it could really work for you. Fair enough. Skepticism is reasonable.
Let me ask you this: how’s the current approach working?
If you’re having great success with traditional job applications, getting interviews, receiving offers, landing positions you’re excited about, then by all means, keep doing that. This article isn’t for you. You’ve found something that works.
But if you’re not. If you’re sending applications into the void. If you’re doing everything “right” and getting nothing back. If you’re watching your savings dwindle while the rejection emails pile up…
What do you have to lose by trying something different?
Put up a simple website. Reframe your positioning. Put together a three-month package. Start reaching out to companies with problems you can solve.
The worst case scenario is that it doesn’t work and you’re back where you started, except now you also have a website and some outreach experience. The best case scenario is that you start getting paid to solve problems, build a client roster, and never have to send another “To Whom It May Concern” application into the digital abyss again.
The job market is brutal. Everyone agrees on that. What not everyone sees is that there’s a door right there, just off to the side, and it’s not even locked.
If you’d like some help executing this plan, getting yourself set up, I’m happy to help coach you, you can reach out to me here: Book a call with me.
