Since May of this year, when I completely went “on my own” after over seven years of full-time employment, including three years as a Data Architect, I have had even more time to observe the market. Developing KajoData and KajoDataSpace full-time, I talk daily with people who want to break into the data industry. I have noticed a very repetitive pattern. Looking for a job is not just an action you perform. It is a specific skill, almost a craft.
Just like in RPG games, people who are looking for a job are at a specific level of advancement. The higher your level, the faster and more effectively you land your dream role. You don’t have to be at the very top immediately to succeed, but the difference in results between someone at level two and level four is colossal. Today, we will go through seven such levels together. I will show you what each of them is about, what mistakes are most commonly made there, and what you need to do to level up. This is especially important now, in mid-2026, when the market is no longer as forgiving of stumbles as it was a few years ago. Let’s begin.
Level 1: The Emotional Lottery and Believing in the Magic of Scale
The first level is, unfortunately, very common. Let’s call it random CV sending, which is entirely motivated and driven by emotions. Imagine a situation: someone has just lost their job, their contract is ending, or they suddenly realize they hate their current occupation. An alarm goes off in their head. Fear, frustration, and sometimes sheer panic appear.
What does such a person do? Driven by a massive impulse, they sit at their computer and in fifteen, maybe twenty minutes, they “cobble together” a document. They type in anything, just to be quick. Often, they use the first available generator or ask artificial intelligence to write a professional summary in two seconds, without even verifying it. Once the document is ready, the great distribution phase begins. This candidate goes to popular job boards and clicks “Apply” wherever possible.
The problem is that at this stage, people often confuse emotions with business reality. They think that since they sent a hundred applications in one evening, they have done a titanic amount of work. They believe that scale and pure statistics will do the trick. “Since I sent so many CVs, someone has to respond eventually.” Unfortunately, in the analytics industry, it doesn’t work that way. Sending an unpolished document to random positions is like throwing peas against a wall.
At this level, the candidate falls into a loop. In the morning, they are full of hope; by noon, they feel discouraged due to a lack of responses; and in the evening, they yield to despair again and send another twenty worthless applications. These actions become regular, but their quality is terrible. It’s like managing social media without any strategy—throwing random photos everywhere hoping someone will finally like them. You are doing more than someone who isn’t looking for a job at all, but your efficiency is close to zero.
Level 2: Polished Documents and Stepping Out of the Shadows
The magic begins to happen when you advance to the second level. Here, the candidate starts to understand that haste is the worst advisor in the recruitment process. Application documents are not created in a quarter of an hour. You dedicate specific hours to them, spread over time. You write a draft CV, sleep on it, read it with a cool head the next morning, and make corrections. Furthermore, you send this CV to a friend or someone in the industry for them to take a look at it.
At the second level, you can say with a clear conscience that your CV looks truly professional. But that’s not all. You also have an updated LinkedIn profile that clearly communicates who you are and where you are heading. You also have a basic portfolio. These don’t have to be exceptionally complex artificial intelligence research projects, but you have a prepared repository on GitHub, or a neat dashboard in Power BI or Tableau that you can show off.
Thanks to this, besides mechanically clicking on ads, you begin to engage with the market. You check what the buzz is on LinkedIn. You start sharing your small successes or projects. You make your first attempts at direct contact with people in the industry. Successes start to appear. With a good scale of action, a bit of patience, and a reasonable match between your skills and the role you are applying for, getting a job becomes highly probable.
I will allow myself a brief digression here. If you are at a stage where you need solid technical knowledge to even build that portfolio, remember that on KajoData.com you will find plenty of materials about data analysis. And if you care about comprehensive support and being part of a community that will push you forward, it is worth looking into the KajoDataSpace initiative.
Level 3: Sniper Targeting, or Tailoring to the Offer
Level three is the moment when you stop shooting blind and start using a sniper scope. The key here is optimizing your CV for a specific job offer. However, analysts often fall into a zero-sum thinking trap here. They think they have only two options: either send the same universal CV everywhere, or write a completely new document from scratch for every single offer, which consumes gigantic amounts of time.
The golden mean lies in the process. A candidate at the third level has one very solid, base CV. The difference is that they also have a developed, repeatable mechanism for modifying it. When they see an interesting offer, they don’t wonder all over again: “What should I include here, and what should I throw out?”. Instead, they can efficiently extract keywords from the ad and adjust their base documents to answer the specific pain points and needs of the employer.
Nowadays, artificial intelligence tools are a huge help in this. Skillful use of AI to quickly rephrase points in your experience so they resonate stronger with the offer allows you to maintain a large scale of sent applications without losing their quality. Such effort is immediately visible on the other side. A hiring manager browsing hundreds of identical documents will instantly notice a person who took the trouble to adapt. They see the keywords from their ad; they see the technologies they asked for. This radically increases the so-called “response rate,” which is the rate of responses to your applications.
Level 4: Metrics and Process, or Recruitment Engineering
Level four is, in my opinion, the best compromise for most people. It already requires some advancement, but it doesn’t consume as much energy as it might seem at first glance. The secret of this level lies in a paradigm shift: job hunting stops being a chaotic sprint and becomes a structured process.
This does not mean you sit from dawn till dusk refreshing job boards. It means that in addition to a great CV, a portfolio, and tailored documents, you start tracking your actions. You create a spreadsheet where you note: where you applied, for what position, when, whether there was a response, and at what stage you dropped out.
As a data analyst, you begin to analyze your own recruitment process. You wonder where the “bottleneck” is. If you see in your spreadsheet that you are easily invited to initial HR interviews but always fail after them, the conclusion is simple: your soft skills and presentation method are lacking. You need to practice speaking. If you fail technical SQL tests, it means you must stop sending CVs, lock yourself away for a week, and do advanced database exercises. Conversely, if you have zero response with a large scale of sending tailored applications, your CV is probably still illegible to ATS systems or recruiters.
By having a defined process, you actually work less, contrary to appearances. Just like me when creating KajoData. If I had to reinvent how to set up the lighting for a video, how to edit the material, and how to publish a course on the platform every single time, I would be working twenty hours a day. Process, procedures, and repeatability give freedom and comfort, allowing you to avoid burnout during your search.
Level 5: Breaking Introversion and the Hidden Job Market
Level five is the moment when you have to face your ego and natural introversion. For many, especially in the IT and data analytics world, this is an incredibly difficult barrier to force through. Why? Because when looking for a job, we put ourselves in the position of a requester, which automatically causes discomfort.
A candidate at this level does not differ technically from a candidate at level four. They have the same process, the same documents, and the same portfolio. The difference is that they stop waiting for someone to find them. They start actively and smartly engaging with internal recruiters on LinkedIn. They reach out to old friends from university or previous jobs with a simple message: “Hi, I am looking for challenges in the data area; let me know if they are looking for someone at your companies.”
Such an action opens doors to the so-called hidden job market. Very many positions never make it to public job boards because recruitments are closed internally through employee referrals. By being active and expanding your network, you make it possible for someone to recommend you. Even if a referral does not guarantee employment, it almost always guarantees that your CV will be read by a decision-maker. At level five, you stop being a lonely island in the recruitment process.
Level 6: Radical Development and Working on the “Wow Factor”
At the sixth level, we enter the territory of outstanding professionals. This is the stage where you multiply all the previously mentioned actions. Your process is optimized to the limit, you have a great contact spreadsheet (your own recruitment CRM), and you radically raise the bar when it comes to what you show off.
A portfolio at this level is no longer just “to have one.” A candidate at the sixth level doesn’t upload simple scripts from a YouTube tutorial to GitHub, nor another sales dashboard generated from a free Titanic dataset that looks exactly like thousands of others. This person builds projects that solve real business problems. They show that they can acquire non-obvious data, clean it, draw unconventional conclusions, and present them in a way that knocks you off your feet.
A candidate at this level wants to show that they care in an above-standard way. They reach out to recruiters with concrete ideas on how they could improve work in their department. This is an extremely rare approach, but incredibly effective. It requires hard work, massive determination, and the elimination of wishful thinking and excuses.
At this level, you stop yielding to your own emotions and saying: “The market is against me, there are no offers for juniors, nobody wants me.” If you fall into such a trap of self-pity, you will feel better for five minutes, but you will drastically lower your effectiveness. Level six is about taking full responsibility for your development.
Level 7: “Category of One”, or Creating Your Own Job
We have reached the ultimate level, the seventh. Let’s be honest: this level is extremely difficult to achieve for someone just entering the industry. It is reserved for people with a unique intersection of competencies. However, I mention it to show you where the absolute ceiling and horizon of your professional development lie.
At this level, you are de facto not looking for a job for open positions. You create these positions for yourself. You possess such a rare and unique set of skills that you become a “category of your own.”
Imagine a person who is a professional sports coach, perfectly understands biomechanics, and at the same time is fluent in Python, SQL, can build cloud infrastructure, and operates advanced machine learning algorithms. When such a person approaches a large football club or esports organization, they do not compete in the race for the “Junior Data Analyst” position. They come with a concrete value proposition. They show their track record—documented past successes. Everyone who talks to them sees clearly that hiring them will pay off manifold.
Applying at this level is extremely precise. You approach companies with a proposal to solve their very specific, painful, and expensive problems. The combination of deep domain knowledge with outstanding technical knowledge means that you stop being a cost for the company and become an investment.
Summary: Time for Verification
We have gone through all seven levels. I strongly encourage you now to do an honest examination of conscience. Think about where you actually are. Many beginner analysts overestimate their level, claiming they have a great CV and process, while in reality, they are stuck between level one and two. You don’t have to aim for level seven right away to drastically change your situation on the job market. It is enough that you reliably close level three or four, and you will see a huge difference in responses from employers.
If you believe this article shed new light on what job hunting should look like and could help someone in your circle, please share it on your social media—on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram. Your support allows me to create more such content and help more people retrain and enter the fascinating world of data. Good luck in your recruitment, and see you on the analytical trail!
The article was written by Kajo Rudziński – analytical data architect, recognized expert in data analysis, creator of KajoData and polish community for analysts KajoDataSpace.
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