Last updated: August 2026
The reflex move is to open your CV, spend a Sunday night rewriting it, change your LinkedIn headline, and start applying. Do it in that order and you end up sending your CV to roles you would not take, before you can describe what you actually want.
Here is the order I use with candidates in building products, lighting and A&D. It starts before you touch a single document.
How do you know if you are ready to look at all?
You do not, until you have tested it properly, and that test comes before everything else on this page.
I built a readiness check for exactly this. Work through it first. If you come out the other side still weighing up whether the problem in your current role is fixable or structural, that decision has its own page in the hiring guide, knowing when to move. Once you have decided to look, the rest of this page is the order to work in.
What should you do first when you start looking for a new job?
Speak to a specialist recruiter in your area before you change anything. The job of that first conversation is a market read. Ask someone who works your area how your experience will be read right now, which of your salary assumptions need checking, and where your background will raise questions you want an answer ready for.
Two things make this conversation worth having. Pick someone who works your specific area, because a generalist cannot tell you what a specification manager's background is worth against a BDM's. And be upfront that you are early and gathering information. Any recruiter worth speaking to will still take the call. This is an information conversation. It does not have to be me. Speak to the recruiter who knows your part of the market best. The agency process itself, and what you should expect from a recruiter once a live role is in play, is covered in working with a recruiter.
The other reason to start here is simple. Roles in building products, lighting and A&D get filled without ever being advertised. It happens from a shortlist a recruiter already had, or from a conversation that started long before the role existed. I am not going to tell you how often, because I do not have a clean enough count of my own briefs to publish one and I am not going to borrow someone else's number. What I can tell you is that a job board will never show you one of those roles, because there is nothing on it to see.
If you want to start there, my candidate page has how I work and how to get a conversation booked.
What should your brief for the move contain?
Write down what you want before you write anything you send out. The brief is the document that stops you applying for roles you would turn down, and it is the step I most often have to send people back to do.
I have already covered what belongs in it, in detail, inside my guide to running a job search without burning bridges. The short version: the role you want, your must-haves, your deal breakers, your route to market, locations and travel, your notice period, and any bonus or commission dates worth timing around. Go and build it there.
Do this before the CV, not after. If you rewrite your CV first, you will write it for the job you have rather than the one you want, and you will end up redoing it.
When should you update your CV?
After the market conversation and after the brief, because both of them change what goes in it. Once you know what you are aiming at, the CV becomes a much easier document to write, because you know what to lead with.
The mistake I see most often in this area is a CV that lists responsibilities. Nobody hiring a salesperson cares which accounts you were given. They care what happened to them. Numbers, products, sectors, project names where you are allowed to use them.
I built a free AI prompt that does this properly, the Resume Builder, in the AI toolkit on this site. Feed it your current document and the brief you just wrote.
What should you change on your LinkedIn profile?
Your headline, your About section and the way your current role is described, in that order. In my own searches, those are what decide whether you appear at all and what the person who found you reads first.
My LinkedIn guide, in the resources section of this site, covers the strategy across seven parts, and there is a profile builder in there that will do the rewriting with you. What I want to explain here is why any of it matters, because the reason is not obvious from the outside.
How do recruiters actually find you?
By searching keywords on the back end of Seek and LinkedIn, using paid access that most people do not know exists. This is my own experience of sitting on the buying side of those tools, not something either platform publishes, so take it as what I see rather than as documented fact.
Here is what that means in practice. When I am working a role, I am not scrolling my feed hoping to spot you. I am running keyword searches across a candidate database, and the results come back ranked. Your profile either contains the words I am searching or it does not. If you describe yourself as a "commercially minded sales professional" and I am searching for the product category you actually sell, you are invisible to me, no matter how good you are.
I have seen recently active profiles move in my search results, including after job-ad activity. I cannot see what caused it, so I would not treat activity as a ranking rule or try to game it.
Get the words right first. That is the part you can control, and it decides whether you match the search at all.
There is a second thing worth knowing here, and it cuts the other way.
Can your employer tell that you are looking?
Neither platform documents an alert to your employer for an ordinary profile edit, and I have never seen one happen. That is an absence of documentation rather than a guarantee, so treat it as low risk rather than no risk.
The setting that does carry a risk is Open to Work. If you set it to all LinkedIn members, LinkedIn is clear that this includes recruiters and people at your current company, and it adds the green photo frame. If you set it to recruiters only, LinkedIn says it takes steps to hide it from recruiters at your current employer, and then says in its own help documentation that it cannot guarantee complete privacy. Read that sentence twice before you rely on the setting. It works off whichever employer your profile says you currently work for, so it is only as good as the profile.
The other thing to keep clean is your equipment. Assume anything you do on a work device, a work email address or a work connection can be seen by your employer, because in Australia it generally can be where you have been told about the monitoring. Use your own phone, your own email address and your own connection for all of it.
How do you start speaking to people without word getting out?
Carefully, and in an order you decide in advance. This is the point where a search stops being preparation and becomes visible to other people, and it is where a careless search does its damage.
Building products, lighting and A&D are small areas. The specifier you speak to today drinks with your state manager. I have written the whole method for handling this properly, including how to tier the companies you approach, the rules to set with recruiters before you give anyone your CV, and how to finish cleanly when you do move. It is in the bridges guide linked earlier on this page, and that guide is where step six lives in full.
How should you keep track of it all?
In one place, from the first conversation, because you will lose the thread otherwise. Who has your CV, who sent it where, what was said about money, when you agreed to follow up.
I built a job search tracker as a Google Sheet you can copy and use. It stops an avoidable mistake, which is two recruiters sending you to the same company.
The order, in one place
- Test whether you are ready to move at all.
- Speak to a specialist recruiter in your area, for a market read rather than a role.
- Write your brief for the move.
- Update your CV against the brief.
- Update your LinkedIn, starting with the words people search for.
- Start speaking to people discreetly, in an order you set.
Three of those are on this page. Two of them are in the bridges guide. One of them is a tool. Applying for jobs is deliberately absent from the list, because the work you do in this order is what decides whether the applications are any good.