Hey ,
I had a call over the weekend with someone trying to break into recruitment analysis.
Three rejections in a week. None of them told him why.
He thought he was doing something wrong.
He wasn’t. Not really.
The Easy No
Here’s something I said to him on the call that I think every aspiring recruitment analyst or scout needs to hear.
If you walked into my football club and applied for a role today, it would be an easy no for me. Not because you’re not capable. Not because your background is wrong. Not because you haven’t put the effort in.
It would be an easy no because when I looked at your profile, I couldn’t see how your skills translate into football.
That’s the actual blocker. Not the application. What surrounds it.
Three Things They’re Looking For
When a head of recruitment opens your application or your LinkedIn, they’re trying to do one job. Build an association between you and the role they need to fill.
Three things make that association possible.
The first is experience inside football. Most people reading this won’t have it yet, and that’s fine. It’s the hardest one to get and the one I had least of when I started too.
The second is visible work that shows your skills applied to football. A scout report. A player rating model. A piece of analysis on a player or a tactical idea. Something that lets a stranger see your thinking in a football context.
The third is a network with people who can vouch for you. Not a transactional ask. Genuine relationships built through engaging with people’s work, showing up consistently, and being someone they’re glad to know.
If you don’t have at least two of those three, the no is easy. It isn’t personal. There’s nothing to grab onto.
Silence Isn’t a Verdict
The painful bit is the silence. No feedback. No “thanks for applying, here’s what was missing.” Just nothing.
Most clubs at Championship level and below don’t have anyone whose job it is to write you a thoughtful rejection. The people making the call are also running the recruitment department. The path of least resistance is to not reply.
Read that line again, because it’s the point of this email.
It’s not that you weren’t good enough. It’s that the person making the decision had no reason to find out either way.
What to Do Instead
The instinct, when applications go nowhere, is to send more applications. Tighten the cover letter. Reformat the CV. Apply to more roles in more leagues.
I’d argue that’s almost always the wrong move.
Applying to roles is the slowest, lowest-conversion way into football. The fastest way in is making yourself easy to say yes to before anyone needs to.
That means showing your skills applied to football, publicly, so the work is doing the introduction for you. It means engaging genuinely with the people who’d hire you, long before you have anything to ask of them. It means being part of the conversation, even quietly, by the time the role opens.
Then when you do apply, the no isn’t easy anymore. There’s a face. A body of work. A context.
The Takeaway
If your applications keep going into a void, don’t read it as a verdict on you. Read it as a missing association.
The work isn’t to send more applications. It’s to make yourself impossible to ignore before you send the next one.
Liam
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