After I got fired I went to the unemployment office. No savings, no plan. Then on a Sunday afternoon I saw a Facebook post from a small digital marketing agency hiring new people. I went to their site, filled out a form with thirty questions, and waited.

A few days later I got a rejection letter. But also an invite into their private Facebook group. The following Sunday at 15:10 they posted that they needed some help. I saw it at 15:11 and responded. They invited me to come over as soon as possible.

The work was monkey copy-paste stuff. But I got talking with one of the founders, and he later told me he had no idea how they'd missed my application. I was still on unemployment pay for the next two months, so I offered to work for free to get experience. They accepted. In about fifteen days they offered me a position.

That job was never listed anywhere.

A year and a half later, a girl I'd worked with there left for another company. After a month her boss asked if she knew anyone smart enough to recommend to Publicis, where he used to work. They'd called him back but couldn't match his salary. She recommended me. He recommended me. I ended up in an interview for a position that was never posted publicly.

That job was never listed either.

From Publicis I went to the company where she worked. From there I got headhunted to another. Then I went consulting. Then I got headhunted for the last position.

Every single move happened through someone who had already seen me work.

Here's the mechanism I didn't understand until I looked at the whole chain at once. I thought career progress was about qualifications, CVs, applying to the right listing at the right time. It's not. Every meaningful job I've had came from one thing: someone who'd seen me work deciding I was worth mentioning when an opportunity came up. Not when I asked. Not when I was in the room. When I wasn't there and my name surfaced anyway.

That changes what actually matters about how you work. The listing is a lottery. The interview is a performance. But the recommendation happens on a Tuesday afternoon when nothing important is going on. It's based on whether you were reliable when it was boring. Whether you made things easier or harder for the people around you. Whether someone trusted you enough to attach their own reputation to your name.

Nobody recommends someone because of their CV. They recommend someone because working with them was better than working without them. That judgment gets made quietly, over months, in moments you don't notice. And it follows you further than any application ever will.

The move I took from this is something I still do. Every few months I ask myself: if someone I've worked with got a call tomorrow asking if they knew anyone good, would my name come up? And if it did, what would they actually say? Not the polished version. The real one. What was I like on a normal day. Whether I followed through. Whether I made their job easier or added to the noise.

If the honest answer isn't something I'd want repeated, that's the thing to fix. Not the CV. Not the LinkedIn profile. The Tuesday afternoon version of how I show up.