Hunting for Opportunities

Hunting for Opportunities

There are two modes of finding work.

When you have money, you buy. Paid job boards. Premium subscriptions. Lead generation tools. Recruiters. You trade cash for access and let other people do the hunting for you.

When you have time, you hunt. You prospect manually. You write proposals. You show up in places where opportunities exist and compete for attention.

Most freelancers in Pakistan are in hunting mode. Money is tight, especially early on. So the question becomes: how do you hunt effectively?

Because there’s a right way and a wrong way to do this. And most people are doing it wrong.

The Platform Hierarchy

Not all platforms are created equal. Your effort should follow a clear priority order.

LinkedIn comes first.

This is counterintuitive for a lot of Pakistani freelancers who think of LinkedIn as a place to post motivational quotes and congratulate people on work anniversaries. It’s not. LinkedIn is the single most powerful platform for remote work if you use it correctly.

Here’s why. Every company that hires remotely has decision makers on LinkedIn. Hiring managers. Founders. Team leads. These people post about their problems, their projects, their open roles. And unlike Upwork or Fiverr, you’re not competing in a marketplace where the lowest bidder often wins. You’re building relationships with people who can hire you directly.

The ROI on time spent on LinkedIn is higher than any other platform. But it requires a different approach than job boards. You’re not applying. You’re connecting, engaging, and positioning yourself until the right opportunity appears.

Upwork comes second.

Upwork gets a bad reputation, mostly from people who don’t know how to use it. Yes, there’s a race to the bottom on price. Yes, there are clients who want the moon for fifty dollars. But there’s also serious money on Upwork if you know where to look and how to position yourself.

The key is selectivity. You’re not applying to everything. You’re applying to ten to fifteen proposals per week, max. Each one tailored. Each one demonstrating that you actually read the job post and understand what the client needs.

Fifty proposals with a spray and pray approach will get you nowhere. Ten proposals where you clearly stand out will get you interviews.

Fiverr comes third.

Fiverr works differently. You’re not hunting. You’re setting traps. You create gigs, optimize them, and wait for buyers to find you.

This is useful as a passive income stream once you have reviews and momentum. But it’s a terrible place to start from zero. The algorithm buries new sellers. The race to the bottom on pricing is even worse than Upwork. And the buyer expectations are often unrealistic because Fiverr has trained them to expect fast and cheap.

Use Fiverr as a supplement, not a primary strategy.

Everything else comes fourth.

Wellfound for startup jobs. Swooped for curated remote listings. Braintrust for Web3 and tech roles. These are worth checking, but they shouldn’t consume your daily effort. Treat them as bonus opportunities, not core channels.

The RSS Feed Hack

Most job boards have RSS feeds. Nobody uses them.

This is a mistake.

Set up an RSS reader. Add feeds from every job board relevant to your skill. Now instead of manually checking ten different sites every day, you have a single stream of new opportunities delivered to you.

This saves hours per week. Hours you can reinvest into writing better proposals or building better materials.

The tools are free. Feedly works. Inoreader works. The setup takes thirty minutes. The payoff lasts as long as you’re hunting.

Proposals Are Not Cover Letters

A proposal is not a cover letter.

A cover letter is about you. Your background. Your experience. Your interest in the role.

A proposal is about them. Their problem. Their project. Their specific situation.

Most freelancers write cover letters and call them proposals. They open with “I am a highly skilled professional with X years of experience in Y.” Nobody cares. The client has fifty other proposals that start the same way.

A good proposal opens with the client’s problem. It demonstrates that you understand what they’re trying to accomplish. It positions your experience as relevant to their specific situation. And it makes the next step obvious.

Write proposals. Not cover letters.

The Easy Apply Trap

Easy Apply is a trap.

On LinkedIn, Wellfound, and most job boards, there’s a button that lets you apply in one click. Your profile gets sent to the hiring manager automatically. No cover letter required. No tailoring. Just click and move on.

This feels productive. You can apply to fifty jobs in an hour.

But here’s what actually happens. The hiring manager gets two hundred Easy Apply submissions. Most of them are completely untailored. They blur together into noise. The people who stand out are the ones who took the time to write a real message.

Easy Apply is a dopamine hit disguised as job hunting. You feel like you’re making progress because you’re taking action. But the action is worthless.

If a job is worth applying to, it’s worth ten minutes of your time to write something real. If it’s not worth ten minutes, don’t apply at all.

Managing Your Time

Job hunting can consume infinite time if you let it.

Set boundaries. One to two hours per day maximum for active hunting. More than that and you’re probably doom scrolling job boards instead of doing focused work.

Structure your hunting time. First fifteen minutes: check RSS feeds for new opportunities. Next forty five minutes: write two to three tailored proposals or outreach messages. Last fifteen minutes: engage on LinkedIn, comment on relevant posts, nurture connections.

That’s it. Anything beyond this is usually procrastination dressed up as productivity.

The rest of your day should go toward building. Building your portfolio. Building your skills. Building the materials that make you hireable. Hunting without materials is just begging.

Building The Materials

Before you hunt, you need ammunition.

A portfolio that shows relevant work. Not everything you’ve ever done. Just the work that proves you can solve the specific problems your target clients have.

Case studies that explain your process. Not just screenshots of deliverables. The thinking behind them. The problems you solved. The results you achieved.

A LinkedIn profile that positions you clearly. Not a resume dump. A clear statement of who you help and how you help them.

A proposal template you can customize quickly. Not copy-paste. A structure that lets you tailor efficiently without starting from scratch every time.

These materials are not optional. They’re the difference between hunting successfully and hunting endlessly.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Most people who struggle to find work don’t have a hunting problem.

They have a positioning problem. A materials problem. A “I haven’t actually figured out who I help and why they should choose me” problem.

Hunting is the easy part. You show up, you apply, you follow up. The hard part is having something worth buying when you show up.

If your proposals aren’t landing, the problem usually isn’t the proposals. It’s what’s behind them.

Fix that first. Then hunt.

With or without my help – I wish you the best.

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