Something to readChanging jobs
What Color Is Your Parachute?
A job-hunting guide built around a detailed inventory of what you want from work
Why it’s worth your time
Bolles's long-running job-hunting guide pairs search advice with a self-assessment of what you care about, where you're at your best and which skills you most want to use. That pairing tends to suit anyone applying widely and hearing little back. You'll likely get more from it as a workbook than as a read.
Figuring out what job to look for
The book · About 7 hours of reading · Buy or borrow
How to get it
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- Do the self-inventory.
Look for Bolles's self-assessment, often called the Flower. It's the part of the book you fill in, more than read, so keep a notebook or the companion workbook beside you.
- Write the three things your next job must have.
From the inventory, pick the three that matter most, such as a kind of problem, a kind of team or a skill you want to use every day. Check each job against them before you apply.
Good moments for this: before a job searchafter a layoffwhen you keep landing jobs that don't fit
Keep going with Truest
Small actions add up. Truest helps you find the next thing worth doing, make the space to do it, and keep a record of your progress. It’s a private place to work on your career, and it’s yours, not your employer’s.
- It actually happensWe’ll put it on your calendar and remind you before it starts.
- The longer sessionCareer Compass is the guided session for working out what you want next.
- It’s yours to keepEach thing you do is saved to your private record, there when your next review or job search comes around.
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Making it work for you
Every workplace is different. Here’s what to think about before you start, and what might get in the way.
Things to think about
It covers seven dimensions, and doing it properly can take several sittings. Spreading it over a couple of weeks may give a truer picture than one long evening.
What might make this harder
Do a one-hour version: your top skills, the colleagues who bring out your best, and the setting you want. Fill in the rest once you're interviewing.
Questions people ask
What is What Color Is Your Parachute? about?
A job-hunting guide by Richard N. Bolles, in print for more than fifty years. It combines advice on networking, résumés, interviews and salary with a self-assessment of your passions, traits and transferable skills.
What is the Flower exercise?
Bolles's self-assessment, which gathers your skills and preferences in one place. A companion workbook lays it out to fill in, alongside exercises on the people you work best with and your transferable skills.
How do I figure out what job to look for?
Describe the work before the title: the skills you want to use, the kind of people and the setting. Then look for roles that match the description, whatever they're called.
What it says, and how it holds up
Applying for everything you could plausibly do is an understandable response to a job search, and it can make the search longer. Richard N. Bolles's guide pairs the search with the work of understanding what you care about, where and how you do your best work and what you're good at, so you know what you're looking for. The publisher's own pitch treats knowing yourself as the compass for the whole hunt.
The rest of the book covers networking, résumés and cover letters, interviews and negotiating salary, for people looking for a first job, recovering from a layoff or changing careers. His publisher credits him with leading the career development field for decades. Search tactics tend to change faster than self-knowledge, so the newest edition you can get is the one to read.
If you already know what you want and still can't get interviews, the bottleneck may be elsewhere: how your experience reads on paper, or who knows you're looking. A second opinion on your résumé from someone who hires for that role may be the next thing to get.
Other perspectives
Different takes on the same question. You don't have to pick a side.
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Picked by Truest and described in our own words. The original belongs to its creator. Last updated October 9, 2026. We sell a career membership; where that’s relevant above, we say so.