How to Get Hired

Goodmorning, champ!

99% of people absolutely suck at getting a job.

Granted, every company is different. And what I personally look for in candidates may be totally different from what other founders (or hiring managers) look for.

But I’ve reviewed thousands of candidates and have hired dozens of A players. There are some people who manage to differentiate and distance themselves from the pack almost immediately.

So whether you’re looking to land your dream job, or just curious to know how we’ve hired some of our top employees at (fill in your dream workplace),.

Here are 5 things I would do if I were trying to get hired. You should 

1. Differentiate your resume

2. Create a shortcut for the hiring manager

3. Over-deliver and make an impression

4. Get people to vouch for you

5. Give a shit more than anyone

Differentiate your resume

Unless you are later in your career or coming in smoking hot via a referral.. odds are you will be submitting a resume.

Now, as the person reviewing resumes, let me paint a picture for you.

“Review applications for XXX” has been sitting at the top of my to-do list for a week now. The thought of clicking through 200 resumes makes me want to take out my eyeballs with a fork. I’ve been procrastinating on this for days.

As a founder, recruiting is part of the job. But no founder starts a company because they absolutely love recruiting. I’d much rather be launching new growth initiatives, talking to users, or shipping products.

So I when do take the time to review resumes, you should make it so fucking easy to stand out. Add some color, tell a story, give me some data points… literally anything.

I’m a huge believer in how you do anything is how you do everything.

If you aren’t going to sweat the details, why would I ever hire and trust you to own something that impacts the performance of my company and my livelihood?

Here’s a resume I saw from Emily Vu…a Spotify themed resume. This got her a product marketing internship position at Spotify..

I think it accomplishes a few things right off the bat…

There’s a level of design and attention to detail that shows she put deliberate effort into it.

She gives her experience both where she has worked and a start-up she built herself

At a glance you can easily identify the companies she worked for, the roles she had, her top accomplishments, and the timing of everything.

She provides off-ramps to learn more and connect elsewhere if I’ve piqued your interest.

Create a shortcut for the hiring manager

You have to remember that the person reviewing your resume is literally just another person. They have emotions, biases, and probably a million other things on their plate.

When I’m staring down an endless queue of resumes, there is a 0% chance I am reading all of them end-to-end. Instead, I look for a shortcut to separate certain candidates from the others.

I remember when I saw Tyler Denk talk about hiring when he worked at Morning Brew, we were hiring a front-end developer and had over 500+ applications.

So he looked for a shortcut: He would only consider applicants that also submitted a web portfolio.

Not only could he see and vet their actual work, but it required a certain type of person who would even take the time to create a personal portfolio in the first place.

That narrowed the entire applicant pool down to a dozen or so people. From there, he set up interviews with those who had the 5 best portfolios, and hired a super talented front end developer with a ton of conviction.

I’ll be sharing the next 3 next week again but this time I thought to do something special for you guys.

Add gigs and job openings that you can apply for. For today, I’d just be adding about three and a Notion Docs from where you can get jobs/gigs from.

1. Administrative Data Role. Must have experience using Slack and Notion. Send application to [email protected]

2. E-commerce Call Rep Application Form

3. Anderson Business Advisors is looking for freelance copywriters with experience writing direct sales copy, newsletter copy, and blog copy.

Tamilore works Content at Buffer and last year she curated this Notion Docs that contains regularly updated job boards and I think it would help you a lot. Here’s the link: Notion Docs

PeeJay From AIESEC in Enugu

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