Recognizing Business Pain as a Motivation for Hiring
The first thing to keep in mind: do not rule yourself out of a job just because you do not meet the requirements that they have listed on the page. The company that you are applying for a job with is held together by duct tape behind the scenes. It might look really polished from the outside, but on the inside it feels like there are fires going on everywhere and it feels like a total nightmare on the inside for the people in the business and who are running the business. Think of a parent on a really chaotic day not slept well, the house is a mess, guests coming over, an important meeting at work.
Viewing Hiring as a Solution for Emotional Needs
And then: okay, hiring. There are 312 applications. That is like the state that the person hiring you is often in. The reason why someone is hiring you is not because they want to hire you. They would actually rather not hire you because they would rather not pay the money. And it’s not even the money. Often they would rather just not deal with the hassle, because hiring someone is an enormous hassle. The reason they are hiring you is because they are hoping that you will make their life easier. All of the roles being hired for are to alleviate some kind of pain that is currently being experienced.
Navigating High Competition and the Three Doors
It’s a very emotional need that someone has when they say, “Hey, I’m going to hire you and pay you 50k a year for you to take stuff off my plate.” Given that it’s an emotional need, you should not take the job description too literally or too seriously. You should not take the experience requirements too literally or too seriously. You should not take the fact that they haven’t replied to you too literally or too seriously or too personally in the current job market. There are way more people applying for jobs than there are jobs available. For example, when hiring video editors, there can be 500 people applying for a job
Exploring the Analogies of the Nightclub Doors
and one or two or three get the job. When hiring for student success coaches, 800 people applied over the course of 2 weeks and four were hired out of the 800. These are not good odds. There are broadly three different routes you can take when it comes to applying for jobs. Using an analogy from a book by Alex Banayan called The Third Door: life is kind of like a nightclub and there are always three doors. There are three different ways to enter the nightclub. The first door is the one where there’s a line of 500 people waiting to queue up. That’s the equivalent of applying for a job when you fill in the form
Learning from Steven Spielberg’s Unconventional Third Door
on the website and apply for the job. The second door is for the billionaires and the celebrities and the people whose parents are super well connected. The second door is about who you know. If you know someone, you can get into the nightclub. But then there’s door number three. Steven Spielberg, the famous director the way he got his first job directing was by being on the tour bus at Universal Studios. He sneaked off the tour bus and made his way into a film set where he then spoke to someone and said, “Hey, my name’s Steven. I’m really looking to break into the film industry. I’ll literally do anything you want.” The approach is an unorthodox, unconventional one where there’s no guidebook.
Finding Loopholes Through Creativity and Ingenuity
It’s about finding a loophole. Not standing in line waiting with other people, not relying on pre-existing connections but using the third door, hustling a bit and using creativity and ingenuity to try and get in. There are career coaches, including those helping people land jobs in tech, who note that for senior jobs in tech and even often for junior jobs
Tapping Into the Hidden Job Market Networks
in tech, 80% of the roles are not advertised. The job exists, but they’re just never going to advertise it publicly because they don’t want to deal with the challenges associated with having 5,000 applications. And so the network based approach where you put yourself forward, find networking opportunities, and get your way in that way becomes essential. Recognizing that hiring is a human to human interaction, not a cog to machine interaction like it often seems when applying for a job. So much backdoor dealing happens behind the scenes that instead of being surprised when applying for 500 jobs and no one gets back to you, it’s important to be aware that all of this backdoor dealing is happening behind the scenes so you can position yourself in a way
Tapping Into the Hidden Job Market Networks (continued)
that allows you to benefit from the back door dealing rather than be disadvantaged by it like most applicants will be.
Augmenting Learning with Educational Tool Insights
Shortform is a wonderful service that’s like having an intelligent friend break down a book. Their library has hundreds of books in the realm of education, personal development, history, philosophy things that actually help you learn. For each book, they go chapter by chapter and break down the key concepts to aid understanding. Crucially, this is not a randomly generated AI summary of a book. It is instead a human-crafted experience
Utilizing Human-Crafted Experience for Deeper Understanding
where a real human has actually gone through the book, teased out the key points, and crucially, they haven’t just identified the key points in the book. They’ve also correlated those key points with other books in the library. For example, they’ve created a study guide for Feel Good Productivity. The study guide is thorough and impressive. They’ve actually made some concepts clearer than in the original writing. And when the book references, for example, the broaden and build theory or intrinsic motivation, they tie that in
Developing Critical Thinking Through Strategic Book Summaries
to other books and other authors and other research, showing where research agrees with what the author is saying and where there are potential disagreements. It’s a far more critical thinking way of understanding a book rather than just taking the author’s word at face value. There are two primary use cases for Shortform. Firstly, it’s useful when thinking about reading a whole book but not yet decided browsing the Shortform summary to get the key ideas and then deciding whether to read the book. Or if a book was read a few years ago and revisiting the key ideas without rereading the whole thing is the goal, the Shortform summary works well for that.
Crucially, Shortform does not replace reading. It works more as a tool to augment reading, understanding, and learning. It’s available at shortform.com/aliadal for a free trial and $50 off the annual subscription.
Implementing Tangible Steps to Stand Out
Now, tangible specific things that you can do to make this happen. Number one is actively trying to stand out on the job application. One trick used in job applications is adding a question to the end that says, “Is there anything else you would like to tell us?” It’s possible to filter out any application that does not answer that question. What has been found is that there’s a remarkably strong correlation between the effort someone puts into that final response and how good of a team member they’re going to be when part of the business.
Moving from Scatter Gun to Sniper Approach
When applying for a job, the scatter gun approach is unlikely to work. The scatter gun approach is like applying for 500 jobs, using GPT to tailor a cover letter and resume to each job, and mass applying to as many things as possible because the attitude is to take anything.
Targeting Dream Companies with Intentional Research
The recommended approach is to take a sniper approach. Figure out what you actually want to do. Not “I’ll take whatever job I can get,” but what is it you actually want to do? What company has a mission that is actually interesting? Finding five of those in an area where you would like to work ideally in your local area, ideally with an office rather than being fully remote because it’s easier to meet with people in person. Once the dream five are found, take a sniper approach to try and get hired there. Find on LinkedIn the people who are working in those companies. Reach out to some of them: “Hey, I’m interested in I saw that you work for [company].”
Networking Effectively Through Personal Connections and Coffee
“I’m really interested in getting into the space. Any chance you’d be open I’d love to take you out for coffee sometime. I’d love to ask you some questions about your role.” Then take them out to coffee or lunch. It’s totally worth the price. Being genuinely curious, getting to know about the company and the roles and keeping in mind that the best roles are not actually advertised. Often by the point a company advertises a role, it’s months after they realized they needed it. People who have been hired despite there being thousands of applications for roles have often been the ones who went a little bit above and beyond.
Going Above and Beyond with Custom Content
When hiring for a videographer, one person out of 100 applicants sent in a custom video and pitched himself through it to show his personality, his videography skills, and his editing skills. The guy had no experience. His resume was not strong, his application was not strong, but he got fast-tracked to the top of the interview list because he went above and beyond compared to everyone else. So that box “Is there anything else you would like to share with us?” that is the chance to create a mini presentation, to make a Loom, to make a video showing your face and being on camera, because people hire other people. If you can build rapport with the people who will be offering the job, without actually being there in person at the interview,
Building Rapport Through Face-to-Face Video Presentations
that puts you at a massive advantage compared to everyone else who’s not willing to go the extra mile. It’s about taking the sniper mentality and going the extra mile, doing the research, reaching out to the people working in the company, finding out about the job, and then once there is a personal connection with someone working in the company, following up every now and then: “Hey, I’ve actually got the summer free. I’d love to do an internship with you guys.” Here are the different ways I can help. You don’t want to say, “I’m happy to do anything. What can I do?” Because that requires the other person to figure out what they should give you, and they don’t have the time to figure out
Being Proactive with Suggestions to Add Value
what they should give you. Being proactive in suggesting things you can do is the better approach. And if you really want the job, even just doing those things makes a difference. If someone was applying to a job and said, “Hey, I noticed you talked in your hiring about all these pains you were having in your business. It seems like what you guys would really benefit from is AI automations. I’m actually really interested in working in the space. I’d love to work with you guys. Happy to hop on a 30-minute call with anyone on your team. It doesn’t have to be you. I know you’re super busy. And I’m happy to work for a month completely for free where I’ll build any AI automations that will save you guys time. At the end of the month,
Offering Risk-Free Trials to Demonstrate Capability
you can decide if you’d like to keep working with me.” A message like that would stand out enormously. Especially because it can be passed off to someone on the team. If a team member is asked to talk to this person for 30 minutes, they’ll agree, especially if the person is local. And if that conversation goes well “Actually, this person is really cool” it increases their chances of getting a job in the business enormously. And that opportunity only came about because the person was proactive in reaching out to try and get that wedge in the door.
Leveraging Experience and AI in the Modern Workplace
Everyone is using AI to apply for jobs. Employers are using AI to screen applications. It’s something of an arms race between who can use AI better. What employers do as an anti-AI signal is they do not ask about hypothetical future scenarios. And what they ask about is your experience. What experience have you had with YouTube, with social media, with marketing? Give tangible examples of where in the past you have done something. One of the most discriminating questions in a good way found in applications is: what cool stuff have you built with AI? As an employer, asking about past experience increasingly matters, which means experience is really, really important. So, what do you do if you don’t have experience?
Creating Your Own Portfolio When You Lack Experience
Well, you create your own experience. The experience can be stuff that you’ve built and stuff that you’ve done without having to ask anyone’s permission for it. When looking for a director of marketing, there would be total openness to hiring someone on a strong salary if they said, “Hey, I’ve never actually done this for someone, but I took the liberty of going through all of your top 10 competitors in the info product industry, deconstructing all of their sales pages, looking at their meta ads library, and putting together a custom proposal on a custom website super easy to do these days with AI.
Curating a Portfolio to Show Results via Video
That shows exactly how I would go about revamping your marketing processes. And here is a Loom with me showing my face, walking through exactly what I’ve done and how I did it.” Even if that person doesn’t have any experience, the fact that they’ve demonstrated shown rather than just told what they’ve done, shown their face, done it on video, makes it possible to see what their vibe is like and whether it gels with the team. If it doesn’t, then obviously it’s not in anyone’s interest to hire the person. But that would stand out enormously. You can take your own portfolio into your own hands. You don’t have to wait for someone to hire you to do stuff just do the stuff. Do it on a weekend. Make a personal website. Put a portfolio on it so that when applying for jobs,
Developing Compelling Stories Through Extracurricular Involvement
there is something to show them rather than just telling them, because AI can do all of the telling. If still at university, one of the biggest pieces of advice is to get involved with stuff that will give you stories. A common question in interviews or job applications is: what’s an example of a situation where you’ve handled adversity? If the answer is something like, “When I was at university in my third year, I was the president of the ball committee where we were organizing a party. We had to sell 500 tickets. The price was $1,000. This was a $500,000 event. And a specific problem we had was that one of our suppliers canceled at the last minute. In order to deal with that, here is what I did:
Creating Your Own Opportunities Without External Permission
A, B, and C.” The fact that there’s a story to talk about in the job application of something done in the past which can’t be faked, because you don’t want to lie on an application form and that you can talk about that story when asked about it at interview, means you do have that experience even without formal experience. But if someone has just gone through university doing only the academic work and not taking part in any extracurriculars or anything interesting because they think academics will be the thing that gets them the job it’s a tough position to be in. Stories and experiences to talk about are necessary. The crucial thing is that those stories and experiences can be created independently.
Shifting Mindset from Job Seeker to Problem Solver
You do not have to wait for anyone to give you permission to create those stories for yourself. Once the list of dream jobs is figured out, think about what problems those companies are likely having in their business and AI can help with this. Going to Claude and saying, “I really want to apply for a job at this company, can you do a bunch of research and surface all of the problems that you think they are having,” is a useful exercise. If you think of yourself as being hired to solve problems and hired to alleviate pain, you are 4much more likely to approach the application in the right way, rather than thinking of yourself as simply applying for a job. Read More
