Software Engineering :: Career :: Job :: Search :: Training :: Cultivated Strategy #2: Why Applying Online Won't Land You Your Dream Job (& What To Do Instead)
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Wil,
Yesterday we talked about how you can overcome the mental block of "not having enough experience" when it comes to landing your dream job. However, regardless of how much (or how little) experience you have, there's one SUPER frustrating part of the job search that crushes people's hopes on a daily basis -- Applying Online.
Raise your hand if you've ever been in this situation ✋:
You find a job you love on LinkedIn - the post is fresh and you're excited. This could finally be it!
You carve out a few hours that evening to tweak your resume. You want to make sure it's personalized, so you change up the language to include keywords from the job description. You tailor your bullets to make sure your experience is relevant, and you give it the once-over to make sure all the grammar and spelling is good.
Next up, your cover letter. You have a pre-written draft but you need to make sure you swap out the company names, spend some time talking about why you love this new company, and really give them the hard sell in the final paragraph. They need to know that you really want this job.
Finally, you fill out all of the questions on the application, upload your documents, anddddd click Submit!
Now you cross your fingers and wait...
The next day, you don't hear anything. Maybe you get an email that your submission was successful and you'll hear back from the team "shortly" (whatever that means).
Then a week goes by, still nothing. The doubt starts to settle in - did you include the wrong experience? Should you have used that other bullet you were considering? Has someone even looked at it yet? Surely they'd send you some kind of note if they did.
After another week, you've all but given up - feeling rejected and forced to move on.
If so, you're not alone. Applying online and hearing absolutely nothing back from the company is the rule, not the exception. Here's why:
Have you ever been to Penn Station in New York at 5:00 pm? If not, here’s a live look:
At Penn, trains are assigned a track roughly 10 minutes before they are scheduled to depart. As soon as the track is posted on the board, every single person in this picture makes a beeline for a door that’s not much wider than the front door of your house.
The same thing happens when a new job is posted at Amazon, Google, or Microsoft. The floodgates open with hundreds - if not thousands - of online applications. But only a small fraction will get an interview.
One will receive an offer.
We currently live in the most competitive job market history has ever seen. However, it’s not the volume of competition that’s preventing people from landing jobs.
It’s their approach.
According to a recent survey conducted by Jobvite, 75% of people use online applications as their primary method for job searching. Around the same time, the Wall Street Journal released the results of another survey stating that only 20% of open jobs were advertised (online or anywhere else). The remaining 80% of roles were either filled by referral or word of mouth.
Think about it. If you’re applying online for a job, you are competing against 75% of the population for 20% of the available openings.
If you want to land your dream job, you need to land a referral.
The question then becomes, "How do I get a referral if I don’t know a single soul at my dream company?" Sounds tough, right? The good news is, there's a proven process that you can follow to build relationships with people who can get you hired:
If you're going to invest the time and energy needed to build a relationship with a total stranger, you want to pick the right total stranger. Someone who will not only be able to refer you into the job, but will also be present and have a say when the hiring decision is made.
These people include someone who would be your peer or your manager if you got hired. They typically hold the job title you want, which makes them easy to find - you just have to know where to look.
Let's say that you want to work on the sales side of the automotive vertical for Google, like this role:
The easiest place to find people who could have a huge impact on your job search is through LinkedIn.
All you need to do is fire up the platform and use the search bar to enter this formula: Job Title + Company + Location (if location matters to you). Using our Automotive Account Manager role from above, my search might look like this:
Account Manager Automotive Google
This is going to pull up every single person who already holds that title at Google, which means that they know exactly what it takes to get hired for the role:
Pro Tip: Recruiters are the human version of an online job application. They receive hundreds of emails every day so standing out is incredibly tough. On top of that, they can only refer you into a first round interview - they don't have any say in the hiring decision. For those reasons, I do not recommend wasting time reaching out to recruiters.
Once you have a critical mass of people, you're going to want to reach out. We can't do that unless we have their contact information, so I highly recommend a tool called Mailscoop.io.
All you need to do is plug in someone's full name and the URL for their company and Mailscoop will spit out their email address:
With their email address in hand, you can begin reaching out and learning from these people -- understand where they came from, what mistakes they made, what skills they built, and what they'd recommend for someone in your position.
From there you can build a relationship with them and add value to the point where they are willing to refer you in and advocate for you during the hiring process.
All this said, the three steps above are a highly simplified version of the process. If you want a deeper dive including email scripts, cold outreach psychology, and the right questions to ask, I give a detailed walkthrough in this article.
I can pull back the curtain on all of these strategies until the end of time but it won't help you land a job unless you go out there and take action.
The data I've collected on the thousands of job seekers who have come through the Cultivated Culture community shows that the ones who go from depressed to dream job the fastest are the ones who take immediate action on these strategies.
If you want to be one of those people, here is your homework for today:
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Use the techniques above to find 10 people who could influence the hiring decision at the company you want to work for.
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Send one email today and one email every weekday after that to a new person on your list (Need a template? Give these a try.)
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When you hit your 10 contacts, repeat step one.
Following these steps will get you started on your relationship building journey. But turning a stranger into an advocate who is willing to vouch for you throughout the hiring process doesn't happen in one email.
Tomorrow, I'm going to share some strategies and tactics I've used to connect with people like Arianna Huffington, Satya Nadella (Microsoft's CEO), John Lee Dumas (host of the Entrepreneur on Fire podcast), as well as VPs at Google, Microsoft, and Twitter who helped me get hired.
Be well,
Austin