Career guide: How to get startups to notice you
featuring Tyler Hogge, Lauryn Isford, David Apple, Rex Woodbury, Claire Butler, and 30+ others
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The next play career guide is our attempt to find you the best possible answers to your questions. We did that by asking some of the most talented people we know — people like Tyler Hogge, Lauryn Isford, David Apple, Rex Woodbury, Claire Butler, and 30+ others — for their help in providing thoughtful responses.
Quick disclaimer before diving in: you should read the below as ideas and perhaps some suggestions but NOT prescriptive advice. There’s more than one way to live your life, and so our only advice is that you should think for yourself (if you want 🙂).
“I am trying to get in touch with a particular startup that seems really interesting (and I think I could be a good fit for the role). What tips do you have for getting in touch with them? Should I just apply on the general application or how else can I stand out?”
Most people apply to jobs by sending in their resume and potentially a cover letter. If you really want a particular job, then you probably want to try harder than the average person. Trying harder can manifest in many ways (some of which we’ll cover below) — but it most certainly involves more effort and creativity than the standard approach.
If you think about applying for a job as you would think about doing sales for a product (in the case of applying for a job - just imagine you are the product), you may end up with very different conclusions about what tactics you should be using to conduct your search. Strategies very common in sales, like analyzing a funnel and thinking about call to actions, are actually not that complicated; they just require some upfront intentionality that, when applied to job-seeking, can be very effective.
You should not just apply and wait. You should run a very targeted, very thorough sales process. I outline that whole sales process here. That video is 10 minutes of all the advice I would give to everyone looking for a great career in tech. — Tyler Hogge, investor at Pelion Ventures Partners
The bottleneck for a lot of people, especially when starting out, tends to be near the top of the funnel. For a bunch of reasons - they do not get a lot of opportunities sent their way and thus the only roles they apply for tend to be hyper-competitive filled with lots of candidates.
And so, if you are looking for ways to get in front of your dream roles, here’s a few things to consider. The actual specifics around how you implement any of these approaches do depend on your situation - your background, the context of the role and the company, etc. But you should be able to pull out at least a few insights from the below and apply them to your search.
Most people’s general advice for increasing a company’s awareness of you as a potential candidate is to get a warm introduction.
Warm intros are always best. Do you know anyone who knows the company? Try to get an introduction. — Lauryn Isford, Head of Product Growth, Notion
Note that not all warm introductions are created equal. Maybe it’s more of a spectrum we should be defining the warmth. Some may come in HOT - meaning your contact would have really amazing things to say about you. Some…less hot…maybe even cold (and you don’t even realize it). A good approach is to, before the introduction is made, actually try and ask the person what specifically they would say about you to the rest of the company.
When you ping the contact you know at the company, you can do more than simply asking them to put in a good word. Again it depends quite a bit on the nuances of your relationship with them so definitely do not try and jeopardize that - but you can really try to set up the introduction for success. Impress the person. Add value to them. Do something that reinforces your unique-ness and why you could be a good fit. Give them a blurb that summarizes it so it is really easy for them to pitch you to the rest of the company.
If you do not know anyone at the company, which is also very common, you can try to build relationships with current employees or investors.