It’s been 11 years now that the obvious hit me: the best way to land a job is to do the job, not talk about it.
It’s 2010 and that idea has not graduated to mainstream yet. So let’s be very specific: let’s assume your dream job is product manager at Google, working on the Analytics product.
How do you go from one of thousands of resumes, to the one person the whole Analytics team is dying to bring on board?
By doing the job.
What does that mean, really? Look at the product and share your insights. Do you have smart suggestions on how to improve the product? If not, you may have picked the wrong dream job.
After all, if you got that job, what would happen after HR issued your Google badge? You’d expect a deep dive on the product, its features, and what improvements are planned in the upcoming roadmap.
Why not role-play that job today and see what you can come up with?
And then publish it where it has a chance of being seen. Usually, product teams like to google for their own products, so there is a good chance that your post will eventually make it on their radar. Mission accomplished.
Let’s go back to the Google Analytics example. I’m sure you can come up with many good suggestions such as these:
- The “Compare to past” feature is broken: if I want to compare the last 14 days with an arbitrary date in the past, I need to enter the exact start and end dates. If the interval I specify doesn’t have the exact same number of days as the current one, I get an error. That’s not friendly at all. A quick fix would be that you can leave the end date blank, and Analytics would figure out what the proper range should be. Except if you do that, you get another aggressive popup that tells you blank is an invalid date…
-
Setting goals: you can look in the “Goals” menu for a while to try to define goals or change their value. It’s not there. Where is it? It’s buried in the settings, but not the “Settings” link on that page. No, it’s in another page which is very hard to find (you get to it via an “edit” button on a page that you are not likely to ever look at – seriously?). Compare this to Facebook, which lets you change ad values in-line, by just clicking on them.
Does that approach work? Yes! Just last month, designer Rodrigo Galindez wrote a blog post where he showed how he would reformat Twitter’s new landing page. Within a week, Zendesk offered him a job. Why? Because he showed he could do the job, by doing it.
How far can you take this hack? A while back, I went to an event called “how to become a VC.” It was packed, and I couldn’t help but notice the irony: the discussion focused on career paths, maybe starting as an associate and climbing the ladder.
How would I become a VC? By being one: pull some of my own money, invest it in startups, and build my track record. That’s how. I can’t imagine any other way.
