Rating 8/10

Recommendations

How to Get Any Job You Want is a must-read for young adults with limited work experience. It provides valuable insights on how to stand out from the competition, why resumes aren’t important, and why projects are more valuable than degrees. I recommend this book to anyone in high school or starting on their career journey.

Overall thoughts

Everyone has similar resumes (college degree, basic work experience, extracurriculars). We need to stand out and can do so by creating tangible projects that companies value.

Ask yourself, “what can I do on day one to bring value to the company? What can I do long-term that justifies bringing me on?”

Tell a company what you would do differently, and why that’s better than what they’re doing. Name a few of these, offer some relevant skills, and mention the steps you would take to accomplish these goals.

Our application to a company should be about ourselves and the company. It should include what they need, what they need but don’t know, and how we can create both.

An employer’s decision to hire someone often comes from the candidate’s approach to the application process.

If you don’t know where to start, just start building something. Contribute to a tangible project.

Building something is difficult, but fulfilling.

Unlike school, there are no right and wrong options in building something. There are options with more favorable predicted outcomes, but these are never certain. We have to use our judgment. We have to create our own standards.

Employers want to see our ability to identify a valuable pursuit, cut our losses when necessary, launch a project in line with that pursuit, push through, and develop the skills and responsibility necessary to finish that pursuit.

Professionals don’t wait for inspiration.

Having a project motivates us to develop the necessary skills to complete said project. Developing these skills would be more difficult without a tangible result.

Experience is usually more valuable than education to employers.

Levels of a job search

Level 1: A good resume

A good resume will never get us a job, but a bad resume could lose us one.

A resume requires a pleasant appearance and outcome-based content.

Keep your resume clean, a single page, uniform use of line breaks or bullets, not too many indents and sub-sub points, and a logical order top-to-bottom of what’s most important.

Level 2: A good LinkedIn profile

LinkedIn allows us to go slightly deeper than our resume. We can describe what drives us, who we’ve worked with, and what we did.

Social media can be a tremendous asset in building social capital.

Level 3: A personal website

The personal website allows for far more control and customization than social media.

Anyone with a decent personal website stands out.

Blog regularly.

Level 4: A Portfolio of projects

A portfolio allows us to describe our projects in depth.

If you have no projects, start doing things for free.

The success or failure of a project is less important than completing it.

Level 5: Unique, stand-alone websites, videos, or infographics for your target company

Study your company in-depth and provide a unique take.

Dig into the industry, business model, customer base, digital presence, successes, failures, and competitors. Build something that describes what you love about them and what you would do for the company.

Spending 30 days doing a thorough analysis on a company will probably be more valuable than spending an entire year getting a second major.

Creating value before a company hires us creates a loud signal that we’re a person they want to employ.

Most people get jobs because of a personal connection, not because of a resume.

5 things to do instead of building a resume

• Create a personal website
  • The content is less important than having a site.

• Have a LinkedIn profile

• Use social media
  • Having public social media will make us more cognizant of what we share.

• Review books on Amazon.
  • Employers want to hire curious people. Reviewing books signals we are curious.

• Build something
  • Outcomes are more valuable than inputs.

5 College and career fallacies young people should avoid

Fallacy #1: You can’t turn down “free” opportunities

Things that appear too good to be true are often too good to be true.

Nothing is free, as every action has an opportunity cost.

The more skin we have in the game, the more likely we are to succeed. Our focus improves.

Make it a goal to be independent of others and dependent on your own success.

Fallacy #2: Your major matters

What we know matters, not our credentials (unless we are in specific industries (research, medical, engineering, law)).

Network:: A group of people we’ve established social capital with, and can work with and call on for resources, expertise, and support.

 College will not provide us with a rich network. College builds a network within our age group, but we need a network that includes older experts.

Fallacy #3: “Leadership” is a skill

Resumes and degrees only signal to our employer that we pass a minimum bar of intelligence and ability.

Fallacy #4: There is one right path

Our future job probably doesn’t exist yet.

To plan for uncertainty, avoid doing what you hate.

Make a list of the things you hate, aren’t good and don’t want to be good at. Anything not on this list is good to pursue. When you discover more things you dislike, add them to the list.

Fallacy #5: You are an employee

Machines and software are better employees than humans.

The advantage humans have over machines is our creativity.

We are our own company.

When working, take ownership of the company vision, and look for ways to improve (even outside your department or control). Do one thing every day that adds value to yourself and the company.

Look for ways to create value, and then do them. Don’t ask.

The market always demands creative problem solvers.

Interview Tips

An interview is about getting to know the other person.

Don’t look for the “right” answer in an interview. Speak honestly and bluntly. These questions are simply to find out general tendencies.

When being interviewed, imagine you’re getting to know a friend in a social context.

An interview is not for rattling off specific skills and experiences. That’s what LinkedIn or a resume is for. An interview is a conversation where the interviewer learns about our personality, motivations, and the things we enjoy and don’t enjoy.

Working for Free and the Cycle of Education

Young people should work for free, as it builds an excellent reputation and earns recommendations.

The goal of an employer is to extract more value from the employee than the firm pays in wages. Otherwise, there is no growth or profit.

The goal of an employee is to contribute more than they receive in wages. Then, they gain bargaining power to negotiate for advancement and raises.

The harder the economic times, the more employers need to know what they’re getting when hiring someone.

This is the cycle of higher education. Kids graduate with debt and need a job to pay it off. But, the value of a degree has decreased because of excess supply. So, many young adults can only find low-paying jobs. To gain an advantage, young adults return to school for more education, pushing them further into debt. Forgoing college and opting for experience and self-learning avoids this cycle.

When working for free, become super useful, dependable, and get to know as many people as possible. Explain you are working only for the experience. Do this for 6 months – 1 year. Then you have something interesting to tell future employers.

Summary

The degree is dying. Instead, to get any job, we must showcase our ability to create value for companies via projects. Focus on building (a personal website, an app, a business, or whatever!) Also, treat interviews more like a conversation than an interrogation.