Blog: How to get a job without experience in 5 easy steps

Originally written March 6th, 2011

A recurring theme that I hear when I’m chatting with someone at almost any point in their life, is a dissatisfaction with their job or lack thereof.  Now we’ve all heard from lifestyle gurus and passionate entrepreneurs about doing what we love everyday instead of a job that leaves us feeling empty and unhappy.  I agree with most of them, probably 99% of them in fact.  Something about the way we are taught lends itself to the widespread belief that it is OK to be miserable with your job.  Beyond that, a lot of people wouldn’t even know how to get a job they do like.  You’re unlikely to find the position of your dreams on Monster.com, especially if you are looking at entry level positions, which yields a lot of high turnover job listings.  The classic process for finding your next career move is flawed:

1. Look for job postings
2. Submit a hundred resumes
   
3. Call and follow up with HR
   
4. Hope for interviews from a small percentage of jobs you applied for

Let’s not play the numbers game this time, and start thinking about why/how we should end up in jobs that we love.  Before you move on, if you aren’t motivated, please watch this clip of Gary Vaynerchuk in 2008.  For fun, you can try not to get pumped up.

WHY WOULD I DO SOMETHING I HATE FOR 40 HOURS PER WEEK?

It’s been a long time since I worked for a company or had a position that I didn’t like.  Mostly because I found out that I love sales, which eventually turned into a love for all things business.  For those of you that don’t stumble upon a career you love by accident, I am hoping that this post illuminates a simple process for you to work with.  It’s my dream that my family and friends are happy with their work lives and it’s a subject that I feel I can speak on, simply because I love what I do.  One thing that I have never understood is that someone would be willing to work at job they dislike, long term.  I understand that certain emergency situations can require someone to take a job that they don’t like, but I would argue the majority of people out there, simply don’t put in the effort to get the job they really want.  Ask yourself this question, “Why would I do something I hate for 40 hours per week?”  Now try and answer it, if you can’t, then keep reading.

HOW DO I GET MY DREAM JOB WITHOUT EXPERIENCE?

This won’t apply to everybody that reads this post.  What I mean is, some of you will already have the experience you need for a position and this process will still work for you as well.  There is another group that I really want to help, and that is the young and ambitious rock star who isn’t getting the attention they deserve.  Too many potential matches for the job get passed by, because they don’t have the experience an employer wants for the position.  We’re going to focus on separating yourself from the rest of the pack, while highlighting your passion for the job, and impressing potential employers with your capabilities.

YOU’RE BETTER THAN YOUR RESUME

Too many hiring decisions are made by people that have never done the position they are filling, and/or by people that really don’t have actual training in hiring personnel.  Are you really comfortable letting that person make a decision about hiring you?  What about deciding whether or not you should even get an interview based on a piece of paper?   I’ll answer for you, NO, you’re not OK with this.

As a person/employee, I have always felt that I am better than a piece of paper.  I’m even better than a piece of paper that is about me!  There is a reason or two why a lot of deals are closed in person.  The forces of person to person interaction, are more powerful than your track record written down.  Not to mention, there are so many constraints to how you must compose a resume, that important information is traded for hyperbole and jargon.  You have capabilities, and your experience is only a measure of how many times those capabilities have been put to the test.  To put it this way, one year playing basketball for Michael Jordan, isn’t the same as one year playing basketball for me or you.  That includes you, Lebron.  The point is, you need to help prove your capabilities to the people doing the hiring and the people you will be working for.  If you believe in yourself, get them to believe in you too.  Once they believe, experience doesn’t really matter.

THIS IS HOW I AM GOING TO GET THE JOB I WANT

It should be pretty obvious by now that you should get a job you love, so let’s stop talking about that and start talking about how to get the job you want.  Here are some easy and actionable steps to get you going.  I’m going to keep them simple, so if you have any questions ask them in the comments and I will do my best to elaborate if needed.

1. Find your passions in life – Open up a spreadsheet on your computer (Google Docs, Excel, whatever), and start making a list of anything that you are passionate about.  Mine would be something like:  Entrepreneurship, Startups, Video Games, Cooking, Web apps, Hip Hop, etc.  We are trying to give ourselves some leads on where to take our research.

2. Start to research companies that are in an industry associated with your passion - Don’t worry about what your position would be OR if they have openings listed on their website just yet!  Let’s just look for the companies that interest you.  A good place to look is industry blogs, Google, or even curated lists like the Inc. 500 or 5000.  Once you have your list of 10 to 12 companies, feel free to jot down the different types of jobs you might like to have at these companies.  This next part is CRITICAL, write down what you like about the company.  Even simple things that you notice can play a big part.

3. Create a LinkedIn account to research your potential boss - Go to Linkedin.com and open an account.  When prompted, import that contacts that you feel you could connect with, from your email.  There is a powerful network effect on LinkedIn that allows you to see more users/employees from companies through your connections.  After that, start looking at the people that work for the companies you are researching.  Look for your potential boss, coworkers, execs, and just the overall feel for the people that make up the culture of the company.  From this research, you should be able to tell how you are connected, what similarities you have from work experience in the past, and other clues about recent changes at the company.  Add the contacts that you find on LinkedIn, to the spreadsheet.

4. Prepare for and carry out a call to your future boss - With the information that you have collected, you are going to call your future boss to get this process started.  This is best to do, before you send in your resume.  The first thing to note is that this is a great way to set yourself apart from every other joker that submits a resume.  Grab the information you got from your research and call the company.  Mention who you are, why you like/are interested in the company, why you are calling that specific person, that you are thinking about your next career move, and ask what they look for in a team member.  Use the information that you get and let them know that you are very interested in joining the team, if that is the case.

5. Ask for the next steps and push forward through the hiring process – When you end the conversation, ask if you can come into the office to chat about opportunities.  This is a great time to share your resume if that is what they want next.  So if they ask for the resume upfront, tell them you can come in to drop it off.  From here, it’s business as usual when it comes to interviewing and hired.  After that interaction, assuming it went well, you have separated yourself from the rest of the applicants.  In the case of a company without a job posting, you probably don’t have any competition and despite what you might think, this is a highly successful way to look for jobs/network with companies you like.  In some cases, they will create a job for you.  Can you imagine telling your friends and family that your next job was created just for you?

That’s the process that I tell my friends to use when they talk to me about their careers.  Some have had great success with it, some have chosen to go other routes with success as well.  I’ll leave it up to you to decide if it is going to be helpful for you.

GET PAID

Now that you’re in the door, the rest is up to you.  If you’re true to yourself during the process above, you should be setup to speak from the heart on why you would be good to work with, and why you are passionate about working there.  In today’s work environment, it’s hard to beat hiring passionate people that are familiar with your business and are legitimately excited to work for you.  Good luck and happy hunting!  I’d love to hear about anybody that pulls off their next big position using this system.

Is there anything you think would make this process better/easier?  Let me know in the comments.

Blog: How Rap Genius is killing the game

Rap Genius is incredible.  It is the “Hip Hop Wikipedia.”  As a fan of hip hop, it’s amazing to be able to visit a legitimate lyric site that doesn’t look like a Geocities massacre.  Rap Genius is clean and has a great user experience.  What I personally love about hip hop, is the cleverness in the lyrics.  I listen for that rewind moment, where you have to question how amazing a line was, and go back on your WinAmp track bar to hear it one more time.

Here is how they are killing it:

Crowdsourcing Lyrical Definitions – Much like Wikipedia, Rap Genius is crowd powered by a dedicated group lyric decoders.  Right now the only reward for submitting songs/definitions to Rap Genius is RapIQ and a boatload of swagger to go with it.  RapIQ is defined by participation for submitting songs, defining lyrics, and most importantly you are rewarded for quality entries.

YouTube Soundtrack – One of the most clever pieces of technology on the site is the YouTube soundtrack Rap Genius provides.  When a user submits a song, they input a YouTube link, and that link turns into an audio only track.  Now you can read up on the lyrics and get your head bobbin’ to the track at the same time.

Like Individual Entries – This is one of my favorite things about the site!  As a total Facebook goon, I like when I see clever implementations of social plugins on websites.  When someone decodes a set of lyrics, an extra little window pops up that allows for voting up/down AND you can Like the individual definition!  This is absolutely one of the coolest uses of the Like button I have ever seen.  Imagine if this was a part of your everyday browsing experience?  If you could Like small snippets across the web that would absolutely be a game changer for the detailed information contained in the Open Graph.  Someone with technical skills, make it happen, damn.

Incredible Community – Hip hop in general has an incredibly passionate community but the group that has formed around Rap Genius is doing work, everyday.  There are a lot of sites out there that have been trying for a long time to get a community that is this engaged, but continue to fail.  I’m sure it has something to do with the site’s focus on hip hop, but the user experience when you are on Rap Genius is something that everyone can learn from.

Passion – Rap Genius is a clear result of passion, and it shows.  I myself have trouble making projects like this simply because I am passionate about it.  It’s hard not to look for the money in anything that you do, and maybe Rap Genius will eventually start to monetize the site, though right now it appears they just love hip hop.  I have a lot of respect for what they have done here.

Make sure you checkout RapGenius.com.

Blog: Create social commerce experiences using social design guidelines

Originally written January 11th, 2012

“How do I say this?  Social Commerce.  Social Design.  I want both of you to listen to me.  Stop playing games, you two were meant to be together!”

Humans are social beings, and not surprisingly the technologies that take advantage of that on the web, are here to stay.  The word “social” is thrown in front of every other business term you’ve ever read, it’s probablya lot of bullshit really, but that is a post and a discussion for a different day.  I’ve been working in “Social Commerce” (see what I’m saying) since 2009, and it’s clear that despite the marketing hype cycle social ______(pronounced social-blank) has gone through, there’s a real science to succeeding in social ______.  We’re seeing that elements of social applied to commerce, can have a significant impact on your business.  Since 2009 when I started working in the space; the pundits, budgets, and brands have let social commerce into their hearts in a big way.  As more and more brands look to social commerce, it is important to consider what social commerce is, and how we should go about designing social commerce experiences.

Definitions for Social Commerce & Social Design

Wikipedia says:

Social commerce[1] is a subset of electronic commerce that involves using social media, online media that supports social interaction and user contributions, to assist in the online buying and selling of products and services.

More succinctly, social commerce is the use of social network(s) in the context of e-commerce transactions.

I like the last line when thinking about what Social Commerce is.  We need to understand why social commerce has an impact, so let’s review social design as well.  Facebook/Eric Fisher published social design guidelines to help with this very process.  Facebook wants you to create apps etc that are a pleasure for its users, so it’s no surprise that they would release some guidelines to help us all figure it out.  Eric has published additional social design strategy resources on his blog, and will be speaking about social design at SXSW this year.  I suggest you check it out if you are there.  I met Eric some months back and I can tell you confidently to follow along, the guy is smart.

Anyways, back to the show.  Facebook says that social design is:

Social Design is a way of thinking about product design that puts social experiences at the core.

And:

Social Design defines how we understand ourselves and each other and can be broken down into three core elements: Identity, Conversation and Community.

• Community refers to the people we know and trust and who help us make decisions.
• Conversation refers to the various interactions we have with our communities.
• Identity refers to our own sense of self and how we are seen by our communities.

The guidelines go on to talk in detail about each of the core elements.  As a primer before we dive in, there is a story that Eric tells at the beginning of his post on Social Design Strategy.  The story, fittingly, is an example of social commerce.  Eric is walking down the street with a friend, and she tells him that he would really like the Strand Bookstore, as they pass it.  Eventually, after taking his friend’s advice, he leaves the bookstore with a new book in his hand!  She was right to think that Eric would like the store, and Eric trusted her judgement.  The takeaway is that social commerce can bring information to us, that is very relevant & trustworthy but isn’t necessarily something that we are looking for proactively.  Clearly we can make the argument that social can help even if you we know exactly what we are looking for, but the fact remains that social networks are changing how we consume the net and now the products/services that we pay for, whether we are actively or passively seeking them out.

Community

A community can be a lot of different things.  The definition above is good, but it is naturally weighted towards Facebook.  Their contention is that users are actively building their social networks/communities on Facebook, so the easiest thing to do is to tap into that.  This is a true statement, but it does ignore that other communities may exist on your site around certain themes: products, lifestyles, whatever you can think of.  So for now, we’ll keep both in mind.  The important thing to recognize here, is that there are powerful forces when discovering you have common threads with strangers and with friends you already know.  Both are serendipitous, “happy accidents” if you will.

The reason Facebook is so powerful in either situation is that you can gather information about a user and their friends from the Open Graph(posts to come about this).  The Open Graph tells us the relationship of objects on the web to each other eg. person to person, person to web page, etc.  This is an oversimplification, so if you want more on the subject and just how powerful it is, read up at Facebook.  In the interest of time, we’ll move on with that basic definition.  With the power of the Open Graph, apps can be designed to utilize the information in powerful ways around communities.  Here’s some things you should think about:

• Who is in your community and should it be segmented?  Current customers are a community and so are their friends. Identify the communities, see if you have any data on how they are connected.
• What is important to the communities you have identified?  If I am booking a trip or buying clothes, what type of information should I know about others using the site?
• What social actions/cues make sense for my users?  This is social commerce, so keep in mind if you are selling diet pills, asking for someone to share that purchase with their network is a tall order.

Conversation

Next up is the conversation.  The conversation is the interaction between the members of the community.  This is how we find our commonalities, and other information relevant to the context of the community.  There is a reason the community is formed, and the exchange of information(the conversation) is how we begin to identify with the community.  Eric describes the conversation as:

Conversation is simply a generic term I’m using to describe the interactions between the self and the community and the stronger the associated emotion, the stronger the bond.

This is inherently a back-and-forth and therefore is comprised of two different experiences that play off each other. Generically, we can describe these as listening and speaking.

Listening is the information and content that gets brought to us.  In Facebook an example would be checking your News Feed to understand what is happening in your network.  Speaking can be seen as the reactions we have to those posts eg. likes, comments, and shares etc.  Largely in social commerce, a big part of the conversation is based on reviews right now.  People have questions, some have answers, good and bad.  I’m excited to see what the new Open Graph updates Facebook announced bring to this part of the equation.  Now that users will have access to social actions, rather than just “liking” something, we’ll be able to see a whole new range of interactions.  Someone might want, love, desire, hate, or even wish for something.  It’s a new understanding of what a user’s interactions with your site are.  Here are some things to consider:

• Are you forcing interactions?  Is there a real reason for a user to share what they are doing on your site?
• Is there a natural motivation for users to interact with each other?  Can you create that motivation with incentives?
• Can social interactions make the experience better?  Is this the type of purchase you want an expert to weigh in on?
• Have we set the right expectation to the user?  Do they know how or why their social data is being used?

Identity

A long time ago, my good friend HotLou told me”Facebook is in the identity business.”  That is becoming more and more apparent with the launch of Timeline, etc.  As it relates to identity, humans have a very natural tendency to want to understand/hear more about themselves.  They want others to tell them what they think about them, and they have the same desire to let their friends know as well.  In the world of social commerce, identity plays an interesting role.  From one brand to the next identity can be completely different.  For lifestyle goods like fashion, it can completely define us to the point that we would like nothing more than to be associated with that brand, like Louis Vuitton.  Others bring us closer to good, by helping to give back like TOMS or Warby Parker.  As our relationship to the brand changes, so does the does the conversation and the information we find relevant to our identity.  We could spend all day on identity alone, as it is a very powerful motivator but for now consider these questions:

• Am I revealing something about the user or about how they fit in the community?  Is this personally significant to the user?
• What can I tell the user about themselves or their relationship to others, that they don’t already know?
• Are we trying something that is a new fun experience for the user, like which one of your friends is most similar?
• What actions does this experience make the user want to take?  Does it get more engaging the more friends they invite?

Overwhelmed?  Don’t Worry, It’s Still Early

The social web is still in its infancy, and that especially includes social commerce.  Over the next couple years, we will know exponentially more about how social data can help ecommerce.  With the exciting new changes to Facebook and the Open Graph, right now is a very exciting time for exploring social commerce and the impact it can have on your brand/customers.  If we keep learning, and keep these important guidelines in mind, we will create amazing advances in ecommerce as it stands today.