You just graduated from college…
You are educated. You are committed. You are focused. You’re ready to go out there and show the world what you can achieve.
There’s only one little problem… Nobody knows you.
I don’t mean nobody knows you in the sense that you are a loner, or that you don’t have any friends.
I mean it in the sense that, nobody who is a somebody in your profession knows you.
Not only that, you also have zero official “on the job experience”.
Sure, you’ve done projects and had an internship or a summer job or two. But the last highlight of your resume is your college, followed by a three month gig doing something that barely passes as a job.
This means… Congratulations!
You’ve come to what we call the “chicken and egg” dilemma:
If you cannot get a good job without past relevant experience, and you cannot get past relevant experience without a good job – how are you supposed to start your career?
But it gets even worse than that.
Since our readers are both intelligent and inquisitive, you’ve probably gone further than just realising that this conundrum exists…
You’ve probably also thought through it’s reasons, it’s implications, and perhaps even ways out of it.
You might have even done a Google search or two, or maybe even asked some teachers or established professionals about solving the chicken and egg dilemma:
“How can I gain relevant job experience before I get the job?”
If you’ve done so, you’ve probably been exposed to all sorts of responses.
These responses that range from “oh don’t cry, everyone goes through this” to “you just start somewhere and work your way up”; Gaslighting you to the core, and shifting the responsibility of a broken hiring system squarely on your shoulders, because it is no longer their personal problem.
That’s right… The chicken and egg problem is not only stopping you from starting your career, it is also your fault!
Give me a break!
Allow me to offer a new perspective…
The harsh truth is that, our hiring system in the West is broken.
Many professionals get their first break, not because of what they can do, but because of who they know or the networks they are embedded in. In other words, they either start their career by borrowing uncle Jack’s reputation, who happens to be some VP somewhere, and writes them an unsolicited recommendation letter… Or they get their break after calling up everyone in their alumni phone book – which only really works in getting you a high-value job if you’re an Ivy League grad (and even then, only if the right people like you).
Ultimately, the problem is – especially if you come from a family or a community of “outsiders” to the privileged white-collar / high-value / credentialed class corporate game – you don’t know anyone that can give you this nepotistic lift.
So… What do you do then?
You’ve got two choices (and no, revolution is not one of them):
- Get your foot in the door by being a relentless. Turn into an applicant who is a borderline pest, who isn’t afraid to take out ads promoting your resume or knocking on the doors of hiring managers until your knuckles bleed. (That’s what some famous entrepreneurs call “hustling”)
- Hack the hiring process
Both are valid. Both require different aptitudes. So, I will explain both.
Relentless Pursuit of The Jobs You Want
Yes, it IS possible to hustle your way to the jobs you want, but you have to do it in a realistic, focused and persistent manner.
You have to ignore, in fact, get comfortable with hearing “no”.
You have to focus on what your life will become when you get the job you want, as opposed to focusing on your day to day right now. Your day to day will most likely resemble – as Gary Vee says – eating excrement with a smile.
And because you don’t have infinite time or energy, you have to – instead of applying to everything and anything you can think of to get your foot in the door – carefully select your targets and make your applications count.
Of course, this is easier said than done. That’s why, we put together The Ultimate Guide to Getting a High Value Job, which walks through the gist of this process. It is completely free.
If you are just starting your career and you value your time, as well as your sanity… And instead of bashing your head against the wall over and over again for six months straight just to get a foot in the door to a low value job… I recommend you read the guide. Instead of figuring it out the long way, you’ll learn how things really work so that you get greater options and better opportunities.
In fact, even if you don’t want to take the hustle route – read the guide – as it will teach you what’s expected of you to win.
Of course, hustling to get a great job is just the beginning, don’t stop there…
Learn to Hack The Hiring Process
The reality is, hiring is not an objective phenomena. It is a subjective event.
HR professionals and hiring managers are influenced by the processes they follow, by the cultures they are embedded in, as well as by their evolutionary baggage – just like the rest of us.
Ultimately, you don’t get hired for a job because of events that take place in reality. You get hired because of decisions that happen in the mind.
Based on this fact, and the science behind how attention works and how people make decisions, we’ve put together a step-by-step method to get – professionals who are just starting out – the jobs they want.
It takes a fledged course with over 30 sessions, during which we cover every little detail involved in the application process, as well as a number of our time tested techniques that you cannot find anywhere else. These include how to establish a winning “Career Narrative”, how to use “The Language of Value” as well as, how deploy the “Instant Track Record Formula”.
I’m not explaining this to pitch you the course (you won’t even find the link here). I’m explaining it to you here because, that last cleverly named buzzword (“Instant Track Record Formula”) is how we actually solve the chicken and egg problem…
You see… There is a formula you can use to articulate your past experience in a way that hiring managers pay attention to and respond to. And instead of toiling away for years at “stepping stone jobs”, or jumping through all sorts of contrived HR hoops corporations invent – you can sidestep all that – and leverage this formula to be treated as a qualified candidate from the get go.
You just have to learn how to tell them what they really want to hear, in exactly the way they want to hear it, and ground all of that in reality so that you’re not lying.
While we don’t teach this formula to help you to cheat your way into a job you cannot actually succeed in – we won’t help you become a brain surgeon if you’re not a doctor, that’s unethical… It will give you the universal key to getting positions which you are not “officially” qualified for.
Because, let’s face it: EVERY job that is a step up, will be a job you aren’t quite qualified for!
In other words, the chicken and egg issue is not only about your first job. It’s about ALL your subsequent promotions too!
Remember this: at every “next step” in your career, whether it’s your first high value job, or your first managerial role, or your first executive position; you will be doing something you’ve never done before. That’s the definition of moving up and getting promoted.
This means, someone is going to need to “bet” on you, “take a chance” with you or “know that you can hit the ground running”. These career growth requirements are challenging for most professionals to attain, regardless of their attitude or work ethic – when they don’t know the formula.
In fact, instead of applying the formula that gets them ahead, most professionals are stuck, playing by HR’s rules, or worse, boot licking their “superiors” every moment of every day so that they get hired or promoted by favoritism, at their manager’s whim. They are playing the “please the boss and obey HR” game.
Unfortunately, that game is rigged to keep you losing and keep them winning at your expense (we’re not against people winning when it’s win-win. We’re against this type of win-loss winning where you are left with the bills of mismanagement).
Why not stop playing their game, and turn the tables with the corporate world?
Forget the “realism” of the banal corporate world that tries to put you in your place and extract as much work from you for as little pay as possible, if just for a second…
Give yourself the permission to view your situation from a totally different vantage point, and dare to ask yourself:
How many job offers did you get this week?
How many will you get, if you keep following their playbook?
How long will it take? How much effort?
How many job offers would you like to get, if you could get your way?
What would getting your way look like?
Can you dare to think that there is a better way of doing this that will get you your way?
Do you believe you have what it takes to become a winner?
Why don’t you find out…