HOW TO GET OFFERED THE JOB YOU WANT

This topic has even more meaning to me now that I have had played both employer and employee. I can't emphasize enough how important it is to have a self-motivated staff with a focus on long-term goals. It makes life less stressful, it makes organizational changes more successful, and it creates a productive and positive environment for everybody affiliated with the company. So if you're curious what an employer is after, there's nothing that beats that.

Where to start

There isn't a more powerful tool than networking when it comes to landing the job you want. If people don't know you, they can't know how awesome you are. Getting a job is a skill. The better you are at it, the better the job you will get. It requires the ability to communicate quickly, effectively, and unconventionally. It also requires a great deal of soft humility. So what is it that we need to communicate? How do we do that quickly and effectively? And what does it mean to do it unconventionally? We will discuss these in greater detail below.

Think like an employer

If you're currently looking for a job, put yourself in an employers' shoes. What is it that you would want to see from you? How would you want you to approach you? What would make you want to hire you? For those of you who have never employed people, I can not stress enough just how difficult it is to find good employees. And as much as I would like to yell that by writing in all caps, there is no amount of dramatic effect that I can add to get you to understand. It's the most difficult part. Companies want great people. They exhaust numerous resources on scouting and hiring and will still come up short. So imagine having a great person walk right up to their door... Very few would pass that up. But what does it mean to be great?

Technical expertise is great, but it's only one slice of the pie, and usually the easiest to teach. You need to show that you are:

• Self-aware
• Autonomous
• Objective
• Proactive
• Quick to accept responsibility
• Always leading by example
• Empathetic but not to a fault
• Able to learn from failure

So, leadership qualities. I will discuss all of these in more detail. These are some of the most important character traits to be great. A company/manager wants somebody who is proactive and going to operate autonomously within the scope of their work. Obviously a boss isn't going to want a new hire to come in and start working on things "autonomously" that aren't relevant to their role, but they want to provide the rulebook and then say: "okay, have at it and let me know if you need me." Confident that you're going to start creating your own processes, maximizing the use of your time and therefore the companies dollar. We won't dive too much into operating once a part of the company, but rather how to get there. They're different discussions all together.

Where to start

When most people think "job," they instantly think, LinkedIn, Indeed, Goodhire, etc. this is silly. You're jumping into a bidding war. Picture real estate. Imagine you're going to buy a house and there's 10 other offers on the table and all offers are due by 9 AM the next morning. That house is going to sell for the highest price possible. Not great for you. Now imagine you know a friend who is looking to sell their house, but it's not on the market. If it's not on the market, then nobody knows about it. Now you're not dealing with any competition. You get to just discuss and come to a meeting of the minds with your friend. Which scenario sounds like it will be a better outcome for you? Of course doing the off-market deal with the friend (friend because of networking). As the old stock trading adage goes: "Buy the rumor, sell the news." The essence of this quote is—once something has become news, you're already late to the party and now dealing with a lot of competition which drives prices up and opportunity down. 

So, what does all this have to do with a job? 1. Supply 2. Demand 3. Scarcity. These things dictate pricing in the market. When discussing a job/career, supply, demand, and scarcity determine opportunity. If there's a phenomenal job on the market that has plenty of benefits, great work hours, tons of PTO, and offering a great salary, the demand (competition) is going to be extremely high. When pursuing careers, if we opt for resources like LinkedIn and Indeed, everybody and their mom has seen the job listing, that's great for these companies, not great for you. You are trying to buy the news/get into a real estate bidding war. We need to find the off-market deal, the needle in a haystack that takes some unconventional tactics. But these tactics work wonders, and if you don't like interviewing, then you'll love this approach.

The Process

There are only four steps to this process (three if you don't count "repeat"):

1. Identify
2. Connect
3. Follow-up
4. Repeat

Identify

First thing we need to do in our search for the ideal career: identify the ideal company. A company is like a person; it has an identity/personality. What's a company that matches you and your personality? That's a great place to start. Read the companies mission statement, read about their culture, read about the founder, where they started, why they started, and all that they've done. Once you identify a few companies, now it's time to identify some people.

Ideally these people will be in a role that sounds appealing to you, but they don't have to be. Sometimes it's better that they are not and I'll explain why in a bit. If you're new, go for the low hanging fruit. That would be people lower down on the totem pole. Find them on LinkedIn, read about their role, look into their educational background, see what all you have in common if anything. Maybe even do a Facebook search to get less business heavy information. You might even share mutual Facebook friends. THIS IS SUPER IMPORTANT. Now that we've identified our target, now comes the fun part.

Connect

You get to choose here what you would like to do though I suggest you go for coffee or lunch. Remember, we need to communicate quickly and effectively. Nobody wants to read a paragraph of how great you are. No, people like to talk about themselves and that's perfect for what we're doing. So, you're going to write an email to somebody asking if you could pick their brain (use whatever term you want) about what they do, how they like their work, and if they'd be willing to shed some insight on their path to getting there. Basically, you need your email to read "You're awesome. You're more successful than me and I want to learn from you." This gives a nice boost to the ego that is so primal nobody can ignore it. You'll instantly be let inside the inner circle. I can't tell you just how powerful this is. I have emailed people from John Mackey (CEO of WholeFoods) to Steve Schwarzman (CEO of Blackstone) and gotten very kind replies. Short, but nonetheless replies. These were both on my old work email at Colliers. I am still searching so I can include screenshots here.

So, in this email include BRIEFLY who you are and what you're doing. Then include BRIEFLY what you're looking to do and why you're reaching out to them. Then ask the question, are you open to grab a quick coffee or lunch? Use the words: "your choice, my treat."

And you're in. This phrase has gotten me over 40+ meetings with high caliber individuals.

So: "You're awesome. You're more successful than me. I want to learn from you. Do you have time to grab coffee or lunch this week? Your choice, my treat."

Now, I want to caveat this with one exception: if you are mass emailing and want to get straight to the point then you can do that, but this email has to be to the head honcho and it has to be concise and include some specifics like references ideally with impressive titles. Like this one here.

But like I said, that's the less personal approach meant for mass emails (think 25+ people in a day).

Follow-up

This is a crucial step. Here is where you need to play your cards right. Be subtle. You have to treat people like a cat. Cats always go for the person in the room who likes cats the least. It's the principle of "people (and cats) want what they can't have." Don't follow-up with anything more than saying you really appreciate the time and you hope to keep in touch. Let them know you're looking to make move in your profession and that their advice really helped provide some insight as to your next move. Then leave it.

Repeat

Start back at step 1: Identify. Repeat the process until you get the job offer you like the most.

So what's happening here?​

As I mentioned, companies have personalities. Any good company hires people who match that personality which normally comes from the owner. If you find somebody to connect with that's already at the company and they enjoy your company, they're likely to communicate that to somebody (hopefully the boss) because they want to work with people they like. If you're looking to move a bit faster, you can always say, "I would love to connect with anybody else in your office if you feel there's somebody that would be good to talk to." And hope they say you should talk to my boss. We're basically getting an internal referral which is a very powerful thing. Imagine having somebody that already works at the company on your resume as a referral. Simple politics. This is the process is getting the internal recommendation.

Start as soon as possible​

This process should be something you start the second you're ready to be employed. It's better to have some sort of prior education or work experience so you're an attractive candidate surface level. We need to capture their attention showing we're not just all talk and having something to include that shows you take action is very helpful. But even doing this shows you have what it takes to grow professionally. That could range from experience to education to a mutual connection. If you're somebody whose got a degree and work experience and mutual connection, the job is pretty much yours. So start building all of those things now.

My personal experience

You know I'm not about anecdotes, but I'll share my experience with this quickly: I have received six or seven full-time job offers even when I wasn't looking for a job. I used a mutual connection to set up a meeting with a developer in Miami, FL to learn more about development (literally just wanted to ask questions). That meeting lead to a job offer that prompted me to quit my job in research. This is the moment I discovered this system. COVID hit and that opportunity was no longer a thing. I landed in Jacksonville, FL and then over the course of about two hours I wrote and sent 30-40 emails to real estate development companies. That landed me my job in commercial real estate brokerage (along with some other offers), that through a series of multiple steps, lead to me to where I am now. This approach works and I say that even more now being on the hiring side. It's not 100%, but it's very close. It's getting even easier to be competitive by adopting this strategy. Nowadays, people don't understand that the world doesn't owe them anything so they sit around and wait for opportunity or lack the humility to start where necessary.

I saved the email that I used to send to the 30-40 companies. You can buy it on the website here for the price of a subway sandwich. I sent this one off right to the presidents and CEOs of the companies. They would immediately connect me with the hiring team and I'd normally get interviews within a day or two. 

Happy job hunting!

~ Bonde​