MFM Mini - 5 Hacks to Landing Your Dream Job

alright i thought it would be fun to share a few of my hacks for job interviews or getting your dream job when i was twenty three twenty four years old i had just finished doing a startup in australia we had gotten funding and it was moving on to the next phase and i said alright do i wanna do i wanna keep going with this or do i want to bounce and i basically i said hey guys we hit our goal got our funding we gotta go do this field test that's gonna take years figure out if this technology works good luck to you guys i wanna move to silicon valley and i wanna see what's in the water there now the problem was i had none of the experience you needed to get any of the jobs i wanted at tech companies right i would go look online and it said you know are you an engineer nope don't know how to code designer nope finance well not really don't really have those skills okay you could be a product person right which is sort of code for pm which was i thought project manager but turned out it's product manager either way it's sort of the same thing it's the person that kinda like shepherd the product along shepherd the project along and their job is to make it successful and they're the person who doesn't code doesn't design but they tie together all these pieces now the problem was every job posting said you need you know seven years of pm experience blah blah blah i had none i in fact as you can tell i thought it stood for project managers so i had zero years of experience had zero seconds of experience but nonetheless i wanted to apply for these jobs and and i ended up getting my dream job i got a job at this idea lab working for this couple the sort of billionaire couple and they were super successful in their past and they were looking for somebody to come in and join this incubator this idea lab where you would dream up projects and then you'd have a team of people already announced to build them and that was that was the gig and so you know like this podcast is about spit out business ideas that's what i got to do as my job and actually build them and bring them to life so anyways how did i get this job well i'm gonna share with you a few of the things some of these that i did and some of these that i've seen or have stood out to me since then because i've hired i don't know fifty seventy people since then personally and you know some people do a good job standing out so here's my hacks for getting to stand out to not just be another resume on a pile of resumes on somebody's desk right hoping for the best so here's what here's three categories that i'm talking about first of all you gotta know that almost all the value happens in the prep happens before you even step foot in the office to do a job interview there's two types of prep there's prep for yourself and then this prep for the company let's talk about prep for yourself when you get in there you are gonna be asked questions there's three generic questions you need to be prepared for number one so tell me about yourself how do you answer the tell me about yourself question you wanna prep this you wanna make it sound like it's off the cuff but it's actually something you've thought about you kinda knew where you wanted to go with it you don't wanna bore them with just a series of events of your life you wanna tell the story right so you wanna say you know i grew up in a family i grew up in a small town you know we had our whole town had four traffic lights that's how small the the town was both my teach both my parents were teachers i thought from my whole life i would become a teacher until i turned twenty one and realized you know teachers make fifty thousand dollars a year and hey i like money right you you sort of present some version of here's my backstory right i grew up i always thought i wanted to be a doctor and and then when the time came that i needed to sign up for eight years of medical school i thought to myself well maybe i should go and see what a doctor does and so i shattered a doctor for two weeks and knew at the end of those two weeks men things the most important thing i learned was i don't wanna be a doctor but now here i am i'm twenty one years old and i don't know what to do next right so you're telling a bit of a story and the beginning setup should be i thought x i'm not it should be i just to say the easy formula is i grew up thinking x and then bam i got punched in the face when i realized x is wrong and that's when i pivoted or adjusted or i realized you know i grew up in a family of forty two engineers right every aunt and uncle i have as an engineer i thought you know the word job was basically the same thing as becoming an engineer in college i failed by engineering classes right that was terrible such a like poor student in engineering and so at some point i realized hey mom dad it's not gonna work out for me being becoming an engineer but the good news was i figured out one thing i was good at talking i was good at talking to people i was good at selling and i i realized that there's a whole set of jobs that's how i got into business development that's how i got into sales and ever since then i've sold shoes i've sold medical equipment blah right so you're gonna create this pivot point in your story the pivot point says i used to do x i used to think about i used to think of i was gonna do x then i realized why so now that's why that's how i shifted into z that's how i stumbled into z and wow z has been an amazing ride for me right that's what you're essentially trying to say and then and you wanna lead them to where you are now right and so since then i've just been kicking butt taking names doing this at all these companies but you know i've really been just looking for that next challenge and i decided that this next chapter of my life is gonna be about working on a product that i truly truly enjoy so that's why i applied to this company right so that's when you get to the a kicked butt phase and then then you're gonna say you know that's what i had to ask myself what do i want what do i really want and i decided that then this next chapter is gonna be about x learning gonna be about you know challenging myself gonna be about making an impact that's why i'm choosing to apply to work with you guys alright so that's the tell me about yourself question hopefully that gives a generic structure that you can plug your life into and you're gonna cut all the fat and just tell a story that fits that structure alright second thing they're gonna ask you questions about tell me about a time when you dealt with x tell me about a time you know tell me about some of your strengths tell me about some of your weaknesses tell me about a time you fail blah blah blah you can't prepare for all these broad questions specifically because you don't know which one they're gonna ask what you can do is you wanna prep three stories right so you don't wanna answer the question of you know tell me about a time with without a story right they're they're asking you for a story and these behavioral interview questions are very common there were where people are gonna ask you about you know tell me out a time when this happened so you wanna come prepared with three times and i the three i would prepare is number one when you overcame an unexpected obstacle you know we were doing great you know the business was was doing phenomenal and then all of a sudden facebook changed the rules and overnight our revenue went from two hundred thousand dollars to forty two thousand dollars and we were weeks away from going out of business or whatever right so things were good and then an unexpected obstacle came and here's how we overcame it that's that story number one think through your life and that could be anything it could be i worked at an ice cream shop you know and the you know the most important part of an ice cream shop is having cold ice cream and then our freezer broke and we had to scramble and figure out what are we gonna do just close the shop no we went and we you know blah blah we got ice from the neighboring restaurants we created a little barricade and blah blah you know we we we the ice cream didn't melt so you wanna overcome it unexpected ops number two is you dealt with a team issue a people issue so we were at work and this one person really wasn't pulling their weight and nobody wanted to address it but i felt like i the to do so here's how i addressed it some team issue number three is the world was going one way and nobody really knew where the you know everybody sort of thought the world looked like x but then i i realized i saw this had this insight why so that so what you're saying is how you found a new opportunity you know we only used to do this but then one day i noticed this and it got me thinking maybe we could try this new thing and boom that new thing worked so you know the three story structures you overcame an unexpected obstacle you dealt with a team or people issue and then lastly you found a new opportunity or you observed a new opportunity okay so those are the things you're gonna prepare about yourself then how do you prepare for the company well there's two things i think people should do here number one a lot of people forget like the table stakes you should definitely come in having looked up what the company does and but i think furthermore you should have an opinion about what they're good at what they're bad at now this can be you kinda auditing their product so you can go through their product you could take screenshots you can make a presentation you can make a list of the three things that you think you they that could be improved that could be better and you noticed them by playing with the product we had somebody once who has gone on to become a very successful founder you know sold a company twenty million bucks and and is very well known they they came in and they said yeah actually i saw your product i really liked it but i wanted to understand what customers thought about it so actually what reached out and i i sent this message to about ten customers and and i asked them these these three questions and would you guys like to hear kinda like what your customer said and we're like saliva at this point wow this person did the work they they showed me they could do the job by doing the job beforehand that is the easiest way to paint a picture in my head that you can do it is by having already done it right talk to the customers audit the product that's a easy thing to do last thing is they're gonna ask you a question so do you have any questions for us what do you say right you've been sitting there for fifty minutes they've been bombarding you with questions and then they give you this little opening at the the last five minutes do you wanna ask us any questions and you're like dude i just won't go to the bathroom i need a p break but i know i i know i need to come up with something here because this is part of the test this isn't you being kind this is part of the test where you're trying to see where my head's at and i could ask about the job blah blah here's the little hack that i would do so what i would do is i would say you know i think i've got a really good sense of what you're looking for but i'm curious you know if you think forward six months from here a year from now and you picture the whoever you hire for this role the person who hired for this role they're doing a awesome job what do you picture them doing that that would let you that would tell you that they've knocked this out of the park right what would it feel like what would have changed if somebody really knocked this job out of the park that does two things it tells them you're sort of thinking forward about how you're going to please them essentially how you're going to solve their problem which is why they're hiring you in the first place they have a problem and you're getting them to articulate what winning looks like so you know how to position yourself you know what i think i could do that i think that if i came in i'd be able to do x y z and get to that get to that outcome you want right but you get them to state the dream and if they even them just saying out loud what they think a killer job looks like while staring at your face there's sort of this association that happens and they they appreciate that that's where your head's at you're not thinking about well what are your hours like what's your vacation policy that's about me and said i'm making it about the role i'm making it about the company to say what would winning look like and i'm trying to ask questions probing questions to figure that out so i think that's the most important question to ask at the end when it comes to what questions do you have for me the you know the other one i i'd like to ask here is let's say let's say this goes great you hire me and i come into work and it's my first kinda like thirty days on the job my first ninety days out of the job what do you think would be the most important thing for me to focus on during those first thirty days this first ninety days or opposite could be what do you think would be a trap that would be easy for me to fall into but you know should be avoided and you you're sort of going with presumed assumption that you're getting the job and you get them to to think outside the box and and sort of highlight a priority or highlight a a common trap that that you would avoid just asking that question we'll tell them that you are a a a sort of sharp clear thinker who is you know team first okay last thing that i would say is little little hack little tips that would that work well use a whiteboard if they have one this works great when you're in person i know a lot of interviews right now on zoom i would still try it on zoom i would have a piece of paper in front me i draw something or i would use the whiteboard feature in zoom or whatever it's there's something about when you say can you know i'm a i'm a visual person i'm a visual thinker can i draw something here and all of a sudden it just breaks the pattern of this sort of looking down at my paper and asking you a question to like oh something exciting is gonna happen what is he gonna draw what picture did you have said and it can be anything you could just draw you know here's my understanding of how the business works correct me if i'm wrong if i have the right picture you got your suppliers over here and then you have your customers over here you have two segments yeah let's call it the high end and the low end segment and and you just draw some diagram let's get this is i don't know it has the swag and confidence that just ex suits here and in doing so you turn it more into a brainstorm versus an evaluation versus a judgment that they're putting on you okay so those are my by my very basic very very very basic things and then obviously follow ups follow ups strong so say hey i had a great time you know in our conversation and by the way you know after our conversation i was looking up this thing check this out it's pretty cool right just add value and you're not sitting there begging for a job it's a two way investigation of is this the right fit that's how high you know winning players evaluate jobs is this the right thing for me and are am i the right thing for you and we're gotta both opt in for this to happen it's not just a one way thing where pick me pick me pick me okay so those are the those are the tips that i got hopefully that's helpful to those of you who are are looking for jobs but of course my preference as always is be the person creating the jobs start a business own a piece of equity in a business that that is the way to go but if you're looking for a job hopefully this was helpful alright i'm sean and if you like this let me know you can tweet at me sean vp or go to my website email me sean at sean prairie dot com alright i'm out of here hey my first million listeners is this is jeff from trends dot c if you know trends you know our bread and butter is our newsletter where we share trends and how to capitalize on them but after working on this thing for nearly two years i gotta say that one of the coolest things is when people in our community actually build businesses from these trends and one example is an article we wrote in october twenty nineteen and it was called the a to z of saas and sas is spelled x a a because it meant anything as a service and we walked through literally from a to z or a to z in canada forty different models of something as a service including analytics as a service clothing as a service compliance as a service egg freezing as a service legal as a service malware as a service testing as a service there were so many different business models that we found which all framed around this idea of something as a service which basically means that you create something that's hard enough for someone to build in their own company so they're willing to pay for it as a service and we covered specific examples of companies in each one of these models and the money that they had raised now one of our trends members chris ko saw this article and he saw an opportunity shortly after he launched something called sen eats when she calls ea which is e commerce as a service he basically helps companies fulfill their e commerce and he bought a domain for eight dollars you can go to it at send dot com and fast forward to today chris and send just raised their series a at a seventy million dollar valuation chris also recently tweeted that his warehouse is growing from ten thousand square feet to thirty six thousand square feet and his order shipped in june were growing forty five percent month over month they're basically out of space ce is one of many success stories from trends so much so that i was recently asked why i'm still at trends instead of pursuing these businesses on my own so if you want in on these trends before they actually get big sign up at trends dot c slash m m we've got a special deal for you that's trends dot c slash m f m and we'll see on the inside