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The Question We All Ask
One of the questions we all often ask ourselves is, “What can I do to ensure I get my dream job?” And this applies to everybody, not just people that work in the corporate world, but even in the world of solopreneurship as well.
There is this idea that if you really want to be successful in your chosen field, you have to go and find the model. You have to emulate success.
One of the easiest and fastest ways to do that is to go and literally work for that person. The person that is doing exactly what you want to be doing five to ten years from now.
The goal is to apply this, but it’s also meant for someone who really wants to go get that dream job. Say they want to be a social media manager at Snapchat, or want to get that job at Facebook or Google.
Here’s What You Can Do
If you really want to go get your dream job, you have to do the work right now. You have to do the work upfront.
I want to give credit to Charlie Hoehn here for creating a strategy that has really worked for a lot of people. Charlie talks about this idea of literally doing the work for free for the company or person.
Let’s really think about this for a second…what does any company ultimately want? They want to make sure that the person coming into their company can actually do the work, right?
They’re not looking for a fancy resume. They’re not looking for a list of trophies and worthless accomplishments. They simply want to know that when you start that next day you can actually do the work. And if you can, can you actually produce results?
So the shortcut — or rather the hack — is to do the work up front.
Step-By-Step Process
Let’s say you were trying to get a sales job or a project management job at Facebook. If you can sit down and identify what it is that the project manager does on a daily basis for that role, simplu go ahead and do some of the work for them upfront and send it to them.
During your interview process, say:
“Hey John, you know I’m really excited about this role and actually went ahead and identified ten prospects that we can reach out to. I didn’t want to do anything further than that of course, but I’ve identified these ten prospects and laid out what would happen if we got a 20% conversion rate on these new prospects. As a project manager, I would make sure that the legal team would sign off on this and then I would make sure to delegate this over to the engineers…”
blah blah blah…
And then:
“Here you go. Here’s the plan. I did the work for you (without actually doing it because I didn’t want to actually do anything on behalf of the company before being hired).”
We show them that we can do it. We either hand it over to them or we can say:
“Do you mind if I actually work for you with no pay for two weeks and show you that I can do this job?”
There are very few people and very few companies that would say no to free work, and once you’re in there you just literally circumvented the entire interview process. There was a line of people waiting to interview and by offering the free work you were able to go around the whole system.
Once they see you can do it, what reason do they have to say no? You just eliminated all of the pain and struggle when it comes to hiring.
That’s exactly what they’re looking for anyway. So if you want your dream job, do the work.
Definitely check out the work of Charlie Hoehn. Make sure you follow his principles because he’s brilliant at breaking this down.
Resources
- Charlie Hoehn– Charlie is an American author, entrepreneur, and public speaker. His books, Play It Away and Recession-Proof Graduate, offer simple solutions that help people get on with their lives.
- Dream Job Blueprint by Ramit Sethi – An in-depth resource full of useful tacticts. Also debunks a lot of conventional job search advice.
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Photo credit: Perzonseo Webbyra — CC license
