How to Get Any Job You Want (even if you're unqualified)

If I had to describe 3 things about New Yorkers, I’d say:

1) they hate tourists
2) they hate every other city on the planet
3) THEY ALL look good.

Maybe it’s just because I’m from the Midwest. But to me, everybody in NYC looks like they go to the gym.

I had tried a bunch of times to gain weight previously, but to no avail. Being around all these jacked guys made me want to give it another shot.

But I needed to try something different. So last summer, I hired a personal trainer in NYC.

And I was super happy with the results. So happy that I was thinking about maybe getting another trainer in my hometown after I went back.

I told my NYC trainer about this. He asked, “Are they professionally certified in strength training and nutrition?”

I had no idea.

How many people do you know who say “I want to get ripped. I need advice from someone who has certifications in nutrition and strength training!”

The only people who say that are the people who have those fancy credentials.

The buyers don’t care!

They just find the most ripped person they know, and ask THEM what to do.

Years ago, I was interviewing for an internship at a startup. I had a good resume, and the people at the company knew I went to a good school. I thought I had the offer in the bag.

But I never heard back from them.

I found out later that they hired some guy from a random community college in a city I’d never heard of. He didn’t have as much related experience either.

How’s that possible?

It turns out that people applying for a job care more about their own credentials than the people who arehiring them.

This is very counterintuitive.

Average applicants obsess over getting the right credentials and being “qualified” on paper. Meanwhile behind the scenes, companies are playing a totally different game.

They’re obsessing over finding the right person to solve their problems.

Here’s what goes on behind closed doors

Credentials and paper qualifications DO matter for some (mainly academic) industries like medicine or law, but for most other fields, job requirements are surprisingly negotiable.

Companies can sometimes get over a hundred applications for a single position, so they need to have some way of weeding people out to keep that number manageable. The best way of doing that is by saying “graduate degree required”, “5+ years of experience required”, etc.

What they’re REALLY thinking is “we don’t want to go through a bunch of applications of people who don’t know what they’re doing — a person with 5+ years of experience could most likely do a good job”.

If you can prove to them that you can solve their problem, you instantly decommoditize yourself, and none of those things on paper matter as much.

This is exactly how I’ve gotten interviews and job offers for positions that require masters degrees, MBAs, degrees in subjects I’ve never studied, and more years of experience than I have.

So how do you prove to them that you can solve their problem?

Do the job before you get the job.

I call this the “pre-interview project”.

For example, if you’re applying for a sales/marketing role, a good pre-interview project could be selling some of the company’s products and writing a document about it. If you’re applying for a design related role, you can mockup some new designs for the company and tell them why you made those decisions.

Today, I’m going to show you exactly how to choose the perfectpre-interview project (including real life examples), who to send it to within the company you’re applying to, and how to structure the email to so that it’s well received (I’ll even give you sample email templates to use).