Personalized job deck hypothesis
Joel Levesque applied to 819 jobs using AI last year. He gets five interviews. Three bail, but no mention of what happened to the other two. This is an extreme example, but my sense is that this mass application process using AI isn’t uncommon.
I think there might be a better approach.
About a decade ago there was the ‘Please Hire Me, Google’ guy, Matthew Epstein. He bought a domain (googlepleasehire.me) and created a viral video pitched at Google. He got 700k+ site views, 450k video views, and 80 interviews. He didn’t get hired by Google but did end up accepting another role.
There was a copywriter, Alec Brownstein, who bought Google AdWords ads targeting the names of five creative directors in NYC that he wanted to work for. The bet was that they would Google their own name and the cost was cheap since no one else was bidding against those words. The stunt got an offer from one of the five, won an award, and got mentioned on major media.
Recently, there’s this engineer that created a deck specifically for the CEO of a company called Sparkles, and Dan, the CEO, tweeted about it.
All of this to say, instead of going the AI mass application route, which at least according to the account referenced above, doesn’t seem to produce the desired results, there’s more to be gained from taking a targeted approach and doing something that’ll stand out.
Here’s a great example of how effective a targeted approach can be for a company and I couldn’t help but include it: Brex sent 300 bottles of champagne to CEOs who had just announced funding. On that, they got a 75% demo and 169 new customers. “Trigger-based, highly relevant outbound can absolutely work, it’s obviously harder and more expensive than just sending more spam email.”
What I’m suggesting is account based marketing for your next role.
What the process would look like:
define a list of companies that you’d like to work for.
have Claude or your favourite LLM rank your fit for an open role.
when you have a narrow list (3-5 companies), create personalized decks and reach out to someone relevant. For smaller companies that might be the CEO.
if you want to take it a step further, imagine what else you could do that would grab their attention. design a bespoke website, create a video, get their attention via a highly specific channel.
iterate based on what you’ve learned.
From the company perspective, it’s quite impressive when someone invests the extra time here and they might use this as a piece of content to show how much candidates want to work for them.
This might seem tiresome, or you might think that you shouldn’t have to do things like this, but this is a step to standing out in a crowded process and likely a better investment of your time than the AI mass apply canon.
If you’re interested in building out a deck for your own personalized outreach and want to work with me to speed up that process, you can express your interest by joining this waitlist.
This would be 1:1 over the course of 3-5 days, with a discount for initial sign ups.
Companies hiring with “Founding” in the title
333 roles on the board have Founding in the title, across 203 companies. Most companies post one. The companies below are outliers in that they are hiring for at least three at the moment. Founding is generally a reliable signal for equity and scope, and something that a few of you have asked about.
Tracebit · London · Series A, $20M · 7 of 7 roles are Founding
Terminal · Toronto · Series A, $20M · 6 of 9: Founding Account Manager, Founding Recruiter, Founding Product Marketing Lead
Clarasight · NYC · Series A, $11.5M · 6 of 13: Founding Designer, Founding Product Builder, Founding Infra Engineer, Founding Sales Engineer
HelmGuard · London · Seed, $7.3M, raised Sep 9 · 4 of 5
Fluencify · Stockholm · Pre-seed, raised Sep 7 · 3 of 3
Backbone · Brussels · Pre-seed, raised Sep 3 · 3 of 3, all engineers
Testing signals for fractionals and freelancers
I’ve been asked whether there’s a way to help fractionals and freelancers find signals from the job board, or elsewhere, that a company might be open to their services.
For PR and marketing people, one thing I’ve been testing is drawing insights from publicly available press releases, like a switch from an agency as the point of contact to someone internal, whether they’ve put out any announcements for their recent capital raise, and any change in how the company talks about themselves. All of these could be opportunities to make contact.
Along the same lines, I’ve noticed that many companies who have raised 100m+ have opted not to put out a press release. Given the scale of these companies, they could make interesting pitches to a number of publications. For any PR, marketing, founder content people who might be interested in this, reach out to me to let me know what signals you’re looking for and I’ll provide some ideas for companies who could be ready for your services.
But this can apply to more than PR and marketing. If you’re currently fractional or freelancing and thinking about ways to generate automated ways for when to pitch a company, reply to this email to express your interest.
Box’s CEO on what he sees coming with respect to agentic workloads.
Job Board Stats
Since last week:
2,157 new roles last week, up 30% on the week before
549 companies posted at least one
342 remote (15.9%, the highest week yet) · 615 with a salary (28.5%)
I’ve also added dedicated pages for remote and AI. Just a few days in and these are already the two top performing pages on the job board.
One thing that’s become interesting is that the job board has become a driver of new subscribers to this newsletter. The biggest source of traffic to the job board is ChatGPT.
Best,
Chris