Targeted Bets: An alternative approach to the job hunt
seanmuirhead.com
seanmuirhead.com
I spent a lot of time on targeted applications for these places, re-doing my CV and spending weeks iterating on my cover letter. I never heard back from any of those places.
Instead I've been hired into industries I knew nothing about. Sure, I was a decent candidate, but I was just another candidate. This has worked out fine.
Why did these places hire me and not the others? Because they were growing so they had a need to hire. The former places did not.
So for me the only real advice is to apply to places that are growing. When places are growing and really need to hire to expand, all the bullshit in the process is eliminated. Decisions are made fast. It's easier and more pleasant.
Or sometimes when people are leaving and they need a replacement ASAP. That's how I was hired, but it was also quite lucky that there were not many applicants.
2 turn 18.
3 move to highest gdp location, capital city, largest city, that you can get to, or that your chosen industry, if you have one, is focused in.
4 make list of growing companies.
5 apply to growing companies.
Simple, yet so few will actually do this.
2)Great, still have no job experience or degree
3)I sell everything and show up to the valley naked. I'm suddenly homeless looking for a job in a place where I have no connections, no degree, and no laptop to actually apply for a job or do remote gigs
4)AI startups number 1-4 are doomed to fail, 5 and 6 expect me to work 12 hour days with little pay and no benefits, and 7-9 won't hire me without a degree or nepotism
5)In the extremely unlikely chance I get hired given the circumstances described, I'll be laid off when the company goes belly up or the shareholders demand a new yacht
GeE i WOnDer whY PeoPlE DoN'T dO tHis
This is not how it should be, but sometimes when you have no other opportunities this is what you need to do to open doors.
Capitalism is vicious and not participating because you (rightfully) find it demeaning is your prerogative, but it is also poor local optimization.
I joined the military and walked with PTSD not because I’m a patriot but because I needed to pay for college. I got out and took an internship well below the poverty line. I turned that into an entry level job, climbed the ladder to build a cushion. Started several side businesses trying to improve my lot. One was successful enough now I can live a comfortable life.
The world sucks but you’ll be eaten alive if you wait for it to become fair. Some obstacles are stepping stones.
Take risks, sure, but step 0 is have a resourced backup plan, and know when to execute it.
Yes reaching out to your network is good, putting yourself out there through direct contact where possible is good (early in my career two jobs which were real stepping stones came from emailing a head of and ceo directly after a conference), spending time trying to find your edge relatively to others is good. But there are so many points in the whole process where it's simply luck of the draw that spray and pray within reason isn't a completely ridiculous route.
Unless you're already in a role, try what you have to. It's no fun in it but things are always easier once you don't have anything to fall back too.
So true. Looking back, I got my current job because the preferred candidate dropped out and apparently there was no other preferred candidate, the one before that I bombed the interview but I guess they saw potential etc.
The advice helps you cast a wider net to catch that luck.
I just wish there were more job search advice for weird people. My net is tattered and falling apart after two years of fishing.
No one will admit that because everyone likes to pretend that they "earned" it. Everything about you, your circumstances and surroundings is stochastic.
So absolutely reach out to your network, study the current market and find your edge. It might still be poker-style games which you can still lose because of luck; but doing that gives you starting hands with two aces. My 2c.
Noticed a typo in my original post; my last point is about how different things are when you do have a job vs you don't have a job. Money, not even a lot but enough to stop you hemorrhaging out, offers a lot of freedom to be quite tactical in a way that does help things in your favour.
But it's different when that isn't the case and i think people underestimate the mental load that takes and how detrimental it is to necessarily bringing your best self if you do land an interview. Its always easier when you have some of that comfort which is why sometimes I think just landing something, preferably within your long-term field, rather than necessarily being very particular can make sense.
Right now we're in a weird place - if you have a network, you're pretty well off. If your network isn't hiring, or you are early in your career, it's brutal trying to get through the noise.
The truth is that proof of work matters. But the big problem is that proof of work is easy to fake right now. It takes being creative. I get a few emails a month right now. Honestly, I think this isn't going to work at this point - some go to my personal and some go to my professional emails. But what might work?
Look at people who are writing blogs. Is there something interesting on their blog? Is that worth engaging them on first? (I mean, don't waste their time if you aren't interested or if you're going to submarine it the second or third email - someone will feel used - but showing a dual purpose of the email might not be the worst thing and even if they don't have a position or influence on the position, you might have a good conversation.
Are you involved on bluesky/twitter/threads? Are you getting positive engagement? Are you finding ways to make community? It may not get the formal referral but it might make the social referral and give you 30 extra seconds with the resume and a reason to say yes.
The big shame is that the hardest PoW to fake right now tends to be under NDA's and proprietary codebases. So if you aren't in the position to make major contributions to FOSS in your free time or "code for fun", it feels like a soft reset all over again. As if those yeras in industry mean nothing.
I especially dread the idea of needing to jump on the very doomscrolling places I left at the start of the pandemic just to get a potential lead. My mental health over 2025 was already pretty bottom of the barrel without that.
Highly recommend Alan Watts. If you like audiobooks, I started out on the one titled You're It. I think it was a good starting point.
Do you think investing in bluesky is worth it? I’m in industry but have a PhD ongoing in TTI models so I should probably get on it :/
But you have to think about investing into it like a tool - not like a pastime.
P.S. I'm CEO of a Series A company. I get a lot of email from prospective candidates. I never hold it against them, and as long as it doesn't look like spam, I reply. Telling people not to send emails (I saw a bunch of that in the comments) is categorically bad advice.
Cold emailing definitely wont hurt your chances at the job.
But to be effective, the outreach needs to be heavily tailored and personalized. You need to make it obvious you aren’t copy and pasting the email to 20 other people.
The purpose of these emails is just go get you in the door. From there, you gotta interview well.
This is really rat race to the bottom. Obviously it goes without saying that people passionate about a project get preference, but if you are trying to wind yourself up to be "passionate" your winding yourself up to accept less for more work.
> Do not ask employees for a referral!
This amount of times I get asked for blind referrals is insane. Maybe it is a non-western thing, but I nor anyone else I know does this or accepts these requests. It only kills an application, since it looks deceitful, an applicant should stand on their own.
> If the company is <30 people, reach out to the CEO directly.
There is already a lot of spam filtering through their inbox, this is white noise. This maaaay only work if you know them on other channels and they are "cool".
> Again, send more than one email.
lol
CS is oversaturated right now for many reasons. Regardless, mass applications do not work unless you are cheating, targeted applications do not work unless everyone else does the same. The best bet is internal networks, or searching for work in unexpected locations, e.g. webmaster at the local pulp mill.
source: I worked in hiring for small stints over 7 years
1. Getting rejected does not say anything about you. The guy they hire says a lot about the company.
2. "If the interviewer(s) in question feel like you're trying to circumvent them, you're probably making your case worse"
This is the whole point. In most cased you don't deal with an expert, but with HR. HR are idiots most of the time. HR, like real estate, has also very low entrance requirements. This does not mean that all people are idiots, but the field attracts idiots.
3. A job is a sale. You have to sell yourself. And unfortunately there is only one way to make the buyer happy: Sell him what he wants, not what he needs.
Soft skills are the most important. Calling a group of people you work with idiots because their role has a low barrier to entry reflects badly on you. Bad recruiters are beyond useless but a good one can read a resume, match it to the JD, learn what the hiring manager is looking for (do they keep saying no to people with too much experience or too little? Or in X tech stack), and they can glean out all of the really important job stuff - salary, location, flexibility, perks, etc. they can also get a read on whether the person is likely to be… difficult. The way they treat people they believe to be below them is how they’ll treat others when they’re frustrated/stressed or even succeeding.
Simple mathematics. There are close to zero entrance requirements to HR or Real Estate. Now compare this to a professor at a decent University. Has to get a HS Diploma, Bachelors degree, PhD, Post Doc, publications. While there may be idiots, it is much harder to become a professor at a decent university if you are an idiot.
Back to HR. I did not say that all people working in HR are idiots. There are brilliant people. But on average, their level is not very flattering. And "soft skills" alone is not enough. Many, if not most, just follow check lists and have no idea what they are talking about.
Recruiter are worse. They add another layer of unnecessary complexity to the process. I avoid them like the plague.
When the people you're interviewing with are 'already senior' (e.g. direct reports to the CEO), you can sometimes make your case worse rather than better, because it feels like you're going over their head.
So rather than size...
- If the interviewer(s) in question feel like you're trying to circumvent them, you're probably making your case worse.
- The kind of CEO that tends to meddle in things below their level might drag down your case even if they like you, because folks can develop a distaste for their meddling.
- Doing this for senior roles, or roles at small companies can actually be worse, because the person in question is more likely to be close in reporting chain to the CEO, who is more likely to directly meddle in your hiring process. Zero- or one-level removed can be the worst.
If that happens then it's a very good thing - you do not want to work at a company where people are precious about how they succeed. If a great candidate (e.g you) drops into the inbox of the CEO who forwards it to someone else, and their first reaction is 'Well, they violated my personal kingdom by going over my head!' then that is a manager you do not need in your life.
Do that.
>Get in contact with current employees at the company. It is important that you send more than one email.
Don't do that.
>I've gotten dozens of emails asking for meetings and referrals.
I've never gotten one in my entire career, and I was hiring manager in multiple companies/roles.
>If the company is <30 people, reach out to the CEO directly.
Don't never ever EVER do that.
Edit: formatting
So, what's your trick to avoid getting skipped because a contract recruiter or internal recruiter is going through resumes at 6 a minute and looking for keywords nowhere near the job profile? What's your trick to get through the noise? Right now, it's brutal from junior to staff, and if your network isn't hiring there's no real way to tell the difference between someone who is taking care and someone spamming 200 applications and using 5 minutes of AI to customize. So other than "utilize the network you built over 25 years," what's your advice if all you have is "don't do that?"
I'm glad I have a job now. However, it's brutal for people on the hunt in bad situations or people who have been laid off.
Ideally write the hiring manager and not HR. And, write something that makes it hard to not want to talk to you.
1: Minimal hygiene is writing something that shows you read the vacancy (if any). Don't: "I'm interested in the role, CV attached". do: "You want onsite in Amsterdam, I'm living in Milan but already planning to move to Amsterdam for reason X".
2: Stand out from the average applicant. Someone recently applied with a personal website that was a kinda-functioning OS (with some apps). Someone else applied with a YouTube channel hacking an ESP32 into their coffee machine. Someone applied with a tool on their GitHub profile, super well written, in our target language, doing interesting things on the database we're working with, etc., etc. how could I _not_ talk these applicants? All of these are soft signals that show affinity for their work as engineers. Don't: generic application letter combined with 3+ pages resume with too much detail.
3: if invited: get curious (but not overly opinionated/combative) about their stack. Candidates we've been most excited about have come in asking questions on how we're setup, and why we've made certain choices. Don't: expect the interviewer to ask all the questions, or bring only a prepared question that misses the mark.
4: Its a people process, if that's your challenge, work on that. Maybe you share a hobby with the interviewer, maybe you've both solved similar problems in earlier jobs, maybe you both like Haskell, maybe something else to connect over. Connection matters to most hiring managers.
I do maintain though that cold reach out is more often harmful due to the barrier of HR/recruiting built to prevent this from happening, and you trying to go around that will likely cause trouble.
Also, when you reach out to the employees for "the referral", what does this even mean? If the person knows you, worked with you, or went to college with you, then they can refer you, but if they haven't even met you and don't even know if you're real, what are you asking them to do? "Hey boss I got this email from this guy he says he's a good fit for this role we have open, do you wanna hire him?", is that it?
DO research the company. DO research the role, the team, the manager, the environment, the toolsets, the issues they're facing. Do NOT flood people's inboxes asking for "referrals" whatever that means.
If you haven't been on the market the past 2-3 years: I think we're at a point where we do indeed need to all "cause trouble" if we want anything to change. It's better than being ignored (AKA a soft blacklist) in my regards. If you think that way, the worst you can get is a "no".
>Also, when you reach out to the employees for "the referral", what does this even mean?
It used to mean what you described, yes. I worked with this person in a previous job or college and can vouch to their work ethic at worst, or ability to perform this exact role at best. A referral for me should be a 5 second decision based on seeing the person's name.
I'd personally never give a referral out to someone without that; at best, maybe I'd setup a small call myself and see their work for myself before giving a "cold referral". Most Code referrals don't even do that much, sadly. But I guess enough cold referrals have happened that even those are limited in effectiveness nowadays (as well as there simply not being many openings).
I don't know, but I can't imagine the person whose job is not to look at resumes at all is going to do any better.
There's a tragedy of the commons thing here. It might work if people are getting one inbound email a week and they like reading them. Once it becomes common wisdom, suddenly J Random Employee has dozens of incoming cold emails distracting from their work. So all of them go in the bin.
> Don't never ever EVER do that.
Why not? Is the world really going to implode because someone wants a job so badly that they slip a message into some random CEO’s inbox, an inbox that’s probably already flooded with irrelevant emails from strangers asking irrelevant things?
Don’t ever convince yourself that someone is so important you can’t email them. That’s a self-defeating mindset. Send the email and let them decide whether to ignore it, mark it as spam, block you, or whatever. Life goes on, and there are far more important things to worry about.
Imagine as a ceo you receive emails from juniors wanting to work for your company. You might not even know the role, why would you waste time checking these Cv/email that detracts you from your goals? Usually are low quality and spammy , any ceo will quickly learn to ignore or forward to hr to blacklist these people. These are the same people that once they get a job will email the ceo for a raise.
As a ceo you hire hr to deal with that noise and only give you the top 3 are hr and others wasted their time filtering. If ceo does the filtering is useless.
Imagine for a tech role: the good devs would never email the CEO, the crap and entitles one will do. It’s definitively the kind of candidates you want to avoid.
This is a lot of words to say: you have nothing to lose by doing this.
At any rate, the downside of this is as follows.
The goal of having Human Resources, talent acquisition, recruiters, and other similar roles is to let hiring managers (and everyone above them, up and including the CEO) concentrate on doing their job and only assist the aforementioned roles in hiring. Of course hiring manager is ultimately responsible for hiring a good candidate but they are not expected to do things like posting job descriptions, initial screening, background checks, referral checks, employment history verification, dealing with legal stuff like NDAs etc etc, that's the job of HR/recruiters. Candidates reaching out to hiring managers (and especially higher ups) are not treated nicely by the HR as these candidates are attempting to take HR out of the picture.
HR are people and want to keep their job and get paid, and you circumventing them might be perceived as a threat to that.
That IN ADDITION to a disruption you will be causing hiring manager (or especially CEO) cause now they need to decide what to do with your email. Even though they have HR/recruiters to handle these things.
A typical result of such a "reach out" will likely be forwarding this email to HR and subsequent rejecting/blacklisting the candidate.
Edit: some clarifications
We’ve had candidates spam our every Senior+ level staff at my current job (many not even in the relevant department) trying to get their resume boosted.
Those went from candidate to rejects very quickly.
The goal is to personalize, not spray and pray all at one company.
Heck my CEO asks me all the time that people are messaging him and if i think they are interesting enough to hire.
If the company has a person/group dedicated to hiring then going around them is counterproductive. IMHO of course!
Side note: You gotta hustle people!
Now if you use AI to automate the personalization and start blasting it out indiscriminately, then yea, please don’t.
But if you are being genuine and hand writing emails expressing why you want to work for someone, it’s hard to screw it up.
This may say more about how people interpret you, personally, than about the situation generally.
I might agree in good, normal times.
But in bad times where "the normal process" can't even let you have a human look at your resume, it's different. "circumventing" is at worst a simple act of rebellion to annoy people who can change their process. It's a best a chance to actually get the response that isn't even granted with a form rejection these days.
Working for an interview mill is not the same as working for a company.
An interview mill’s objective is to assess whatever criteria their client told them in a somewhat repeatable way.
A company worker’s objective is to find someone who would be a good colleague or addition to the company.
- I quit my job to work on a side project in a specific space (voice AI for me).
- Spent three months shipping a few things and sinking into the area.
- Apply to jobs in that space, custom cover letter if applicable.
- Reach out directly to hiring people/engineers on LinkedIn for those companies, if it is engineers I usually say things like "did you also struggle with 'x'", "I solved 'Y' by doing __"
- Be genuinely interested in that space.
~50% reach out to interview rate using that strategy.
In the past I took a 18 month break and played around with leaving it blank or putting side projects. It definitely doesn't help but it wasn't a killer either.
- HR is no longer inundated with garbage resumes
- Hiring managers can actually focus on the resumes in their inbox and assume that people are genuinely interested in the role.
- The whole system works more efficiently.
From day one I thought the whole notion of AI in the hiring process (on both sides: candidates submitting AI resumes, HR filtering resumes with AI) was positively absurd. I hope more people catch on.
This just means the average employee starts getting inundated with spam resumes instead that they are ill equipped to handle.
AI in the process is absurd, but the logic of the spam arms race is inescapable.
Connecting the employer with employed to be is not the core proposition.
It's unclear if anyone cares.
I found that neither side of the market wanted to rethink the market, they just wanted something that worked well for them. Even today, job seekers may be reaching for something like this but employers have no interest; there is a glut in the market.
I’m sure I never quite got the messaging correct. However, I distinctly recall that triplebyte attempted a pivot in this same vein and also failed bad.
I'm not sure if this strategy taken at scale will end up being much different from the LinkedIn model. You just slow down the pipeline on the employee's side while the employer still ends up with way too many applications to process each day. Or the reverse in an employees' market.
It still might be worth a shot, though. Especially if it can cut down on fake AI profiles that LinkedIn has become rife with. Any job board that can commit to a "human experience" is worth its weight in gold at this point.
Seems like good advice.
Early career when I realized trying the 1000th way to make myself seem better than all the other college graduates with the same qualifications I gave up targetting and just sprayed and prayed and got jobs that way through pure lottery luck of ending up randomly on the pile at a moment when the company was too exhausted because they lost their preferred candidate at the last minute or something like that. I basically put in so many apps that the 1 in 1 million chance happened that I was an unremarkable cog that showed up at the right place at the right time.
By mid career when I actually had something worth anything to anyone then spray and pray was no longer necessary and targetting an application could actually be effective.
Please, no. Go through the proper channels like everyone else. If you have a referral - great. Otherwise, DON'T spam current employees you randomly find on linkedin or whatever. I get those from time to time and ignore 100% of them.
Much like many other decisions you're making in the job market, it's a polarizing choice that increases your overall chances when the alienated class of people isn't too large. If 90% of people ignore those emails but your chance of getting a first-round interview goes up 5x compared to a cold application when the remaining 10% respond, 2+ emails are easier to send than 1 application, especially when you've done the legwork to make your application any good.
I haven't used techniques like these specifically yet, but as somebody who nearly always eventually gets the job once I've had a first-round interview, I wouldn't be opposed to seeking out the hiring manager and contacting them directly to decrease the resumé false rejection rate.
There are more effective ways of spending your time than that.
I'm not sure in this day and age. Your goal is to get in front of a human, and that's harder than ever. If you spend hundreds of applications with no response, even a "You're blacklisted" response from a human will feel better than the cold neglect of today.
It's not zero effort, but I argue it's less effort than being months into your search and trying to find another 20 companies that you seem to be qualified for. Having the human element can also be encouraging too instead of the 50th dang workday application.
Exceptional folks rarely limit themselves to pushing submit to upload their CV. That proper channel is a lottery, and they know it. It's a broken system that requires hustle to increase the odds.
My theory is that a lot of companies are one trick ponies. By the time you've heard of them, the core of their product is finished and they're left floating and have to make up stuff to pretend to work on.
"Contact current employees [presumably ask for referral]."
"Don't ask employees for a referral, most are incentivized (referral bonus) to give you one if you can convince them"
and draw the rest of the owl?
This blog is really missing the core question of what contact would be more effective than applying to the company's explicit job postings
it's implied but not said that you should be talking to people from the same school or hometown... but what if you're from NYC, or Mumbai?
Having been in the software industry for 30 years I feel the need to provide some balance and context to your advice. YMMV
Getting a startup to even survival level money takes incredible effort, skill, and time.
Outside of those, luck is by far the most important aspect. Which is out of your control.
You have to fight and beat dozens of biases and fallacies. Here is a small sample…
Survivorship bias — focusing on visible winners, ignoring the many failures Outcome bias — judging decisions by results rather than decision quality Availability bias — overweighting memorable success stories Publication bias — only successes get written about or promoted Narrative fallacy — inventing clean stories after the fact
Please ignore the one-shot-bro-influencers who have a fool proof recipe for making 10MMR with Ralph mode. If they are real they have hit luck not execution.
As hard as it is getting a job. The massive amount of work and time it will take. Building a network via proof of work [side projects] and hitting only your archetype with applications is still far more valuable for landing a role. With, and this is key, much higher levels of success than startups.
So it comes back to "networking", huh? Sadly the advice doesn't work if your network is either also laid off or simply is in a soft/hard hiring freeze. They can't connect you to what isn't there.
And that's even before following point #1. This far in my career I don't really have a "dream job" anymore. My dream is to be my own boss. But I need a bit more money and a smidgen more time to establish myself there. So those facts make me fall back to "apply to whatever fits my skillset, maybe ping to check vibes if I know anyone".