Hacking the Job Hunt: How I landed 15 interviews in 30 minutes | Hacker News Reader

Hacking the Job Hunt: How I landed 15 interviews in 30 minutes

themuse.com

18 pointslauren280227 comments

I always feel conflicted when I read about strategies like this. On the one hand, it's creative and effective for marketing yourself. It's also quite simple.

On the other hand, it has a spammy quality that I think might turn many people off of you. I wonder if this strategy is only really viable for marketing/sales jobs...

Sam, I feel you, but this is the developer in you speaking!

I had similar reservations, for example when it related to following up with companies after they gave no response.

I tested this out, and emailed some companies close to 8 times. Guess what happened? Every single company I followed up with that relentlessly replied, and replied positively. 1 Month in and I had an offer from Uber, and interviews with Evernote, Google, AirBnB (had to email them the most) the list goes on.

If you're on the search I definitely suggest testing your assumptions

"Every single company I followed up with that relentlessly replied, and replied positively."

Any chance you could state this in another way? I felt like you were about to say something then put a period. Thx

Hiya person lurking :).

Other then going into the details of the contents of what I wrote, I can't think of much more to write there.

Do you have anything you'd like to know?

Unfortunately, it seems like I might have a lot of questions to get the story straight for myself. It would be a lot of back-and-forth commenting. Thanks for the reply, though.

Huh, so to me that reads as a list of companies who drop the ball.

There are millions of balls, a few manage to get through. Nobody is going to go around actively catching them.

Interesting point rhizome -- I guess it can be looked at that way, but the problem is that at the initial stage, we want to the companies more then they want us.

Then the question becomes, just because other people are dropping the ball, does that mean you're not going to get what you want?

It's the kind of thing that works really well until everyone is doing it, at which point you'll have to try something else if you want to stand out from the crowd!

Completely agree, and I think it might turn more off than on. For example, she states that she would now write the subject line as: "Learn how I increased X for company Y". To me it seems like a very spammy subject line, that has nothing to do with the intention of the writer trying to be hired.

Don't want to be THAT guy but... OK so she sent(sorry, spammed) an identical email to 162 people and got 15 interviews. Which is 10% and well, it's pretty bad.

Since when spamming is HN worthy? :(

I think this is a decent strategy for an aspiring marketer, since it shows off actual marketing skills.

For a software dev, however, not so much. I think it could come off as insincere and/or spammy.

If I'm emailing a company about a job, its because I'm particularly interested in working there. Therefore, I really try to be as personal and specific as I can when reaching out to the company. Especially in the initial email.

Otherwise I'd risk misrepresenting myself.

The author mentions that someone opened the email 39 times. This is possible (depending on email client), but more likely is that one of the email addresses she hit up was a group address (e.g. jobs@example.com) or the email was forwarded by the recipient. As a marketing director working with email marketing I'd kind of expect her to know that.

Actually, the majority were personal email addresses I had taken from LinkedIn and Gmail. The ones which were opened a lot were from personal email addresses.

Classic HN.

"I'm 10 degrees removed from the facts but I'll betcha OP is super dumb. Give me points for saying so."

Lauren Holliday is a full-stack marketer and journalist with a marketing mindset. She has written for publications across Florida and blogs across the U.S. Email Lauren at lah@freelanship.com.

Two weeks ago I saw a post about Full Stack Startups. Is full-stack marketer another new term? What distinguishes a marketer from a full stack marketer? (I'm asking sincerely). Do hiring managers post jobs these days looking specifically for full-stack marketers?

Probably describes a person who can produce in print and on Twitter.

http://wadefoster.net/post/42802176600/full-stack-marketing

https://medium.com/on-startups/rise-of-the-full-stack-market...

It's a progression; Growth Hacker a year ago meant a marketer that could code, manage marketing campaigns, make content and do creative campaigning, then the technical parts of that seemed to drop off, and full-stack marketer came to mean the same thing. Now I'm assuming the technical aspects of that have dropped off here as well and 'Growth Engineer' or something like that seems to have taken its place.

It's quite a clever idea really, just invent a new occupation type for yourself. Since nobody really knows which titles have any form of validity or even what they mean you make yourself look like you are ahead of the curve. Hopefully everyone will be too embarrassed that they don't know what a "full stack marketer" is to actually question it.

The title is slightly misleading. It should read "How I landed 15 interviews in 30 minutes of work". She says that the actual process of being offered interviews took a few days.

I don't think this is a bad strategy. The problem, like others pointed out, is the spammy nature of it. If she directed the e-mails to the "send your resume here" addresses - I think it's spot on.

What is this? The web version of an infomercial?

"How to piss off half your business contacts in 30 minutes."

Excerpt:

So, I decided to create an email marketing campaign. My promotion? “Get a one-week free trial of Lauren.”

And the result? I landed 15 job interviews—for less than 30 minutes of work. And within days, I had gone from unpaid intern to paid marketing director.

I am posting this because "for less than 30 minutes of work" is not how I interpreted the meaning of the headline "...in 30 minutes." It doesn't actually say how quickly this all happened other than the vague ...but regardless, I had 15 interview offers within days of sending the email.

I get that writing headlines is hard. I really, really struggle with that myself. I am posting it for clarities sake, basically.

Obvious mtf.

Lauren, this is excellent! Kudos :)

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