Advice from Josh Cohen, Director MBA Entrepreneurship & Startup Recruiting, Duke Fuqua and Innovation & Entrepreneurship
If you want to work in startups, you have to take whatever you’ve learned about job searches before (look on job board, submit resume, wait for an interview) and turn it upside down. Here’s a three step process to do so:
Research the industry or companies you are interested in. Throw them all on a list. Ideally you have some focus to your list so you don’t have three separate industries. If you do, treat it like a hypothesis that you want to test as you gather additional data to see whether you want to keep exploring.
Don’t worry about whether they are hiring or not. Job postings are lagging indicators of a business need to solve a problem. Startups are often too busy to codify that into a posting. But they still have problems to solve. Your job in the next stage is figure out what those problems are.
Outreach to the folks on your list. You can reach out to alumni or other folks that you share something in common with. But I think that LinkedIn is a great way to scale your outreach. Why? Because it has a high surface area. Follow companies and people that interest you. Then thoughtfully engage with any of their content. After you’ve engaged a few times, then you can connect because they’ve seen your name and face.
Not everyone posts on LinkedIn so that’s why it’s helpful to have a big target list. Try to develop your point of view on their company or industry. What problems do you anticipate they have? When you develop enough of a relationship to schedule a coffee chat, ask them what some of the biggest challenges they have that they don’t have the bandwidth to tackle.
Now you have to show your impact. Hiring is an economic decision: do they believe that you will deliver more value than what they will pay you? Your job in this step is to make sure they understand that value.
Remember those problems you noted before? Try to solve them. You don’t need permission. Sure, you don’t have full context, but you can still offer some ideas. Or a lead. Or an article or book recommendation that will help them. That’s why it’s an upside down job search: you do the job in order to get the job. This differentiates you from everyone else who is just lobbing AI resumes into the great maw of today’s applicant tracking systems.
This three step ROI process (Research –> Outreach –> Impact) focuses your energy in the right place to get hired in a startup: putting yourself in proximity with decision makers and help them understand how you can add value.
