This Recruiting Advice Helps Open Closed Doors

 David Rogier claims to have unearthed the magic advice of job hunting: recruiting advice no one tells you. Among his best advice is to develop results for a company before you even apply. It’s an unorthodox strategy but one that has worked fabulously.

Rogier, a Stanford MBA graduate, has compiled an essay at medium.com on the recruiting advice that works but he had to learn it through hard work and some strong networking.

As he relates in his opening, “My graduate school adviser hated me. I complained that I couldn’t get a job in a startup. She was sick of students complaining. Every student thought they were special and were befuddled why companies didn’t agree.

“Her advice: get lunch with Tristan Walker. I did and it changed how I apply for jobs.”

Tristan Walker was then the well-known vice president of business development at Foursquare and is now venture firm Andreessen Horowitz’s entrepreneur in residence. As Walker told FastCompany.com, he relentlessly pursued Foursquare founders Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai via e-mail, worked for them for free for a month, and eventually became their vice president.

As Rogier points out, Walker’s ability to find advertisers for Foursquare, while not even yet an employee of the company, helped him finally get noticed by the company and eventually hired. Rogier said, “We (myself included) forgot that hot companies get inundated with applications, and don’t know how special you are. By doing work you a) stand out, b) show you actually really want to work at the company, c) give the company a sample of what you can actually do. If you were hiring someone would you be more excited to talk to the person who applied via the website or already closed 2 deals for you?”

Rogier set his sights during grad school on having an internship for IDEO, a global design consultancy. He reached out to a woman who worked there and asked what his greatest weakness was going to be. He was told he was going to have to prove his creativity.

So, he decided to make a book to demonstrate his creativity and incorporate his supply chain management background. “Instead of filling out their application, I decided to make a book. I spent 10 hours in 4 different airport baggage claims, interviewed 23 people and put together a book on Snapfish about how I would improve baggage claims. I got the internship,” he said.

He incorporated that same thinking to land a job at Evernote. Rogier wrote, “Do work that you’d actually do if you were working for them. After graduate school, I wanted to work in Product Management. I was super impressed by Evernote. I decided to show them what I could do. I focused on the new user on boarding experience. I interviewed 23 users about it, came up with a few ideas and wrote 10 slides about it. I emailed those to the CEO. He emailed me back in 30 mins and asked me to come in.”

Of course there’s always the possibility that all of this work to get hired may not pay off. Rogier once did sample work for a company. He sent it along to a hiring manager and never heard back, even after doing more work, and contacting him again. Rogier was stumped on how to proceed.

So, he reached out to Tristan Walker, who gave him probably the best recruiting advice a job seeker could receive: give up on that company. Rogier said, “His advice: if you are doing work for someone and they don’t have the courtesy to respond — you probably don’t want to work for that person. I agree.”