I Read 2,216 Resumes. Here's How You Stand Out 🚀 (2)
Hours is that it's a completely nonprofit organisation that helps people figure out how they can have an impact on the world. The organisation is absolutely sick. They've got a fantastic team behind them, and they've spent the last decade researching what are the highest impact careers in collaboration with academics, at places like Oxford University.
And if you check out their website, 80,000hours.org, they've got some ridiculously in depth guides about how to find that perfect career for you. And doing impact analysis of tonnes and tonnes of different career options.
They've also got a whole page of cold email templates that you can use to get tips for next time you slide into someone's DMS.
They've got their own step by step guide to job hunting, and they've got a jobs board that has over 1000 open positions in high impact careers.
And all of this is completely free. There are non-profit that don't charge for anything at all. And the reason they do this is because they want to try and help you, and me, and all of us find a fulfilling career that does good in the world as well.
In fact, side note, one of their co-founders Will MacAskill, I think he was the youngest professor of philosophy, or the youngest professor at Oxford University, and he co-founded the organisation. And he's actually going to be featuring in my podcast, Deep Dive pretty soon, where we talk about the concept of effective altruism, which is, how can we be a little bit more evidence based about the way that we have an impact on the world.
If any of that signs up your street and you want to find a career that does good in the world, and has a positive impact, then click the link in the video description or head over to 80,000 hours.org/ali. And that will give you a completely free copy of the in depth, 80,000 Hours career guide.
And hopefully that will help you learn about what actually genuinely makes for a high impact career. It'll hopefully get you new ideas for impactful paths that you can take with your career and with your life. And it'll help you make a plan based on what you've learned, and actually put it into action.
Feel free to also sign up to their completely free email newsletter where twice a month, they send updates showing what they've been up to, and what some new high impact careers are, and what some new job opportunities are. So just that incredible resource.
So thank you so much to 80,000 Hours for sponsoring this video and let's get onto the next tip.
This is an example of one of the CVs that we had. And this literally fills me with dread, because it's six pages worth of stuff. And as an employer, reading through tens, hundreds, thousands of applications, I don't have time to read six pages worth of a CV. It's just not going to be worth my time.
And so something like that, it's just like, oh, this is really annoying to go through.
But this one, for example is an example of what a good CV looks like for an employer in this sort of field. This is Becky who is now one of our core team members, and on our leadership team. This is a one pager, it's so easy to digest. It's super nice. It's good vibes, her typography you could do some work, but it's reasonably laid out. It's so easy for someone looking to hire Becky, to look at this and be like, "Oh, this is pretty sick. Well played. I want to give you a shot."
And to be honest, if you do have tonnes and tonnes of experience, there's absolutely no harm in tailoring your CV to the specific job that you want to apply for. I think the mistake people make here is that they take a scatter gun approach. But you're not going to land your dream job, if you take a scatter gun approach and apply to 5,000 jobs with exactly the same CV.
Figure out what are the jobs you actually genuinely want, or you want to actively go for, and figure out ways to adjust your CV so that it fits onto one page, maybe two at the absolute max, but you get rid of all the stuff that is not relevant to that job.
All right, so the next point is that when applying for a job, or sending a cold email, or a DM or anything like that, you want to try your best to lead with value.
This for example is how not to do it. This is someone who applied for one of our jobs.
We have redacted all of the sensitive information from all of the examples that we're going to show you of course, to preserve confidentiality. But hopefully we can use some of these job applications as a learning opportunity, so that we can all just get better at applying for jobs.
This is what this one says. "I am really excited, and I really want to get this position, as I really want to work on this so that my experience increases. And it will also boost my confidence and my CV."
Yes, this is badly written, but also this person is not leading with value. They're leading with, "These are the reasons I want the job. I want the job because B, C, D E." And it's all selfish reasons. This is not leading with value.
Here's another example, which is a bit better written, but again makes the same mistake of not leading with value. "I will shortly be completing my first year of whatever as a history teacher. And I'm very eager to gain experience working in the wider educational sector over the summer holidays. My achievements have inspired me, blah, blah, blah. Then I want to do this with my career. Then I want to do that. Therefore, this internship would be useful."
This person, I mean, it's very reasonable and I'm not knocking these people by any means. I'm really grateful, and is happy that people have applied for jobs at our company.
But no one teaches you this stuff. No one teaches you how to actually apply for a job.
And whether you're applying for a job, or applying for an internship in a way the employer does not care about you. They don't want to care, they don't really care about why the internship would benefit you.
They care about why the internship would benefit them as the employer. And then as a side effect, you can talk about why it would benefit you as a person.
All right, so those were two bad examples. Let's look at now what a good example looks like.
So this is one. "Dear Ali Abdaal's team, as a massive fan of Ali's content, working as a writer researcher intern of the summer would be a dream come true. There are five reasons why I believe I am perfect for the role. Number one interest in the creative sector.
Number two understanding content style, number three team working, number four course experience, number five educational sector, et cetera, et cetera.
This is an absolute dream cover letter to read because this person has led with value. They're saying exactly why we should hire them. And they are doing some of the stuff of, telling us a little bit about themselves, but they're doing it in a way that leads with value.
And honestly, a cover letter does not have to be this whole paragraph, paragraph, paragraph, like you would write a personal statement, or a university application essay. It just needs to be clear. It needs to be a list of, if you want, it can just be a numbered list of bullet points as to specifically why the company should hire you.
There are no rules when it comes to cover letters, other than some of these tips that I'm sharing in this video.
Now, again, if you're applying to 5,000 jobs all at once, you can't go above and beyond for all of them.
But if you know, you really, really, really want that job, if you know that MKBHD is hiring and you really want to work for him, or that Ali Abdaal is hiring, you really want to work for him or that, or whatever other company you admire is hiring.
And you can maybe reach out to their hiring manager, try and go above and beyond in your application, because this really sets you apart from the crowd. Now, the example I want to use here is a chap called Ryan, who applied for one of our videographer positions.
Now Ryan did not have admittedly that much experience, but he got an instant, let's email this guy, let's invite him over to do a trial shoot day. And the reason he got that is because of the 400 people we had apply as videographers when I was hiring, he was the only one who made a video. He made a video, it had had a few issues like lighting, and colour grading, and stuff. But he made a video. He made a video, basically talking about why he wants to work for the team, and why he liked the content, and put in a few jokes.
And just going that little extra step, going above and beyond meant that he got his foot into the door.
And as soon as we saw that, we sent it around the team on our slack group. And we were like, "Oh my God, this guy actually really went above and beyond hell. Yeah, we need to interview him." Didn't care about his CV. Didn't care about his experience. We were like, "Cool, we're going to give him a shot."
Unfortunately, things didn't really work out with Ryan. He didn't have the level of experience that we were looking for in the end, but we gave him a shot, he got his foot into the door by just putting in a little bit of extra effort to go above and beyond.
Even if you're not applying for a videographer, there are ways to go above and beyond for the thing that you are applying for. So for example, this is what one of our writer internship applications said.
So this person has literally gone through the effort of ghost writing an email newsletter that I would send, trying to do it in my tone, trying to talk about some philosophically thing that I might have discussed. This is going above and beyond.
We did not ask people in the application for writer research intern to do work. We didn't say, "Hey, here's the trial task." But this person took an extra hour or so maybe half an hour to go above and beyond.
So if you can go above and beyond in your applications for whatever job you're applying for, trust me the employer will notice. They'll probably say to the team, "Oh my God, I think we found the person."
Because again, this is the insight you get when you start hiring people, you don't realise it's just so hard.
Everyone is like, we really want to hire someone who's really good. We want you in your application, or in your DM, or in your email or whatever, to make it easy to say yes to you. To be like, "Fuck this is the person that we need."
It would be so nice if more people recognised that, and therefore approached applying for jobs with that in mind.
And to be honest, even if you're not in any kind of creative job, there are always ways to go above and beyond your application There are always ways to think a little bit more ingeniously, creatively show a bit more ingenuity when it comes to the application. All right,
