How to get hired: Just make awesome stuff.

I just finished reading How to get hired at a startup when you don’t know anyone and it rang a bell.

This is not a long post, so you should just pause and read it now. The gist of the post is that Shane was interested in working with Formlabs but didn’t know anyone there.

So he spent a weekend to do his own implementation.

With that as reference I used a long weekend to write my own implementation with a few bonus features. I made a website showcasing it and sent it in.

And he landed the job!

This is nothing new. This has been done again and again. Look at the list of sites that landed poeple jobs and Basecamp.

AirBnB hired a front end developer immediately after they redesigned their homepage.

Over and over, I’ve read how this has worked for people.

In short, the best way to get hired is make something awesome that most people will not. I’ll just steal Shane’s last line here:

People call me crazy and say things like “who does that?” – but that’s the point – no one does this.