How To Get Your Dream Offer With “Minimum Viable” Effort

I'm excited to share something that I call the minimum viable job hunt (MVJ) with you.

There is a really good book that you might wanna check out called The Lean Startup, addressing how companies in Silicon Valley scale and grow so quickly. I thought we should take the key piece out of that teaching and apply it here into our own job hunts. 

If you're with me on this, I think you’ll really enjoy this, and definitely sit down, grab a piece of paper, grab a pen, take some notes, and let's kind of map this out together as we go through this. 

In the book, The Lean Startup, the concept is of the minimum viable product (MVP). What does that mean? There are three letters there, so let’s go through them one by one.

Product (P)

Let's first start with the P (product) that seeks to “launch” and become the next billion-dollar company. It has a P because it stands for “product”. The startup has something that they want to sell into t...

Networking: Tool to get interviews easily

Today, I wanted to peel out a small section of my four-day live training for you here because I thought this particular part on “interview explosion” is powerful, and I want you to make the progress that you wanna make in your life and in your career. 

Let’s start with, how do people systematically or at all get interviews with their dream firms? How do they do it? Are they just applying online? Are they doing some sort of social media trick? 

“Hiring comes down to this: decision-makers, meeting with you one-on-one.”

With that in mind, Interview explosion is possible: it's possible to generate interviews on-demand and in great numbers. 

Why? Let’s start with the basics: 

If you look at an interview, what is an interview? An interview is a process of getting someone to know you, like you, and then support you, simple, right? 

The support step is meant to be the “nod” that you will go to the next round or give you the offer, right? T...

Why you shouldn’t be afraid of meeting people on the job hunt

The excitement of meeting new people has got to be probably the thing that makes work-life interesting.

Finding new friends and colleagues should be easy, so what is it about reaching out to new people that is so scary when we know that's what we want to do anyway? 

You need to change your mind from: 

“Hey, no one would reach out to me or be willing to contact me.”

>>> TOWARDS >>> 

“Now I'm going to change my mind and try something new.”

It’s time to change your mind on this! 

One of the aspects of the StuartSystem is that all of my courses are focused on us generating our own job hunt data -  not being so quick to believe this or that negative thought which data won’t support. 

Let's go out and collect some data that really matters - like having a sequence of messages that you can depend on to start networking or following up! 

From that, we can work the percentage at each stage of our interactions with peop...

If you “love data”, start by loving your own job hunt data

Are you interested in data and data analytics or doing investments and crunching numbers? If you are, you're interested in data, but one thing that people don't ever consider is the data that supports their own opinions and their own ideas about things. 

Just take a moment the next time you have a stressful thought about your job hunt and ask yourself: “do I have data that supports that opinion?” 

I’m going to be that you don’t. 

Let me give you a really simple example. 

There is a person who I think wouldn't want to talk to me. I reached out once to that person over LinkedIn and they never responded. I conclude, “people must not wanna talk to me”. 

This is one data point. How often does one data point reflect a population? (and how often do people get busy, miss messages, or prefer you to follow up over email?)

It’s interesting in the job hunt: we come across these opinions about how difficult it is to do this or that...

Dealing With Job Hunt Emotions Out Of Control

Emotions are the most tricky thing. They can even prevent someone from applying in the first place! I'm going to talk to you here about a couple of ways that you can avoid the emotional “ups and downs” of the job hunt, or avoid losing control of your emotions and going into a deep depression. 

There have been many times in my job where I have been depressed and just wanted the job search to be over. But, I've also had times where I've been really thrilled with my job hunt and, you know, that's when you get the interview, it's when you get the offer.

I want to talk to you about how to manage this whole process because I've seen it, I've just seen it so many times, and ultimately, it comes down to these three things:

-- Process

-- Brand

-- Focus

Having A Real Process

Applying and then just waiting to hear back it’s the extent of most people's job hunt process. Start seeing your job hunt as a process that YOU bring firms through, not...

The Best Job Hunt App For Students

Handshake is an incredible tool for getting a job as a domestic or international student. And you want to make sure you use it.

I thought we could go through a brief run-through of what's in Handshake, how you can use it, and how you can take advantage of it because I think this might be a great way to save some time in your job hunt. 

There are three things that you can find on Handshake:

• Jobs
• Events
• Employers

There are some important menu items there, and then “messages” and “career center.” 

If you have any messages - as you've successfully applied or been invited to an interview - you're going to get a message in the inbox and the career center link is right there. You can jump into your career center any time and use their resources.

Did you know that most people don't take advantage of this platform?

Use Your Interests To Find The Jobs You Want 

Now that you are at your university's Handshake center, you can jump in here and you...

A Blackstone Client Experience

I wanted to talk to you for a moment about how to get into those harder to get into firms, and one of those that comes to mind is Blackstone. 

Recently, I had a student go from zero prior finance experience into Blackstone, and I wanted to tell you a little bit about what that experience is like. If you are interested at some point in moving into one of those kinds of secretive or challenging firms you might find this useful. 

When exploring companies of interest, I always like to develop a target company list - a target list of companies. Ask yourself, where do you want to work? Having that focus is super important and will help you get into these harder to get into firms.

Researching a Company

Let’s look at Blackstone. What we always want to do when we first take a look at a company is going to their website, and when you jump into the website, you see across the top a number of different things that you could research. 

For example, an overview...

Using LinkedIn To Find Your Future Boss

In my Career Accelerator Program, members always apply and “hear back” and network with the right people. Today, I thought it would be helpful to share how we use LinkedIn to achieve that. 

So let's just jump right in and talk about what it takes to see everybody and find everybody on LinkedIn.

What Is The Big Problem On LinkedIn? 

The first thing to address is: what is the problem? Why is there a problem with LinkedIn? 

It’s this: you just see your friends and friends of your friends. 

What's the chance that you're using LinkedIn now and it just so happens that your roommate knows the boss of your dream company or that your friends in your class know the hiring manager and will be the one reviewing your resume? 

Good one, Stuart!

 “What are the chances your roommate already knows your future boss?”

It's impossible, right? 

You need to be able to see beyond your friends and the friends-of-your-friends. But when you look at even ...

5 Points of “Job Fair Philosophy” & What To Do Before/During/After a Job Fair

[Author’s photograph of a job fair in Shanghai.]

Let’s talk about job fair strategy and converting job fairs to interviews. *A lot* of this content is what any job seeker should try to shoot for domestic and international students alike. 

So let’s jump into what to do and you may find that if you do these things you’ll be getting interviews through the job fair right away. 

The Five Points of Job Fair Philosophy

So in terms of job fair philosophy, there are five items.
The first thing is to treat the recruiter as a person. Make the recruiter feel like you're talking to THEM - not treating them just as a “stepping stone” to a job.

Second, recruiters hire to solve their problem, not your problem. Companies want to grow and be more profitable. 

Their problem or challenge is the thing “in the middle” between here and there, and it’s the reason they are hiring. So, tell the recruiter how your training in a...

Ever considered attending Grad school? Ever wondered whether that is a good move for you now?

I went to grad school. I went to probably too much grad school!

I did a grad degree when I was doing a startup (just to kind of hedge my bets) - and it kind of worked out: Company, worked out, we listed it publicly - and I ended up getting a master's degree.

Then some years later after work, I went to a dual degree MBA program. 

“I probably have too many masters! As a result, I'm qualified to talk about the subject - having three of them.” 

Now here is what I see as the three top reasons to attend grad school.

Reason #1: Going deeper in a field where you already have some experience 

The first reason is that you have worked for a couple of years and now you want to go deeper into that subject. Do you love finance or do you love electrical engineering? You've done it?  Do you want to go deeper?

All right. You actually have some experience and grad school is that vehicle that is de...