How to Get NOTICED to Get a Job at Google, Airbnb, Microsoft - with Austin Belcak

Hey, everyone, this is Self Made Millennial. I'm Madeline Mann, and today's video is about, in my opinion, the most powerful thing you can do to get a job interview. And this is especially potent and helpful to people who are non traditional candidates, and that is creating a value validation project. Now, I have the king of value validation projects on Self Made Millennial today, Austin Belsack. This is Austin's second time on Self Made Millennial. The first time he talked about how to negotiate your salary, which is got such a widely positive response that I just thought, no brainer to have his face back on this thing again. And if you remember, he is the founder of Cultivated Culture and is known for leveraging unconventional strategies to help people get jobs that they love and salaries they deserve. To the video. Hey, Austin, what's up?

Hey, Madeline. Thanks so much for having me.

Yeah, so great to have you back on Self Made Millennial. And, and today we're talking about value validation projects, which I know that value validation projects, people have been kind of doing it in one form or another for a while, but I believe you're the first person who really put a name to it and has crystallized this as a repeatable strategy. And so how would you even define what a value validation project is?

Yeah, no, absolutely. So value validation projects came from my experience trying to transition into a new industry, a new job, from a non traditional background. And essentially they are this deliverable that a candidate will put together in order to convey their value, to validate their value to an employer or a hiring manager. That's a way to kind of take it one step further than just a bullet on a resume.

So, yeah, it's a way to make it a lot more real about what it might even look like to work with you. I've seen that when with interviewing so many people that we're even using data points such as the way they correspond between interviews as some sort of metric is how it might be like to work with them. And so if you can help them in any way, make it more clear on what it's like to work with you, that is, you know, you're able to show your true colors. And I mean the best shades at that. So, okay, where do you even start? How do you start to kind of put together one of these value validation projects?

Yeah, it's a great question. And so the coolest part about the value validation project to me is that it's much more of an art than a science and you definitely get better with practice, but it's all about being creative and understanding exactly what the person on the other end is going to find valuable. So there's a couple ways to do this, and the core principle across the board is that the more research you can do, the better your project is going to be. So there's really two ways to do research. There's research that you can do on your own with the information that's available to you, and then there's actually getting out there and talking to people who might be working at this company or be working in a similar role or similar industry and talking to them. So. So we'll start with the first piece, which is the research you can do on your own if the company's public. This is very, very easy. And there's a ton of different tools and resources. So a couple of my favorites are to listen to earnings calls just by typing in the company's name and investor relations into Google. It'll pop right up. Should be one of the first couple of results. So very easy to find. If you download the MP3, you can listen to it at 2x. It'll probably take you like, they're usually like 30 to 40 minutes in length, so it shouldn't take you too long. And that's a great starting point. So the next resource that I like to use is a site called Seeking Alpha, which is essentially a finance blog. So if you go to the site, you can type in the company's stock ticker and it'll pull up their profile and it'll have two sections, it'll have news and analysis. The analysis side is basically a bunch of financial analysts and bloggers who just give their opinion on the company. Reading all these articles will give you kind of like a holistic view of what people are thinking about and how they're thinking through these problems. And. And that's going to inform you to make better decisions when it comes to adding value. So maybe a couple of opportunities to add value popped up, be it a challenge or a problem or a new initiative. And so now I can go out there and I can find ways to get more value about those specific things. And so a few ways to do that are. One of my favorites is serving the company's customers. If you can't get anybody at the company to talk to you, the one person who's going to be brutally honest about everything is the customer. Right? They're not going to hold back. So you can get a ton of information, especially if they're like a B2C in some capacity. If it's like Even like a Google, if somebody's using Gmail or a Microsoft, somebody's using Outlook or Xbox or whatever, you can get a whole lot of information from these people. Another is to just go to a site like Quora.com, the question and answer site, and just poke around about those specific granular questions. Forums also like Reddit, are great for getting into the granularity because they have all these different subreddits that are like, they get super, super niche. So you can have a conversation, you can find people who are talking about these things. So you basically, you find your areas of opportunity and then you kind of drill in a little bit more using some of those tools. Now for the second piece, one of the best ways to get info is to actually go talk to people who are working at the company and working through this problem. So, so there are a whole bunch of different ways to approach this. But to keep things simple, you can use LinkedIn to find them. You can get their email using a tool like Hunter IO or Voila Norbert. So you just punch in their name and their company domain and it spits out their email and you just shoot them a note and you basically say, hey, Madeline, I love what you guys are doing over at Self Made Millennial. It's really, really inspiring that you do this whole amazing thing teaching people how to get a job outside of your full time job. I'd love to learn more about how you do that. You kind of make the outreach about them, you kind of build them up a little bit and people will be receptive to that. Then you hop on the phone with them or you trade emails back and forth, you ask them some of these questions and you try and dig up some information around biggest challenges their team is facing. New initiatives, similar stuff to what we were looking for earlier or when we're doing our own research. But if you do your own research first and then you have these conversations, you're going to have this base of knowledge that you can build off of, you can ask better questions, you can go a little bit deeper and you're that much more informed. So you're going to get more out of these conversations. And then once you're basically done doing both of those things, you should have a couple of different ideas for how you could potentially add value. Now, I will say that a sticking point for a lot of people here is that they think they need to come up with like this groundbreaking idea that's going to revolutionize something or totally fix a problem. And, and if you can do that. Great. That's like the jackpot. But companies understand that you don't have the inside info. Right. You don't have access to all this information that the hiring manager, the employer has. They understand that you're kind of on the outside. What you're really looking to do here is show them that you're enthusiastic about the company. You're willing to roll up your sleeves and dive in. You want to showcase your. The way you think about problems, the way you think about solving them, how you do the research, how you work through complex issues. And if you can break that down for them, you don't have to necessarily actually solve a problem. You can just come up with a project that showcases what you're able to do so that the person on the other end, the hiring manager, thinks, wow, if we did hire Madeline, she takes this approach paired with our data that we have in here, like, she's going to be able to make an impact.

Yes. And I actually, I took your advice and I did this where since I work in hr, I, you know, took Glassdoor reviews, valued at that, and then talked to, like, a few employees. And obviously that's not really. That's not always the best quality data or. Or full. Fully the whole picture, but I was able to at least present something around how I would think through problems and work through it. So, yeah, it was. It was probably the perfect way to kind of display that. And so I'm curious about your favorite examples of what people have done.

Yeah, no, definitely. And I think examples are really, really helpful. So I do have a whole page on my site. It's cultivatedculture.com value. I have like 10 examples on there if people want to go look, But I'll highlight a few here just to kind of show the breadth of what's possible. So the first person, her name is Cam, and she wanted a job at Airbnb. So she had applied through all the traditional methods online. She had actually reached out and emailed a bunch of people, and she didn't get any responses. So we were talking, and I was like, what do you want to do next? And she's like, well, I've done a lot of the stuff I'm supposed to do, but I haven't done everything that I could possibly do. So I want to find a creative way to at least give it one more shot. So I mentioned before surveying customers, she went to social media, and she basically combed through Airbnb's profiles and the hashtags that they use, and she looked for pain points, and she found two really, really big ones that stuck out. So she collected all these different pain points. She put them into a sheet. She looked for the ones that appeared most frequently, and the top two were a lack of a keyword filter search. So if I want an Airbnb in LA with a hot tub and a view of the ocean, I can't just type that in. I have to look through all the listings in la. I have to click manually, and then I have to see if those things are available. And that's a pain, right? I want to just type it in, have the results that match. Be good to go. So that was the first. The second was the fact that it was just basically impossible to get in touch with Airbnb's customer service team. I think somebody said that they called the number and they got the dial back from Verizon, that this is out of service or whatever, and it's crazy. So those were the two big issues that she found. So what she did was she screenshotted all those people complaining about it on social media, and she consolidated it into a deck. Then she mocked up solutions for each of those. So for the first, she was looking for a job in User Experience in ux. So she mocked up what a keyword filter would look like in the actual search functionality of their site, and then what the results would look like and how those specific, like, criteria for the listings would be surfaced up. So she put that in a slide, and then for the next piece, she went out and she found a bunch of reliable data sources on the benefits of live chat. So putting a little widget on the site where basically if somebody has an issue, they can click on that, they can get help instantaneously, and how that improves customer retentions, how that improves revenue, how that boosts all these metrics that Airbnb as a company should be interested in. So she packaged this all up and she put it into a deck, and then she basically sent it off. And the next day she gets a reply. And the next week she's in the office for an interview. And it's amazing. And all she did was she found this issue and she didn't guess. She went out and she found real people who are complaining about it. And she said, these are your customers. They have an issue. Here's how you solve it. And so there are millions of people who want a job at Airbnb and thousands who are applying, but they're all using the traditional methods of resumes, cover letters, online apps, and then there's cam who did that. But then she also came to the table with something that is like, incredibly valuable to the company. And so it's a no brainer for Airbnb. They're going to hire her 10 times out of 10 because they see exactly what they're getting. If they decide to hire her, they decide to pay her, if they decide to invest in her. At the end of the day, it really, really comes down to understanding what value the company is looking for and then finding a way to deliver that effectively. It could be through a deck, it could be through finding leads, it could be through a video, it could be through building out a project or a site. There are a million, million different ways to do it. The important thing is just understanding the value and the way to deliver it and then getting it in front of the right people.

And that is something I've probably read hundreds of thousands of resumes, maybe done hundreds of interviews. I think maybe someone did something close to this once. Like, it's just not. It takes a lot of work, but in the end, you're guaranteed to be set apart from the other people because just no one does this. It is like the best kept secret, or people just think, oh, it's too much work. It's, you know, I can't spend all that time for a job. But if it's really the job that could be the perfect fit for you for years, this is kind of a no brainer.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think I just want to touch on what you said real quick. One of the other objections I get here from people is they're like, why would I do all this free work? What if the company just takes it and runs with it and they never hear from me again? And I totally understand that. But as a job seeker, as a candidate, I think a lot of us, we get stuck in like the depressing slog that is the job search. And so we just, we want to be wanted by the. We forget that the job search is a two way street. So the best companies out there, they want to hire people who are willing to do things like a value validation project, roll up their sleeves, have these amazing ideas. The second thing is, how badly do you want this job? I always tell people that one of the things that breaks my heart is when people settle for jobs because it was offered to them. The job search, like you and I both know, it sucks sometimes. It's a slog, it's depressing, it makes you feel awful. And when somebody says, yes, here's this job, and it doesn't it checks maybe two of the boxes that you wanted, but you're like, okay, fine, I just don't want to do this anymore. And that, to me, is really, really depressing. We spend more time at work than we do with our families, which is crazy. So you should love what you do. And when you're going to invest this much time, first, it's really, really effective. To your point, Madeline, not many other people are doing this. So if you're even doing a little bit, like you're putting together one slide or something even very small, you're one step further than everybody else. And so if you have this job that you really, really want, if it's a Google or Facebook or that equivalent in whatever industry you want to get to, shoot for those companies and invest the time to do this, because if you do, you'll stand out. And the higher the quality of your project, the better chance you have of getting hired. And at the end of the day, if the job isn't worth putting in a few extra hours, then you probably really, really didn't want to work there in the first place.

I love it. So, you know, we, we went over a lot and I think, you know, we have all this on the Cultivate Culture blog. So I'm going to link the article on exactly walking through what is a value validation project. I'll also link the one where it gives specific examples and some of the, maybe some of the images from the ones that you described today. And where else can we find you?

Well, you can find me occasionally on the Self Made Millennial channel here and there, but I'm also pretty active on LinkedIn, so folks who are listening definitely feel free to follow me, connect, follow Madeline, if you're not already. That consistency is crazy and the value that she delivers through these videos is amazing. But we're both there. We usually chat with each other, so you'll probably find us caught up in a conversation. Feel free to join in. And then cultivatedculture.com is my site. I have a lot of other resources on there. You can find me there and I respond to all my emails. So austinaltivatedculture.com if you have any questions at all, feel free to reach out.

All right, well, thank you so much for coming on Self Made Millennial. Austin Wi Fi high five.

Wi Fi high five.