Matt Ragland applied to Buffer for two different jobs at once in 2013, confusing the hiring team about which role he actually wanted. He didn't get an offer. The lesson: be clear about what you're after when you're looking for your first tech job.
Chapters
I'm late.
Not like in general, but for this vlog. And I apologize about that. I had this vision of a like super vlog, these 4 different stories in it, and I'm just not at a point yet where I'm able to really piece that together in terms of editing and time and structure. So what you're going to be getting instead to kind of make up for it is there are 4 stories that I want to tell you about getting your first job in tech and what my experiences were. Eventually I will stitch them all together into a coherent narrative. For this one, I'm gonna tell you about when I almost got hired at Buffer. I think.
In the summer of 2013, I interviewed at Buffer for a Happiness Hero position. I got really close. I don't know how close, but I had multiple interviews and things seemed to be going really well, and I was just I was getting ready to leave my job at Camp Rockmon, and I thought, "This is going to be a perfect transition. This is the kind of switch that I've wanted to make, and everything's going to work out perfectly," right?
Not really.
Obviously, I didn't get that job, and that was the result of my first major mistake, which was I was actually applying for two jobs at Buffer at one time, the Happiness Hero position and then a content creator position. And the problem with that is Buffer didn't really know how to treat my application.
Application.
Applications.
It wasn't clear to them what I really wanted to do, and thus it wasn't— so obviously it wasn't clear— son of a bitch! It wasn't clear to them, and so obviously it wasn't clear to me.
That was yet another time in my life where a lack of clarity about what I wanted to achieve and the type of person that I wanted to be and the type of work that I wanted to do really Like, really, yeah, really messed with me.
