Ramit advises Whitney on moving to a new city for work: build relationships with alumni and people already there, schedule phone calls and ask for introductions, then fly in with multiple meetings lined up. One student landed two job offers after doing this legwork in person.
Okay, I get this question a lot about how to get a job if you don't live in that geographical area. So here's the question from Whitney today. What's the best way to get a job at a company that's not in your geographical location? I know most people say to move to the place, but that feels kind of risky and you could be out of work for a long time while getting settled in. Alright, I'm going to answer your question, but I have to admit I'm a little bit hesitant because whenever I've mentioned this publicly, when I, for some reason people seem to not want to believe that this is possible and yet I've seen it work myself with my own students and in fact I've hired someone who did this exact same strategy. So trust me, it does work. And if for some reason you don't believe me, just close this video and unsubscribe from my stuff. Okay, here's what you do. If you live, let's say, on the east coast and you want to work at a tech startup, what you can do is start building relationships with those people. Here's how it works. I'm going to start high level and then I'll get tactical. You want to build those relationships with people who are on that coast. Start with your college alumni, send them an email, try to set up some phone calls. You can't do coffee shop meetings at this point, but let them know what you're looking for and ask them who would be the right people to talk to. You're gonna start learning about websites you should keep an eye on. On Facebook, you're gonna see people saying, hey, I'm hiring for this. Does anyone know anyone? You're building all these relationships at a very high level and you're constantly keeping people in the loop, which I call the closing the loop technique. And you're letting people know, hey, this is what I did, I spoke to this person. Thanks for the introduction. I'll let you know what else I find out. Over time, you will find that you will become more embedded within that community, let's say the Silicon Valley community. And over time, you'll find positions that you didn't even know about, and you'll be invited to apply for positions that you didn't even know about as well. I had a student of mine who lived in la, wanted to get a job in Silicon Valley, so she basically set up tons and tons of phone interviews with people. At a certain point, she had something like 10 interviews lined up with the these people. When she got into town. Some of them were informational interviews. Just, hey, I'd love to let you know when I'm in town. Love to grab coffee with you. Others were actual job interviews. She got into town, met a bunch of people, was able to secure two dream job offers. That is, two offers from companies she would have loved to work at. She negotiated her salary a huge amount. This is, by the way, a recent college graduate. She really had no functional skills. She did a terrific job. Notice, though, that she flew up to meet these people. This is one other thing I want to say. At a certain point, you cannot simply do the phone thing over and over. You need to fly from the east coast to the West Coast. Great. Maximize your odds of success by having a ton of meetings set up. But don't say this, don't say Ramit. Not all of us went to Stanford. We can't afford that ticket to fly across the country. Really? You can't afford $500 to fly and make a decision that's going to affect the next two to five years of your life? Of course, you can use a conscious spending plan. Focus on realizing this is important to invest in yourself for. And put this first. This is your job. This is your career. So get the meeting set up. Build the relationships. Let them know that you're coming into town, which is a magical phrase when you tell people, hey, I'm going to be in town from Monday through Thursday. Would love to grab coffee. Almost no one can say no. For whatever reason, when someone says, I'm in town, almost no one can say no. So you do all those things, and then. And that is how you get a job offer in a different geography before you ever, ever move there for good. Thanks for the question.
