A Note from Penelope: How to get a job without applying

 Tweet

• August 16, 2010
• By Penelope Trunk
• No Comments

You know what? You are not going to get the job of your life by answering job ads. And you are not going to create a stable life by keeping your head down and doing work. I think you already know this because Brazen Careerist is great at attracting people who already know this. 



The way you’re going to get a job is to learn how to use the online world to expand your network beyond the people you have already met. And then use the offline world to bring those online relationships to the next level. After all, that’s really what a job is in the new millennium: It’s an online hunt with an offline apotheosis.

So forget all those tips about getting a job by finding an opening (old-school job boards) or finding a network (old-school rolodex-based networking). The real way to get a job is to crowdsource it. Meet a lot of people and work together to support each other in the quest for work that helps them grow. In that vein, here are five for-real tips:

1. Seek out people who are managing their career instead of looking for a job.

When people ask us, who is in the Brazen Careerist network, we tell them it’s full of self-starters, forward thinkers, and people with outstanding communication skills. We don’t need a poll to tell us this because it’s so obvious: People self-select when they join Brazen Careerist because you have to be smart enough about your career to understand why you need a professional profile online and an ongoing, professionally focused conversation to make that profile work for you. After all, if you’re not saying anything interesting in the world, why would anyone interesting click on your profile.

2. Use your network to curate your world so the people you spend time with can surprise you.

This brings us to Brazen Careerist meetups. The offline meetups – makes total sense to me because I travel a lot. I travel, and usually I will ask Ryan Paugh to pick out a few people in the city that I should meet while I’m there. The people are always fun and enlightening, and while this does say a bit about Ryan’s ability to know who I’ll like, it also says a bit about who is on the network: Coolness. Trust me. There’s nothing I hate more than being trapped in a room with a total loser.

3. Ideas know no boundaries, but jobs are local. So move back and forth between your universe and your city.

These meetups are about finding who is in your area. (And maybe dating them if they are hot.) But we’d never set this stuff up if we were competing with Match.com because, well, if nothing else, we’d never get funded. Lack of focus. That’s what the VCs would say. Even though I’m pretty convinced that even the VCs go to work, on some level, to get consistent sex in their life, I am not going to write about that here, because Ryan will edit this post and it’ll never get through. Still I can’t resist a link to a post about how getting a good sex life matters than getting a good job. Okay. Link. 
You can’t say I’m not at driving traffic to my blog.

But that’s the thing. Each of you has a knack for something, and you will bring it to each other when you do the Brazen Careerist meetup. You’ll help each other with stuff you knew you needed, and stuff you didn’t even know you need.

4. Asking good questions matters not only online, but offline as well.

This brings me to a story about Ramit Sethi. He is so good at calling me to get advice. (Wait. Did you know he moved from San Francisco to New York to get better media coverage for his Earn1k? The guy is so driven.) Anyway, he always has a list of questions and he is on time and organized and fun. All things that make for a good advice session. But I have noticed that when he is asking questions, he makes me think of questions. And his questions make me smarter about what I should ask, and there he is, right there, to answer them for me.


I hope this is what the meetups are like for you. Ask tough questions that are at the very spot where you are lost. But do the thinking ahead of time to figure out where, really, is the spot you’re lost. Broad, philosophical questions are good. Like, does my job need to be meaningful to not make my life worthless. But specific questions will get you farther, like, should I let Ryan cut out the part about sex because it’s unprofessional or should I tell him that all career collaboration has sex as an underlying theme. Oh. Wait. That was a broad philosophical one. Which is my problem. By the way. I get stuck on the very broad, in-actionable questions. That’s why I need to do collaborative career management. What do you need it for?