If You Can’t Land a Job, You Have No One Blame but Yourself
It has absolutely nothing to do with “no experience”
The real reason you’re not getting hired for the jobs you’re interviewing for?
It’s not because you don’t have enough experience.
Everyone before you has started with no experience, and they’ve somehow made it.
That’s an incontrovertible.
So, it can’t be the reason that you’re not getting hired.
The real reason is because you’re not able to demonstrate the value that you can bring to a company.
That’s the real reason.
There’s really two things you have to do to overcome this cycle of “need experience to get experience”.
The First Thing You Have to do is Get Noticed.
Make sure that resume is on fleek (that’s still a thing, right?).
Make sure it’s crisply designed, that it’s going to stand out… because trust me, when a data science job gets posted, there’s going to be 200–300 applicants right out the gate.
And basically everyone’s resume looks exactly the same.
Make yours stand out.
Once that resume is on point, you need people to actually look at it! So, you’ve got to reach out to hiring managers, reach out to recruiters directly.
Message them, tell them that you’re interested in the company. And be slightly, annoyingly persistent. Just slightly. The squeaky wheel gets the grease!
The Second Thing You Have to do is Demonstrate Your Value to a Company,
Here’s the secret to that…it’s realizing that all companies care making money. If it’s a for profit company, the purpose of the company is to make money.
There’s really two ways that companies make more money.
One is by increasing the top line revenue.
The other is decreasing costs, so that you can increase the bottom line.
So your job in the interview is to demonstrate your value — that you can help the company make more money or reduce their costs.
But HOW do you demonstrate that?
Broken record here: having some sort of project under your belt.
Because if you have no experience, they’re going to wonder, can you actually do the job, right?
If I’m going to hire someone who’s never worked as a data scientist before — maybe they’re coming straight out of straight out of school or maybe worked in another industry — the first question I’m going to ask myself is: “Can this person actually do the job for me?”
The way I’ll know if by sending you a take home assignment and basically say “Show me what you can do.”
Or I’ll go your GitHub, and I’m going to scope the quality of your work.
And I’m going to decide based on these if you have the capability to do the job, to do the stuff that we need to drive revenue at our company.
I don’t think that anyone really gives a shit if you don’t have years of “real world” experience.
At the end of the day, they just want you to make the company money and make the team and the boss look good.
And you’ll never get a chance to do that unless you’re actively reach out to people and have projects that demonstrate you can do the job.
That’s it for this rant. I’ll see you all in the next one.
Let me know what you think. Leave a comment below, let’s open this up for conversation.
I‘ve also got a free, open Slack community where I’m happy to bounce around project ideas with you!
And remember my friends: You’ve got one life on this planet, why not try to do something big?
