The magic formula for job applications

I’ve been racking my brains for months on how to really move the needle for job seekers who want to be taken seriously.

And recently, I came across an email had I sent to the cofounder of Circle.so, which got a great response and earned me time on the phone with him. (Listen to hear what the email said, or go here)

Andy’s not the only one — I got the same results for almost every email I sent.

So what’s the magic formula for job outreach? Here it is:

1. A simple, timely email, focused on your shared vision/purpose (what you have in common with the company)
2. A link to a thoughtful “pitch” sharing more about yourself & why you fit the role (this is the one I sent)
3. An easy way to connect further (like a free Calendly link)
4. Sent directly to the founder or primary decision-maker

In my experience it converts nearly 100% of the time, even if they were already in the final stages of interviewing other candidates, like in this case.

It just. Makes people. Want to know you. 😀

How inspiring.careers helps you with this

As some of you know, I’m really trying to productize & gamify this formula to give us all a better way to form strong career connections. The first version is live at inspiring.careers — every application you submit on the website turns into an email similar to this one!

But, I think now I need to turn applications into Notion pages instead, to simplify the email. It’s really important that the email body itself is very simple. (And, I’m guessing, the video thumbnail image I included probably helped!)

So if you’re considering your next career move right now, and want to build your network, drop an application at inspiring.careers/companies and I’ll be in touch very soon.

Have a great week! 👋

Making Your Art/Passion Your Career (Long-Term) with Rob Hardy of Ungated

Join me for this transformative conversation with Rob Hardy, the founder of Ungated.Media — a website and community dedicated to helping creators attract their “1,000 true fans,” a concept coined by Kevin Kelly in 2008. Rob wants to “make the Internet weird again.” 😁

Ungated and Inspiring Careers are both in similar places right now, and this conversation was incredibly therapeutic for me. I hope you get as much out of it as I did.

Topics we cover:

• 90% of business/marketing/career advice out there is complete bullshit — and most of us feel that way
• Avoiding get-rich-quick schemes, courses, coercive methods of marketing, etc. and instead being be generous and simply making better things because we care.
• Gaining a deeper relationship with our selves, our intuition, our feelings of what’s good and true and meaningful — and being pleased with the results when we act on it (thinking less and feeling + doing more)
• Creating meaningful change in the world, and letting the money come (if it does)
• Finding the people for whom your work would be a missing puzzle piece in their life! Rather than making mediocre, mass-market stuff that comes out of the traditional marketing advice
• Building a business from your own weird, that you love running, that feels easy and genuine and authentically you — and being compensated accordingly by these people who want to reciprocate that value back to you
• Immersing yourself into online spaces where you find these kinds of people, although you may not find a specific community or subculture that perfectly reflects what you believe or resonate with
• Developing a good enough idea of the type of person you want to reach — their values, desires, fears, dreams… creating for them, and seeing how they respond to your work… and making friends!
• Understanding what you do that makes you feel alive, and doing more of it
• and so much more

Basically, Rob‘s current advice to creators is: Don’t jump into full-time creatorship at first. Don’t rely on it to make a living.

Make cool shit—whatever you want—without worrying about how it earns money, and meet your financial needs in other ways. Earn your income from a job or clients or something else. Then, over time, if you play the long game and if what you make is valued enough by “the others,” the money will come—and it’s truly sustainable.

It just takes time.

Connect with me at [email protected] or anywhere on the web @rarelyJeremy, and connect with Rob at ungated.media.

Experimenting With Your Career with Mike Amato (plus, his vision for the future of EdTech!)

This episode, like many, came out of a spontaneous career discussion with a close friend of mine, Mike Amato, who is currently launching his career as an early-stage product manager kinda professional. He’s really good at helping entrepreneurs figure out what to build via user research, experiment design, and prototyping. He is highly empathic, and knows how to work with designers and engineers to build the truly minimum viable product to validate a hypothesis.

BUT… Mike has a hard time communicating this value to potential employers or clients. Any innovative company would be lucky to have him, but the traditional talent filters suck at seeing people like Mike for their potential.

If you’ve struggled with this problem yourself, definitely listen to this episode.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• How bad the current hiring filters are at hiring relatively unproven people with extremely high potential, and how we get around this
• Treating yourself as a consultant, a company of one, “You, Inc.”
• Going above-and-beyond on the job hunt to catch employers’ attention
• Focusing your job hunting efforts on specific companies you find interesting
• Focusing on solving problems and adding value to their work, and how it’s 10x more effective at turning into a job than the classic job application method
• Building projects to invest in yourself, and to impress potential employers
• The concern about being “too different” with your approach to applying for jobs, and how it’s actually a great measurement of workplace culture!
• Mike’s vision for the future of EdTech (education technology)
• How having your own vision, mission, and processes helps you stand out from every other candidate and be seen as a trusted partner by companies
• and much more 🤯

Connect with Mike on LinkedIn and check out his portfolio at https://turtletuber.github.io/mikeamato. Check out Tract at Tract.app.

Subscribe to the podcast if you like what you’re hearing and want more! And check out inspiring.careers to discover awesome companies, apply to them in a convincing way, and get access to more awesome tools for building an inspiring career. 🎊

Combining Yoga & Music Therapy to Create More Peace & Happiness in the World — Strategy Session with Ryan Fowler

If you don’t know Ryan Fowler, he is a yoga teacher and (soon to be) licensed music therapist in the Phoenix area. He’s also an incredibly kind, warm, generous human being! Highly worth knowing. 😉

This conversation about combining yoga with music therapy first began when I met Ryan at A Consciousness Rising’s legendary first Summer Solstice weekend in June 2021!

He mentioned this idea to me, and I immediately got excited—not just at the idea of combining practices into something new, but at the incredible impact potential this combination has on mental and physical health!

In this discovery session/idea jam, we talk about:

• what music therapy is and isn’t
• how it helps conditions like burn scraping that drugs, physical therapy, etc. cannot
• how it could be combined with yoga in some kind of program
• how Ryan thinks about designing the playlists for his yoga classes
• action items for Ryan to begin validating this amazing idea

Connect with Ryan @ryanfowleryoga on Instagram and me @rarelyJeremy.

If you’d like to have a session like this with me, or have any other questions/comments for me, you can email me at [email protected]!

And find free tools and resources for job hunting, freelancing, and business-building at inspiring.careers.

Cameron Laird: Irish Voiceover Artist, Sound Designer, Podcast Host & Producer (Impromptu Career-Launch Story)

Cameron is a fully remote, self-employed voice & sound professional building his career in this world. He tells me about taking out a loan to invest it all into audio recording & production equipment to get his studio off the ground, and his goals as an audio/sound career enthusiast. 

What started as a get-to-know-you quickly turned into my favorite kind of career launch story: one where the person is doing something they’re not passionate about, which leads to them burning out, and finally decides to re-launch their career in the trade or industry they’ve always been interested in. 

Such is Cameron’s story, and it’s an excellent one! Not to mention the perfect studio quality sound and pleasant Irish accent 😀

Enjoy! And you can connect with Cameron at fiverr.com/abbeycreatives / instagram.com/camthelemon