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So, I have been speaking to a lot of students recently, and I hear that there is a general feeling of dread when it comes to applying for jobs. And so, in this video, I am going to give my honest advice to anyone who's applying for jobs. Now, if you haven't met, hello. My name is Ali. I'm a doctor turned entrepreneur. So, I'm not an HR professional or anything like that, but I run a small business where we currently employ about 20 people. As an employer who has hired people in the last few years, I recently and in particular since the advent of AI in like 2020 two. And as someone who sees hundreds to thousands of applications for the jobs that we put out, I have some hot takes that I would like to share. And this is the sort of advice
that I give to my friends. Like, if I've got a friend who's applying for a job and they're struggling, this is just my opinion, but I hope this opinion is helpful. When you are applying for a job, I think one of the most important factors to keep in mind is that you don't want to give your prospective employer too much credit. It's easy to think of job applications as being just like an efficient market, as being like a machine. Let me tell you what my experience is as a business owner, as an employer when I am trying to hire people for a job. And I think one of the most useful skills you can have as a job applicant is empathy for the person who's trying to hire you. And this is
what it's like in my life as a business owner. All right, we've got this business. We've got these like somewhere between 15 and 20 team members. Man, some of them are remote, some of them are in person. Across these different departments, man, are there's too much [__] going on. We're just about able to do the marketing. We're just about able to do the sales, although man, there's so many things wrong with our sales process as well. God, it's tough. And I saw an email this morning from someone asking for a refund. And then today it's like I've got this meeting and this other meeting with the team and then this other thing. And then like we need to hire a director of marketing.
Hopefully what you're getting from this is that I don't know what I'm doing. And no person who is hiring knows what they're doing. And so, the first thing you should do, do not rule yourself out of a job just because you do not meet the requirements that they have listed on the page. The company that you are applying for a job with is held together by duct tape behind the scenes. It might look really polished from the outside, but on the inside it feels like there are fires going on everywhere, and it feels like a total freaking nightmare on the inside for the people in the business and who are running the business. Like think of your mom or dad on a really, really chaotic day. Let's
say it's your mom. And your mom's had a really bad night. She's not really slept and the house is a mess and you've got guests coming over. And she's got an important meeting at work and it's going to be like, "Ah, got an important meeting at work. Ah, [__] I'm I'm going to be late for work anyway." And she's like, "Okay, hiring. Yeah, I know we were going to sort of hire a bunch of these people. I see we've got 312 applications. Imagine that is like the state that the person hiring you is in. The reason why someone is hiring you is not because they want to hire you. They would actually rather not hire you because they would rather not pay the money.
And it's not even the money. Often they would rather just not deal with the faff cuz hiring someone is an enormous faff. The reason they are hiring you is because they are hoping that you will make their life easier. All of the roles that we are hiring for, by the way, we're hiring if you're interested, link down below. All of the roles that we are hiring for is to alleviate some kind of pain that we are currently experiencing. It's a very emotional need that someone has when they say, "Hey, I'm going to hire you and pay you 50k a year for you to like take stuff off my plate." Given
that it's an emotional need, you should not take the job description too literally or too seriously. You should not take the experience requirements too literally or too seriously. You should not take the fact that they haven't replied to you too literally or too seriously or too personally. In the current job market, from what I hear, um and certainly this is true for us. There are way more people applying for jobs than there are jobs available. For example, when we hire, let's say video editors, we have 500 people applying for a job to be our video editor and like one or two or three get the job. We were
hiring for student success coaches for our lifestyle business academy. We had 800 people apply over the course of like two weeks and we hired four of the 800. These are not good odds. There are broadly three different routes you can take when it comes to applying for jobs. I'm going to use an analogy from a very good book by a guy called Alex Banayan which is called The Third Door. The book basically talks about how life is kind of like a nightclub and there are always three doors. There are three different ways to enter the nightclub. The first door and the door where you've got a line of like 500 people waiting to queue
up. That's the equivalent of applying for a job. When you fill in the form on the website and you apply for the job. Now, the second door is for the billionaires and the celebrities and the people's whose like parents are super well connected. The second door is about who you know. If you know someone, you can get into the nightclub, right? But then there's door number three. Steven Spielberg, super famous director, obviously you've heard of him. Did you know the way he got his first job directing was on the tour bus at Universal Studios. He literally sneaked off the tour bus at Universal Studios and sneaked his way into a film set where he then spoke to someone and he was like, "Hey, my name is Steven. I'm
really looking to break into the film industry. I'll literally do anything you want." The approach that you are taking is like an unorthodox, unconventional approach. Where there's no like guidebook, no one's going to make a YouTube video being like, "Here's how you get a job in the film industry. Go sneak off the bus at Universal Studios." Cuz as soon as it becomes public knowledge, they will have they will close that particular loophole. But it's about finding a loophole. You're not standing in line waiting with other people. You don't have pre-existing connections. You're using the third door. You're like hustling a bit and using your creativity and ingenuity to try and get in through the third door.
We have a few students in our Lifestyle Business Academy, which is like an online business school, who are career coaches. Like they're helping people land jobs. One of our students um is a career coach in tech. And what she was telling me the other day is that for senior jobs in tech, and even often for junior jobs in tech, 80% of the roles are not advertised. The job exists, but they're just never going to advertise it publicly cuz they don't want to deal with the BS associated with having 5,000 applications. And so what that means is like the network-based approach where you kind of put yourself forward and you find, you know, networking. You like find these opportunities and you like get your way in that way.
Recognizing that hiring is a human-to-human interaction, not a sort of cog-to-machine interaction like it often seems when you're like applying for a job. So much like backdoor dealing happens behind the scenes that instead of you being surprised when you apply for 500 jobs and no one gets back to you, I want you to be aware that all of this backdoor dealing is happening behind the scenes. So, you can position yourself in a way that allows you to benefit from the backdoor dealing rather than be like screwed over by it like everyone else is going to be. At this point, I would like to tell you a little bit about Shortform who are very kindly sponsoring this video. Shortform is a
wonderful service that's like having your most intelligent friend break down a book for you. So, on their library they've got hundreds and hundreds of books, all of which are in the realm of like education, personal development, history, philosophy, you know, things that actually help you learn stuff. And for each book, they take it chapter by chapter and they break down the key concepts so it helps you understand them. Now, crucially, this is not just some like random ChatGPT generated AI summary of a book. It is instead a human-crafted experience where a real human has actually gone through the book, teased out the key points, and crucially, they haven't just told you what are the key points in the
book. They've also then correlated those key points with other books that they've got in the library. So, for example, they've created a study guide for my own book, Feel Good Productivity. And firstly, the study guide is really good. Like, I was very impressed as I was reading it. I was like, "Oh, wow, these guys really nailed it." Secondly, they've actually like made stuff clearer than I did when I was writing the book. And I was like, "Damn it, I should have hired them to help me make the book actually better." But then thirdly, you know, when I'm saying stuff in the book about, for example, the broaden and build theory or about like intrinsic motivation, they're like tying that in to other books and
other authors and other research and showing you where research agrees with what the author is saying in the book and where potentially there's disagreements with what the author is saying in the book. And so, it's a far more like critical thinking way of understanding a book rather than just taking the author's word at face value. I've got two primary use cases for Shortform. Firstly, I use it if I'm thinking about reading a whole book, but I don't know yet. So, I'll kind of browse the Shortform summary to get the key ideas and then decide if I want to read the book. Or if I've already read a book and it was a few years ago and I want to revisit the key ideas without having to read through the whole thing,
I will also look at the Shortform summary. Crucially, Shortform does not replace reading. I'm not recommending that you use it as a reading replacement cuz reading is very good for you. But I use it more as a tool to augment my reading and understanding and learning and it's wonderful for that. If you'd like to give it a go, head over to shortform.com/aliabdaal and that will give you a free trial. And also, if you want, it'll give you $50 off the annual subscription. So, thank you, Shortform, for sponsoring the video and let's get back to it. Now, tangible specific things that you can do to make this happen. Number one is you can actively try and stand out on the job application. One trick that we use in our job applications is
we add a question to the end of them that says, "Is there anything else you would like to tell us?" Because often you can just delete any application that does not answer that question of any Is there anything else you would like to tell us? And what they have found is that there's a remarkably strong correlation between the effort someone puts into that final response and how good of a team member they're going to be when they're part of your business. When you were applying for a job, the scattergun approach is unlikely to work. Yeah, the scattergun approach is like, you know what? Let me apply for 500 jobs. Let me use ChatGPT to like, I don't know, tailor my cover of cover
letter and resume to like this job cuz, you know, they won't notice. Um and then let me, I don't know, try and mass apply to as many things as humanly possible because, honestly, I'll take anything. What I recommend is take a sniper approach. Figure out, what do I actually want to do? Not I'll take whatever [__] job I can get, but like, what do I actually want to do? What company has a mission that I think is actually interesting? And like finding five of those in an area where you would like to work, ideally in your local area.
Ideally, they have an office rather than being fully remote because it's easier when you can meet with people in person. And once you've found your like dream five, you then take a sniper approach to try and get hired in that dream five. Find on LinkedIn the people who are working at that company. You try and reach out to some of them being like, "Hey, I'm interested in a you know, I saw that you work for blah. I'm really interested in getting into the space. Any chance you'd be open you know, I'd love to take you out for coffee sometime, you know, I'd love to ask you some questions about your role." And then you take them out to coffee, take them out to lunch. Trust me, it's totally worth the price of the
coffee or the price of the lunch. You're genuinely curious, you get to know about the company, you get to know about the roles. And the thing to keep in mind is that the best roles are not actually advertised. And at the point where a company advertises a role is often months after they realize they need the role. If I think of people who've been hired at a hired at our company, you know, despite having like thousands of applications for a lot of our roles, they've often been the ones who have gone a little bit above and beyond. So, we were hiring for a videographer and of the 100 people who applied, one of them sent in a custom video. and he pitched himself through this video to show his
personality, to show his videography skills, show his editing skills. And the guy had no experience. His resume was kind of terrible. His application was kind of terrible. But, he got fast-tracked to the top of the interview list because he went above and beyond compared to everyone else. So, that box, is there anything else you would like to share with us? That is your chance to create a mini presentation, to make a Loom, make a video of yourself with showing your face, being there on camera cuz people hire other people, right? If you can build rapport with the people who will be offering you the job without actually being there in person on the interview, that puts you in a
massive advantage compared to everyone else who's not willing to go the extra mile. So, it's about taking the sniper mentality, and it's about going the extra mile, doing the research, reaching out to the people working in the company, finding out about the job. And then once you have that personal connection with that person working in the company, you can then ask them questions. You can like follow up with them every now and then being like, "Hey, I've actually got, you know, the summer uh free. I'd love to totally do an internship with you guys. You know, here are the different ways I can help." You don't want to say, "I'm happy to do anything. What can I do?" Because that requires the other person to figure
out what they should give you. And they don't have the time to figure to even figure out what they should give you. You want to be proactive in suggesting things that you can do. And if you really want the job, even just like doing those things, if someone was applying to one of our jobs, and they were like, "Hey, Ali, I you know, I know I noticed you talked in your hiring video about like all these pains you were having in your business. It seems like I think what you guys would really benefit from is AI automations. I'm actually really interested in working in the space. I'd love to work with you guys. Happy to hop on a 30-minute call with anyone in your
team. It doesn't have to be you. I know you're super busy. And I'm happy to work for a month completely for free where I'll build any AI automations that will save you guys time. At the end of the month, you can decide if you'd like to keep working with me." If I saw a message like that, I'd be like, "Holy [__] [__] Nice." Especially because I can just pawn it off to someone on my team, so then I don't have to deal with it. And then if the team member if I say, "Hey, Owen, can you like talk to this guy for 30 minutes?" He's going to be like, "Yeah, sure." Especially if the guy's in person. And then Owen speaks to the guy, he's like, "Oh, actually the guy's really cool." Owen's saying the
guy's actually really cool. 100x increases the guy's chances of getting a job in the business. And that opportunity only came about because the guy was proactive in like reaching out to me or someone on the team to try and like get that like wedge in the door. Everyone is obviously using AI to apply for all the jobs. The employers are obviously using AI to screen the jobs. So like, you know, it's it's sort of like an arms race between who can use AI better. The thing the employers do which is like an anti-AI signal is they do not ask about hypothetical future scenarios. What they ask about is your experience.
What experience have you had with YouTube, with social media, with marketing? Give me some tangible examples of where in the past you have done something. One of the most discriminating questions in a good way that we found in our application is what cool stuff have you built with AI? As an employer, we're increasingly asking about past experience, which means experience is really, really, really important. So what do you do if you don't have experience? Well, you create your own experience. The experience can be stuff that you've built and stuff that you've done without having to ask anyone's permission for it.
We are currently looking for a director of marketing. I would be totally open to hire someone on a pretty high salary if they're like, "Hey, I've never actually done this for someone, but I took the liberty of going through all of your top 10 competitors in the info product industry, deconstructing all of their sales pages, looking at their meta ads library, and putting together custom proposal on a custom website, by the way, so it'd be easy to do these days with AI, that shows exactly how I would go about like revamping your marketing processes, and here is a Loom with me showing my face, walking through exactly what I've done over here, and how I did it so you can get a feel of what it would be like
to work with me. If that even if that person doesn't have any experience, the fact that they've demonstrated, they've shown rather than just told us what they've done, they've shown their face, they've done it on video, we can see what they we can see what their vibe is like to see if it gels with what our team is like, and if it's not, then obviously, you know, it's not in anyone's interest to hire the person. But that would stand out so much. You can take your own portfolio into your own hands. You don't have to wait for someone to hire you for you to do stuff. Just like do the stuff. Do it on a weekend. Make a personal website, stick a portfolio on it, so that when you're applying for jobs, there is something
you can show them rather than just telling them because AI can do all of the telling. If you're still at university, one of the biggest pieces of advice I can say is get involved with stuff that will give you stories. Again, a common question in interviews or in job applications or whatever is like, "What's an example of a situation where you've handled adversity?" Now, if you can say, for example, that like, "When I was at university in my third year, I was the president of the May Ball Committee, where we were organizing, you know, this party. We had to sell 500 tickets. The price was $1000. This was like a $500,000 like $500,000 event. And a specific problem that we had was that one of our suppliers canceled at the last minute.
Now, in order to deal with that, this is what I had to do A, B, and C." The fact that you've got a story to talk about there on the job application of something you've done in the past, which means AI can't fake it, cuz obviously you don't want to lie on your own on your application form, and you can talk about that story when asked about it at interview. You do have that experience, even if you don't have any experience, right? But if you're someone who's just gone through university, just doing the academic stuff, and has not taken part in any extracurriculars or anything interesting because you think your academics will be the thing that will get you the job, man, good luck. Like, you know, you need
to have stories and experiences that you can talk about. But the crucial thing is that you can create those stories and you can create those experiences yourself. You do not have to wait for anyone to give you permission to create those stories for yourself. Once you figure out your list of dream jobs you want to apply to, figure out like, what are the problems that they are likely to have in their business? And again, you can ask AI to help you with this. You can literally go to Claude and say, "Hey Claude, I really want to apply for the job at this company. Can you do a bunch of research and surface all of the problems that you think that they are having?" And if you think of yourself as
being hired to solve problems and hired to alleviate pain, you are much more likely to apply for the job in the right way, rather than thinking of yourself as applying for a job. Now, if you happen to be a student and you haven't yet seen my video about what I would do if I were a student today, like whatever stage you are in the process, check out this video right over here. And again, hopefully that will give you a little bit of a firmware update for whatever it's worth on how I think you could, if you wanted to, approach life as a student. So, that'll be right over there. Thank you for watching. I hope you found this video useful. And if you'd like to apply for a job at our company, we are hiring. Bye.
