Hugo Cannon — How to Get a Job in 4 Easy Steps

Here's something nobody at a careers fair will tell you.

The best jobs mostly aren't advertised, and the people who land them didn't apply.

They did something else, and it takes 4 easy steps.

1.) ONE PAGE

Your CV must fit on one page.

A person reading gives it about 7.4 seconds, which is less time than you spent choosing the font.

Every job exists to make a company money or save it money.

Patrick McKenzie told programmers this in 2011 and it holds for everyone else.

So write each line so it's obvious which one you did.

"Responsible for social media" says nothing. "Took Instagram from 2,000 to 14,000 followers in eight months" gets you a phone call.

If the word "passionate" appears anywhere, delete it.

Nobody in history has been passionate about stakeholder management.

Put a number on everything instead.

Even the small things. Especially the small things.

2.) DON'T APPLY THROUGH THE WEBSITE

Most good jobs never get advertised.

They go to someone a person already knows, so your job is to become someone a person already knows.

Find people two or three years ahead of you in the job you want, and message them on LinkedIn.

Keep it to four lines.

Ask for twenty minutes and a coffee you'll pay for.

Don't ask for a job.

Ask what the hardest part of their week is, and who else you should talk to.

Then go and talk to that person.

Send a thank-you the same day.

Ten coffees beat a hundred applications.

You'll be employed in no time.

3.) COUNT YOUR MONDAYS

And not a small one.

A real one, at 2am, flat on your back, staring at the ceiling like it owes you money.

It starts well.

Steps 1 and 2 work.

You get an offer from a company people recognise at dinner parties, with a decent salary and free fruit on Tuesdays.

The contract arrives as a PDF, and you read it in bed, because you're an adult now and adults read contracts.

Clause 2: "Your employment will continue indefinitely until terminated by either party."

Indefinitely.

You read it again.

You open the calculator on your phone.

Start at 24, work until 68, and that's 44 years, or just under 2,300 Mondays.

You can hear every one of them ticking.

There are only two ways out of that sentence.

You retire or you die, and the contract doesn't much mind which.

The only thing still open is how many years sit between signing and leaving, and what you put in them.

You don't sign.

It dawns on you that you've never properly asked who you are, or how you want to spend your days.

You've been too busy applying for things.

So you open forty tabs.

Tim Urban, a man who draws stick figures for a living, tells you your desires are an octopus.

Every tentacle wants something different.

You draw yours in the Notes app.

One tentacle wants to write a novel.

One wants a flat with a second bathroom.

One wants to move to Lisbon for reasons it won't explain.

One just wants your uncle to stop asking what you do every Christmas.

He says to play the Why Game.

Why do you want this job? Because it sounds good.

Why does that matter? Because people know the name.

Why does that matter?

Twenty minutes later you're back in a careers adviser's office in Year 11, under a poster of a kitten hanging off a branch.

Tim's question is "Who actually drew this arrow?"

Not you, it turns out.

The kitten drew it.

Paul Graham says prestige is just fossilized inspiration.

You look that up.

It means the job everyone admires was exciting to somebody else, decades ago.

He says to do work that would make your friends say wow, so you text two friends asking what you're good at.

One says parallel parking.

The other replies two days later with a video of a raccoon.

Marc Andreessen says do not plan your career.

You had a spreadsheet, with a tab for 2030 and a tab for 2035.

You delete 2035.

After a glass of wine you delete 2030.

Derek Sivers says if it isn't a hell yeah, it's a no.

You open the PDF.

It's a "yeah, I suppose."

It's 4am.

The octopus is winning.

You wake up at eleven with all forty tabs still open, and something becomes obvious.

Every job ad you've ever read was written by somebody else, to fill a seat that suits them.

You've spent months squeezing yourself into other people's descriptions, and nobody ever suggested you write your own.

So write your own.

One page, describing the job you actually want, by you, for you.

Real job ads say "competitive salary" and "fast-paced environment" and mean "low" and "chaos".

Yours has to be honest.

It has six questions and no job title:

What problem would you happily think about at 4pm on a Thursday?
What does a good Tuesday look like, hour by hour?
What do you want to be noticeably better at in three years?
Who do you want to learn from?
Is this a learning season or an earning season, and what's the least you can live on?
What would you quit over?

Question 1 is borrowed from Richard Hamming, a mathematician at Bell Labs who has been dead since 1998.

He used to sit with the chemists at lunch and ask what the most important problems in their field were.

Then he'd ask why they weren't working on them.

The chemists stopped being pleased to see him.

You don't have a field yet. You have a 2:1 and a Spotify Wrapped.

Answer it anyway.

Question 2 is Cal Newport's.

He says to settle the life you want first, then work backwards to the job.

So write the Tuesday properly: when you wake up, where you are at 11am, who's in the room, whether anyone can reach you at 9pm.

If it mostly involves a long lunch, that's useful data.

Question 3 comes from Julie Zhuo, who ran design teams at Facebook.

She measures a career in skills rather than titles, because the skills come with you when the company doesn't.

That's why the page has no job title.

Skills also compound, which Hamming and Sam Altman both bang on about.

An extra hour of learning a day looks like nothing after one year.

After ten it looks like a different person.

Question 4 is the one everyone skips.

Put real names on it.

They're going on a list in a minute.

Question 5 matters most.

Life has seasons, one for sowing and one for reaping, and at the start you're sowing.

Sowing means taking the job that teaches you the most, even if it pays less, because Andreessen is right that your early years are when you can afford the most risk.

Reaping comes later, once what you planted has had ten years to grow.

Which gives you one rule for those 2,300 Mondays: every one of them, you're either learning or earning.

Early on it's mostly learning, and later it's mostly earning.

A Monday that gives you neither is one you don't get back.

Question 6 is Tim Urban's non-negotiable bowl.

Keep it to a handful of things, or it stops meaning anything.

It takes you a whole Sunday.

When you read the page back, it describes something you'd say hell yeah to, and it matches nothing currently advertised on LinkedIn.

Good. That's the point.

You have more power here than you think.

Companies always want brilliant people, whether or not there's an ad up, and plenty of roles get written around a person after the company has met them.

A jobs board tells you what's available this week.

Your page tells you what you want.

Go after the page.

Which brings you to a new spreadsheet.

Not the 2035 one.

This one's called Dream 100.

The Dream 100 belongs to Chet Holmes, a sales trainer who wrote The Ultimate Sales Machine in 2007.

You list the hundred clients you'd most like to win, and you chase them until they say yes.

Salespeople have been doing it for decades.

It works just as well when the thing you're selling is you.

Your hundred should be a deliberate mix:

people you're fascinated by
people you want to work for
specific work you admire, as well as the companies behind it
problems you want to solve, and whoever's already working on them
safe options
good options
high-paid options
inspiring options
creative options
every name that came out of your six questions

Keep the safe ones in.

A hundred moonshots is a list you'll quit by Wednesday.

Each row gets four things: a name, why it's on there, one actual human who works there, and the date you last got in touch.

Then you work it, ten messages a week.

These are the coffees from step 2, except now you know exactly what you're after.

Ask Hamming's question, and ask who else you should meet.

Kevin Kelly says enthusiasm is worth 25 IQ points, and across a coffee table it might be worth more.

Most of them will say no.

Plenty will say nothing, which is a no that saves you reading an email.

Keep a tally anyway, because every no moves you one row closer to the yes.

Holmes called this pigheaded discipline.

And you only need one.

Nobody gives out prizes for a hundred offers.

You need one person, on one Tuesday, to say "come in and see us."

It'll feel like you're waiting forever.

You won't be.

Everyone who keeps going gets their yes eventually, and the people who don't are the ones who stopped at row forty.

Decide you believe that before you start, because around row sixty you're going to need it.

Then row 37 says yes.

It's a smaller company, and the money's worse.

Your uncle won't understand the job title at Christmas.

But the founder spent the whole interview asking about your answer to question 1, and you walked out at 6pm feeling like you'd had four espressos.

The PDF arrives.

Clause 2, same words: indefinitely, until terminated by either party.

You read it in bed.

You open the calculator.

Still just under 2,300 Mondays.

This time, though, you're thinking about the first fifty and what they'll teach you.

Hell yeah, as Derek would say.

You sign.

Nobody tells you this at 23, but to get what you want, you have to know what you want.

You won't know all of it, and you don't need to.

Tim Urban says a career is a line of dots, and you only ever choose the next one.

So choose the dot where you'll learn the most or earn the most.

Stick your one page on the fridge and rewrite it every January.

And if a job ever stops giving you either, read clause 2 again.

Either party can end it.

That includes you.

4.) NEVER SAY A NUMBER FIRST

When they ask for your salary expectations, say you'd like to make sure it's a fit first.

Let them name the number.

That's thousands of pounds.

P.S. You can't skip step 3. Everybody tries.

How to Get a Job in 4 Easy Steps

1.) ONE PAGE

2.) DON'T APPLY THROUGH THE WEBSITE

3.) COUNT YOUR MONDAYS

4.) NEVER SAY A NUMBER FIRST

Further reading