But I never heard back from them.

I found out later that they hired some guy from a random community college in a city I’d never heard of. He didn’t have as much related experience either.

How’s that possible?

It turns out that people applying for a job care more about their own credentials than the people who are hiring them.

This is very counterintuitive.

Average applicants obsess over getting the right credentials and being “qualified” on paper. Meanwhile behind the scenes, companies are playing a totally different game.

They’re obsessing over finding the right person to solve their problems.

Here’s what goes on behind closed doors

Credentials and paper qualifications DO matter for some (mainly academic) industries like medicine or law, but for most other fields, job requirements are surprisingly negotiable.

Companies can sometimes get over a hundred applications for a single position, so they need to have some way of weeding people out to keep that number manageable. The best way of doing that is by saying “graduate degree required”, “5+ years of experience required”, etc.

What they’re REALLY thinking is “we don’t want to go through a bunch of applications of people who don’t know what they’re doing — a person with 5+ years of experience could most likely do a good job”.

If you can prove to them that you can solve their problem, you instantly decommoditize yourself, and none of those things on paper matter as much.

This is exactly how I’ve gotten interviews and job offers for positions that require masters degrees, MBAs, degrees in subjects I’ve never studied, and more years of experience than I have.

So how do you prove to them that you can solve their problem?

Do the job before you get the job.

I call this the “pre-interview project”.

For example, if you’re applying for a sales/marketing role, a good pre-interview project could be selling some of the company’s products and writing a document about it. If you’re applying for a design related role, you can mockup some new designs for the company and tell them why you made those decisions.

Today, I’m going to show you exactly how to choose the perfect pre-interview project (including real life examples), who to send it to within the company you’re applying to, and how to structure the email so that it’s well received (I’ll even give you sample email templates to use).

Let’s get started.

Step 1: Narrow in on a few existing jobs

This process is not as quick as sending your resume out a bunch of times, but it is more effective.

While everyone else is spamming their resume to a hundred companies just to get a few interviews (if any), you’ll pick just a handful of jobs to apply to and crush them all.

First, go on some job boards, and choose 3–5 jobs you’d like to have.

Here are some good rules to keep in mind when you’re looking at the requirements on job descriptions:

It’s OK if you’re a few years below the minimum experience level, but not TOO far below. If you’re just a college grad, don’t go for senior level jobs that require 7–10+ years of experience. But you CAN go for jobs that require, say, 3–5 years of experience even if you only have 1.

It’s OK if your education level is a little below the required amount, but again, not too much below. For example — even though I never went to grad school, I’ve been able to get interviews for internships that required an MBA, and full time jobs that required a masters, but jobs that require PhDs are out of my league.

Make sure that you can actually DO the job. You might not need credentials, but you do need the skills to get results.

Once you have your 3–5 jobs, move on to step 2.

Step 2: Outline what you’ll be doing on the job

By getting a good understanding of what you’ll be doing everyday on the job, you’ll know exactly what the perfect pre-interview project should be to prove that you’d be the right fit.

The only thing you really need at hand to figure this out is the job description.

Make a special note of the day to day tasks you can do right away. For example, “analyzing churn data” isn’t something you can immediately do (because you need a good amount of internal information for that) but “form partnerships with local businesses” definitely is something you can help do without already being at the company.

Step 3: Do one pre-interview project per company

Now that you know what the company expects you to do day to day, you can actually do it ahead of time and prove to them that you can solve their problems.

When I was applying for a business development role for Kiip, I pitched a few companies on forming partnerships with them, and introduced them to the biz dev team. I ended up getting an offer.

When I was applying for product development related positions, I ran quick usability tests on companies’ products, documented my process, created some design suggestions and sent it to the head of each design team. Here’s an example of what I did for Airbnb.

This sort of thing got me interviews at major tech companies like Quora, and it even led to Shutterstock creating a position for specifically for me.

My friend Francine Lee did something similar (but MUCH more in depth) for Dropbox, and then got a job there.