MFM Mini - 5 Hacks to Landing Your Dream Job

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
All right, I thought it would be fun to share a few of my hacks for job interviews or getting your dream job. When I was 23, 24 years old, I had just finished doing a startup in Australia.
We had gotten funding and it was moving on to the next phase. And I said, all right, do I want to keep going with this, or do I want to bounce? And basically, I said, hey, guys, we hit our goal, got our funding, we got to go do this field test. That's going to take years to figure out if this technology works. Good luck to you guys. I want to move to Silicon Valley, and I want to see what's in the water there. Now, the problem was I had none of the experience you needed to get any of the jobs I wanted at tech companies, right?
I would go look online and it said, are you an engineer?

**Steph** (0:51)
Nope.

**Shaan Puri** (0:52)
Don't know how to code. Designer? Nope.
Finance? Well, not really. Don't really have those skills. Okay, you could be a product person, right? Which is sort of code for PM, which was, I thought, project manager, but it turned out it's product manager. Either way, it's sort of the same thing.
It's the person that kind of like shepherds the product along, shepherds the project along. And their job is to make it successful, and they're the person who doesn't code, doesn't design, but they tie together all these pieces. Now, the problem was every job posting said you need, you know, seven years of PM experience, blah, blah, blah. I had none. In fact, as you can tell, I thought it stood for project manager. So I had zero years of experience, I had zero seconds of experience.
But nonetheless, I wanted to apply for these jobs, and I ended up getting my dream job. I got a job at this idea lab working for this couple, this sort of billionaire couple, and they were super successful in their past, and they were looking for somebody to come in and join this incubator, this idea lab, where you would dream up projects, and then you'd have a team of people already in house to build them. And that was the gig. And so, like this podcast is about spitting out business ideas. That's what I got to do as my job, and then actually build them and bring them to life. So anyways, how did I get this job? Well, I'm gonna share with you a few of the things, some of these that I did, and some of these that I've seen or have stood out to me since then, because I've hired, I don't know, 50, 70 people since then, personally. And some people do a good job standing out. So here's my hacks for getting to stand out, to not just be another resume on a pile of resumes on somebody's desk, right? Hoping for the best. So here's three categories that I'm gonna talk about. First of all, you gotta know that almost all the value happens in the prep. It happens before you even step foot in the office to do a job interview.
There's two types of prep. There's prep for yourself, and then there's prep for the company.
Let's talk about prep for yourself. When you get in there, you are gonna be asked questions. There's three generic questions you need to be prepared for.
Number one, so tell me about yourself.
How do you answer the tell me about yourself question?
You wanna prep this. You wanna make it sound like it's off the cuff, but it's actually something you've thought about. You kinda knew where you wanted to go with it.
You don't wanna bore them with just a series of events of your life. You wanna tell the story, right? So you wanna say, you know, I grew up in a family. I grew up in a small town. You know, our whole town had four traffic lights. That's how small the town was. Both my parents were teachers. I thought for my whole life, I would become a teacher until I turned 21 and realized, you know, teachers make $50,000 a year. And hey, I like money, right? You sort of present some version of, here's my backstory, right? I grew up, I always thought I wanted to be a doctor.
And then when the time came that I needed to sign up for eight years of medical school, I thought to myself, well, maybe I should go and see what a doctor does. And so I shattered a doctor for two weeks and knew at the end of those two weeks, many things. The most important thing I learned was, I don't want to be a doctor. But now here I am, I'm 21 years old and I don't know what to do next, right? So you're telling a bit of a story. And the beginning setup should be, I thought X, or not it should be, I should say, easy formula is I grew up thinking X and then bam, I got punched in the face when I realized X is wrong. And that's when I pivoted or adjusted or I realized, you know, I grew up in a family of 42 engineers, right? Every aunt and uncle I have as an engineer, I thought, you know, the word job was basically the same thing as becoming an engineer.