Finding a new job can be frustrating. Here’s a common scenario:
- You find a job that you really like posted on a job board
- You send in a resume and a short cover letter
- Your resume gets stacked in a pile of many others
- Someone browses it for a few keywords and then it gets thrown in the trash bin
- Meanwhile, you’re still anxiously waiting to hear back
Why is the hiring process still so outdated and time consuming, especially for those of us with specialized skills?
For the hiring team to truly understand if you’re a good fit for a particular role, they need to talk to you. And yet, you need to “get in the door” first. There’s a clear shortcut for this whole process, which is the way each one of us has found success:
“Hey, I saw you’re currently working at Dunder Mifflen. I just applied for a product designer role there and was wondering if you could introduce me to the recruiter for that job?”
In sales and marketing, people often refer to a lead as cold or warm relating to the strength of the connection they have to the person they’re pursuing. Likewise, any job application you send in might be a cold apply: you send some info and wait for a response from an unknown person.
We believe it’s always worth getting an introduction instead.
If you’re skeptical, then listen to this stat: referrals are 8X more likely to get past the resume review stage than cold applications. So, unless you’ve built yourself a bot to scour the web and write customized cover letters to every job you might be interested in, you might instead want to write a few emails to some of your former co-workers who are now working somewhere else.
Most people have a network of people they could ask for a referral — they just haven’t tapped into it. It’s hard to keep track of all these people, especially with the number of people we might run into over the course of five or ten years.
We’re just trying to take this whole process back to being human. You want to get a job at Slack? Who do you know there? What’s the strength of the connection between you and other people there? More importantly, how do you optimize your time to reach out to the correct people who might refer you and help you skip the resume queue?
Over the last few years, we’ve been working towards helping people in this area. We’ve built a platform that has helped hundreds of organizations looking for new talent connect to their pre-existing network, identify who would be a good fit for a particular role, and engage with those candidates. Now, we’re also working on the flip side of the hiring coin with Signal — help connect you with the people that are hiring for those roles.
The process is simple. We’ll start by seeing where your network works — what companies we can match you to where you could find an introduction. Then, we’ll show you who there can connect you to that company as well as how relevant they are as a connection. Alternatively, if you’re browsing a specific company’s career page or a company job board, we’ll help you find connections at that company as well. Eventually, we will allow you to contact the hiring team directly, in case you want to reach out and start the conversation yourself.
For anyone who is sick of just sending a resume in and hoping for the best, try using Signal to tap into your network instead. Our hope is that what we’re building can help people everywhere find the right connections to more easily find their next opportunity.
