How I got a job on AngelList

A step-by-step guide to landing your dream startup job

12 min readJul 26, 2018

I graduated from college in June 2017, traveled around for a few months, and then came home to the Bay Area to start my job search. I started looking for positions on job boards like Indeed, Monster, and Handshake but found the process of navigating different company application systems to be cumbersome. Re-tailoring my resume and cover letter to each open position was extremely time consuming and the results were discouraging. I found myself investing an hour or more on each application and, in many cases, I never heard back.

Enter AngelList —

With AngelList, you can apply to thousands of startup jobs with a single application and search for information not found on other job boards such as salary, equity, team members, investors, and more.

Before we dive into how to find your next startup job, I’d highly recommend reading “Are You Suited for a Startup?” and “Getting Your First Startup Job” by Jeff Bussgang, Partner at Flybridge Capital, to see if a startup environment is right for you.

Creating your AngelList Profile

Below are a few actionable tips to getting started:

Strive to make your AngelList (AL) profile the most concise version of your resume or LinkedIn profile. Keep it short: don’t include more than 3–4 sentences/bullet points per position.
For the “Positions/Projects” section, make sure you’re measuring your impact and quantifying your achievements. To learn more, I’d suggest reading “My Personal Formula for a Winning Resume” by Laszlo Bock (former SVP of People Operations at Google) and “How to Quantify Your Resume Bullets” by Lily Zhang (former Career Services Specialist at MIT).
In the “Achievements” section, you have the chance to expand on your experiences (but still be mindful of keeping it concise!). As a new grad, I used this section to write 3–4 sentences elaborating on my top academic and extracurricular achievements.
For the “Relevant Skills” section, start by parsing a few of the job descriptions you’re interested in and then make a list of the most in-demand skills for the role. Determine which of these skills you’re most proficient in and include them on your profile.
When it comes to applying to startups on AL, it’s important to know your audience. If you’re applying to a small or medium-sized startup, the person you reach out to is likely to be the ultimate decision maker — that could be the position’s Hiring Manager or even the CEO!
Check and double-check everything you’ve written for typos.
Before reaching out on AL, take a moment to apply this same advice to your LinkedIn profile.

Searching for a Position

The AngelList search feature not only allows you to look for available positions, but also lets you search by company size, funding round, and more. The platform also requires companies to post a salary and equity range for each position upfront, so you can match your expectations accordingly.

Regardless of how you filter your search, limit the company’s recent activity (“Company” → “Last Active”) to 7 or 15 days; anything longer and it’s unlikely they’ll get back to you.

Reaching Out

Applying to job postings online without an internal reference can be a numbers game. Companies receive numerous applications per position and AL reminds you of this fact by letting you know how many applicants applied to a given position in the past week.

Even the best candidates should assume that they’ll never hear back from some of the companies that receive their application.

For that reason, maximizing your personal efficiency when writing job applications matters. AL helps with this by capping your message at 1,000 characters (⅓ the length of a standard cover letter).

This abbreviated cover letter is meant to convince the company to “match” with you; the next step is typically a phone interview. In your 6–7 sentence message, you’ll want to convey:

1–2 sentences about why you’re excited about the position and/or the challenges facing the company (“I know you’re doing great work in X to achieve Y…”)
2–3 sentences about your relevant experience (“I’ve done some work in A, B, C that’s related to X. I’m really passionate about Y”)
2 sentences about how you have the skills to excel in the position (“My skills and experiences in A, B, and C make me a great fit for this position”)

Remember to do your research, highlight your background, and demonstrate to the company why you’d be a great fit. Below you’ll find the message that I sent to the company that hired me:

Dear Rafi,
I am writing to express my strong interest in the Talent Operations position at Pramp. I am excited by Pramp’s mission to build a platform on which individuals can gain and share knowledge in real time through being matched with peers with common interests.
Within the organizations I have served, I have consistently searched for ways to improve organizational capacity, reach new audiences, and engage key stakeholders. While at Princeton, I held leadership positions in two very different organizations: Princeton’s Sigma Chi chapter and the J Street U movement. I made a commitment to educating myself about the function of every role in these organizations in order to maximize my effectiveness.
From each of these positions, I will bring both internal management and strategic decision-making skills, in addition to a strong eagerness to learn and grow at Pramp. I hope that I will be able to share more about my experiences with you soon.
Thank you,
Justin Vogel

The bolded portions are the sections that I modified from my template. For each new message, I rewrote the sentence regarding my interest in the company and I occasionally modified the skills I’d bring to the position depending on my perception of the top skills required.

After crafting your template, you should be able to parse a job description and send one of these messages out in 5 minutes. As you can imagine, AL really magnified my efficiency! Moreover, the process of describing both my interest and qualifications in just 6–7 sentences helped me determine which of my skills and experiences were most relevant to highlight during the phone interview.

Though you’ll be able to apply to positions faster and more efficiently on AL, I can’t understate the importance of proofreading your template and messages to the company. If your message contains typos, you can imagine what the hiring manager may conclude about your serious interest in their company, attention to detail, and communication skills.

If you do get a match, remember that this person is likely a busy decision maker, so respond back as soon as possible and certainly don’t wait more than 24 hours. If they don’t respond back to you within 24 to 48 hours after being matched, be persistent and reach out again to ask if the position is still available and to find a time to chat.

Crafting Your Narrative

If I had read this guide at the start of my job hunt, I may’ve been a bit skeptical, wondering:

“Even if half the companies I apply to never get back to me, why should I be applying to jobs that I’m not 100% sure I’m interested in?”

First, it’s important to recognize that you likely won’t be able to be 100% sure about anything until you’ve spoken to an employee. Second, you may not know yet what exactly you’re looking for in your next role or company. An initial phone interview is as great of an opportunity for you to learn about the company as it is for the company to learn about you.

By going through the process of applying and having an initial phone interview, you’ll get the chance to clarify your interest in the position and company, while also practicing how to verbally convey your professional narrative.

You should:

Schedule an initial phone interview even if you aren’t sure that it’s a 100% fit. A conversation with a recruiter, hiring manager, or CEO is a great way to learn whether you’re excited about tackling the challenges facing the company.
Write down your skills and the experiences that demonstrated them. To ensure that you’re presenting yourself in the best way possible, try to write out bullet points on notable skills you developed or sharpened in a given position and how those skills relate to those required for a given role.
Practice talking about your professional experiences out loud. Do a mock interview with those in your personal network, or better yet, a stranger, to get honest feedback on what parts of your narrative were most compelling or how you can be more concise.

Even if you discover that a given opportunity is not a fit for you, doing an initial phone interview will give you the opportunity to practice interviewing, which will prepare you for the next opportunity.

Preparing for the Phone Screen

Phone screens tend to be extremely predictable. In-house recruiters will ask you to describe your interest in the company, to walk them through your resume, and to elaborate about some of your accomplishments and why those experiences make you a great fit for the role.

In the previous section, I outlined the importance of writing down how you want to convey your professional experience and talking about these experiences out loud through mock interviews. Remember that your goal as an interviewee is to help your interviewer visualize what sort of employee you’ll be at their company and how your background demonstrates that you have the skills required for the position.

To prepare for a phone screen, I spent around 30 to 60 minutes reading about the company online. This might be overkill but given that you know they’re going to ask you about it, you may as well demonstrate that you know what they do and that you’re interested in this particular position.

When reading about a company online, I try to figure out answers to the following questions:

What does the company do?
What challenges do they face in their market/industry?
What broadly differentiates them from their competitors?
What do their employees say about their culture on Glassdoor?

Some may consider this to be pretty basic, but you’d be surprised by how many candidates can’t tell a hiring manager the first thing about what their company does.

To prepare, I’d create a word document answering these questions in addition to ones regarding how my background fits the position. If the company has 50+ employees, Glassdoor will serve as a great resource to see what interviewers previously asked candidates about for specific roles. Here is a list of the questions I prepared ahead of the phone screen:

Why this company?
What are the top two things you want to know about this company?
What excites you about working in this industry?
What is the next book on your list/what are you reading now? What do you hope to learn from it?
Describe a time that you came up with a new approach to an existing problem. What was the problem? What steps did you take to overcome the problem?
How did you take the initiative to learn new things in your previous role(s)?
Who are your mentors and what do you look for in a mentor? Who is someone you admire and why?

Now it’s time to craft your narrative. To do so, prepare a list of skills that the position requires and come up with examples for each skill. Here’s a personal example from a college extracurricular:

Internal Operations Management: As Vice President of Princeton’s Sigma Chi chapter, I identified financial insecurity as the organization’s most pressing challenge and implemented three courses of action to address it. To ensure that future leadership teams would understand the organization and its critical functions, I created a system of institutional memory, which included writing a 45-page management guide on topics such as maintaining the organization’s 501c7 legal status, budgeting, and event organization after speaking with both the current and former leadership teams. I also collaborated with the treasurer to streamline the budget, and devised strategies to hold members accountable for paying membership fees. Finally, I took the lead in establishing our first alumni association to solicit donations from alumni members in an effort to help sustain the organization.

You should also be prepared to ask your interviewer some questions. Don’t ask them anything you can easily find out online. Here are some examples:

Can you tell me a bit about your background and what compelled you to join this company?
What opportunities are there for growth and personal development?
What’s the most important thing you’re working on and how are you making it happen?
[If you’re speaking with the hiring manager] Could you tell me a bit about your leadership style and how you run this team?
[If speaking to the CEO/Founder] What inspired you to start this company? What are your goals as a founder? What’s your exit strategy? What is the biggest risk currently facing your company? At what point do you hope to be profitable? Which of your competitors do you worry about most?

After asking each of these questions, I muted my phone and typed out how they answered these questions in case I want to reference their responses during a follow-up screen with a different team member or during the onsite.

Getting Ready for the Onsite

When preparing for an onsite at a small to medium-sized startup, I aimed to read everything I could find out about the company online. I wanted to figure out what sort of problems they were tackling (which you should gain some insight about during your phone screen) and as much as possible about their product and market.

You should also be prepared to ask your interviewers questions at the end of your interviews during the onsite as well. Again, don’t ask them anything you can easily find out online.

Some of the best questions you can ask your interviewers are ones that allow you to engage them around their experience and help you identify shared experiences. You might ask them:

Can you share a bit more about your professional background and what led you to join this company?
What projects have you enjoyed working on most? Why?
Who are your mentors at the company? What have you enjoyed most about working with them?

Not only will these questions give you greater insight into your interviewer and their experience at the company, but it will also allow you to connect with them and have a more natural back-and-forth conversation.

It’s no secret that people enjoy speaking about themselves, and demonstrating curiosity about your interviewer’s experience can make you feel more personable and memorable.

When speaking with the hiring manager (or whoever would be your supervisor), I asked questions about work expectations to get a sense of what would be required of me and how this person might be as a boss. For example:

What is the first project the person hired for this position will need to complete?
After three months on the job, what would you expect this hire to have done to be a success in your mind?
What performance metrics would you employ to evaluate whether I had met or exceeded your goals?
How do you evaluate current team members or fellow founders?
What are some of the characteristics you value most in your current teammates?

Throughout the interview process, I found that there were some common traits startups looked for in candidates. Here’s what a friend wrote me ahead of my interview with his CEO:

“The CEO values people who are always learning and who are relentless about getting things done. So think about who your current mentors are and what you look for in a mentor. Think about the times you have instinctively gone above and beyond to get something done…. If I could sum up the most important qualities they would be: horsepower, work ethic, growth mindset, and an instinct to take the initiative.”

I was fortunate to be hired via AngelList at Pramp, a Y Combinator-funded startup running a peer-to-peer platform helping software engineers practice mock technical interviews.

Wanna chat about interview prep or mock interviews? Find me on LinkedIn!

P.S. We’re hiring at Pramp and it’s awesome! Check out our openings, here.

And a big thanks to all who helped read and review this post!

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