She flipped over my resume. We had been speaking for almost an hour. It was just the two of us seated at the head of a long table, in a conference room with windows for walls. A potential future coworker walked past and peered inside.

I liked the vibe of the office. It was small and trendy, located in NW Portland’s Pearl District. I felt good there.

But more than the office, I liked the vibe of the CEO. She was tough, knowledgeable, and I wanted her to be my mentor. That’s why I was there. More than wanting to work at her company (which seemed interesting – a boutique branding consultancy firm), I wanted to work with her.

After a silence, she said, “I don’t see where you went to college.” 

“I didn’t,” I responded. Full stop.

She looked at me blankly. I couldn’t read what was behind her expression, and I had no idea what would happen next. I just knew that I was following the formula that I’d committed to, and the worst thing that could happen is that I’d be left with no offer.

To spoil the ending, she offered me a paid internship since she had no job openings. That’s right — I found a company that had no job openings and I asked for an interview. Not only did I get the interview, but I got the next-closest thing to a job that they had available for me. I’ll never forget the words that the CEO said to me after I told her I didn’t go to college:

“Well, I think that’s very impressive. You marched right in here, under-qualified, when we had no job openings, and asked to be hired. That says a lot about your character, and that’s why I’d like to offer you this internship.”

We need to flip the script on job hunting. 

The way most people try to find a new job is by looking for postings on sites like GlassDoor, Indeed, etc. This means that this is where all of the competition is, and options are limited. With this method, you’re only seeing jobs that have gone through the bureaucratic process of:

1. Needing to be filled
2. Getting approved to be filled
3. Someone writing a description about them
4. That description being posted online

Then there are two more filters. You look for jobs that you meet all of the qualifications for, and that meet your salary needs. If a job is “dreamy” enough, it is likely that it was already snatched up by the time you submitted your resume and cover letter, and the Talent Acquisition Rep hasn’t had a chance to take the posting down yet. What a disheartening waste of time.

Here’s the formula I’ve followed three times in five years with a 100% success rate:

Do the opposite. Find the company that you want to work at, and then demand a job interview.

It may feel counterintuitive or even arrogant to imagine doing this. I understand. But consider the inverse: working at a job you don’t like and patiently waiting for a raise or promotion. Being unemployed or underemployed and applying for the same job that some 40 million+ other Americans are applying for amid a massive economic decline. Recession or not, it’s more arrogant to believe that your dream job will come knocking at your door without you putting in some legwork. Be realistic. In the same way that we don’t get promoted (rather, we promote ourselves), we don’t get offered the jobs we want the most without first clawing our way in.

In the last couple years, I’ve become a hiring manager myself. I’ve written up job postings, interviewed droves of candidates, and hired dozens of people. Even when we had candidates pouring through the doors from our job listings, I still asked my team for referrals, because the candidates didn’t always cut it. Even if they had all of the qualifications, they still weren’t the right fit. They lacked something intangible — something that a job description couldn’t attract.

A few hiring secrets revealed:

1. You don’t need all of the qualifications of a job to get it.

The hiring manager needs to fill a position. She needed to get a job posting out there, so what did she do? She wrote up the requirements of the job and… some wishes and guesses. 

Job qualifications are largely wish-list items. The “required” or “desired” experience is just a guess. When writing a job posting, you’re forced to think, “What would the ideal person for this role be capable of doing?” as well as, “Which experiences would this person have had in order to be capable of doing that?”

You see? Wishes and guesses. This job candidate might as well be a figment of one’s imagination.

Now you, the candidate, won’t know if these “qualifications” are absolutely required until you go and find out for yourself. You also won’t know if an intangible quality of yours makes up for the qualifications you lack. That’s for the hiring manager to decide, but she won’t have the chance to if she doesn’t get to meet you.

Don’t disqualify yourself before getting a fair shot.

“Nothing is certain until it has happened.”

Proverb

2. There is a characteristic that many hiring managers want, and they can’t test for it in a regular job interview format.

That trait is moxie. Moxie is defined as a force of character; determination. 

There’s a sure-fire way to prove your moxie: Ask for an interview, even if (especially if) no job openings are listed. Similar to what I did a few years ago at the boutique brand consulting firm. In that case, I had a friend who’d done a short project with the firm, and she connected me to the CEO.

Just because there’s no job listing does not mean there’s no room for you in the company. Sometimes there are jobs open, but there are no jobs listed, because the team hasn’t taken the time to write them. Yes, this is a real issue that happens in companies across all industries. If they’re understaffed, they’re busy, and managing job postings is a tedious and time-consuming task. Honestly, they would love it if the perfect candidate came busting through the wall like the Kool-Aid Man.

Other times, there really may not be a job for you there, but maybe they’ll like you so much that they’ll offer you an internship, ask you to reapply in x months when a position opens up, or refer you to a friend at another company you may like. You won’t know what that next step will look like if you don’t get out there in the first place.

If you try this Storm the Castle method and you’re worried about looking bad, perish the thought. On the contrary – you will be adored and admired. And on the off-chance the hiring manager sneers at you, you dodged a bullet. Any leader who doesn’t appreciate moxie is not a leader that you want to follow.

3. Oftentimes, the qualification that makes up for a lack of other qualifications is the eager desire to work at the company.

Almost every job posting out there has a minimum requirement of a Bachelor’s Degree. As aforementioned, I didn’t attend college, so I don’t have this shiny beacon of a minimum qualifier. But I do have moxie, some people skills, and I’ve read a lot of personal development books.

At age 21 after launching my own company and “failing,” I decided to look for a company to work in. I researched “best places to work in Portland” and read about many different companies. One that appeared on every list was Vacasa, an Oregon-based startup that manages and markets people’s vacation rental homes in various regions. I read about the company culture in-depth, including reading GlassDoor reviews, and I found an open sales position on their careers page.

I applied, including an unfiltered enthusiasm to get the opportunity to interview in my cover letter.

“If you want people to have a good time meeting you, you must have a good time meeting them.”

Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People

Two interviews later, I’d reached the final round. I felt I made a solid impression in-person, but I was concerned that they thought I wasn’t experienced enough. So I did two things:

1. I hand-wrote a thank-you card to the hiring manager, earnestly thanking him for taking the time to consider me, and expressing my eagerness for the job.
2. After I didn’t hear from him for 5 days, I sent a follow-up email, emphasizing my desire to work there.

The next day, I had a job offer. I spent 4.5 years at Vacasa, rose up through the ranks, and wound up overseeing the entire international sector of our CX department as we scaled to 20 countries around the world. The person who hired me in 2015 recently wrote a LinkedIn recommendation for me, in which he stated:

In early 2015, I took a chance on Shelby when I hired her for a role on my sales team. Although her resume didn’t stand out amongst the dozens of career sales professionals I was used to interviewing, her passion and self-confidence exceeded every one of the hundreds I’d received. She was, by far, the least experienced person I hired for the role.

Jay Klein, my first manager at Vacasa

The passion he describes was my moxie, my determination for the role. The self-confidence he refers to is one of the intangible traits that he needed to see, as a hiring manager for a sales team.

Your dream job wants you as badly as you want it.

Your dream job is not my dream job. We have different interests and goals in life. Your dream job is yours because of your goals, interests, passions, and even skill set. So, have you ever considered that you are the right person for your dream job?

Looking at the same listings that everyone else is looking at gives you slim-to-no chance that you’ll find your dream job. Reverse-engineer. What is your dream job? What’s the industry, what kind of product or service does the company sell? Is it a leadership role, a creative role, one in which you interact with many people, one in which you travel, one in which you get a ton of autonomous solo work time?

The simplest way to do this brainstorm is to think of the companies that you love as a user. Whether they’re SaaS, marketing firms, clothing brands, travel companies, or anything else — they will eventually have another job opening. Or maybe, they will make a job for you after they get a chance to sit down with you.

I love learning languages. I’ve been using LingQ as a French beginner since February. The technology greatly impressed me. After interacting with the platform for a couple months, one day I thought, “Who is this company and what would it be like to work here?” Side note: This was in late March 2020, as the world — and specifically, the travel sector — began to collapse in rapid fashion due to COVID19.

They had a job on their careers page that looked somewhat interesting. It was totally different than what I’d done previously, but I knew my interest in language-learning and problem-solving skills would be enough for me to succeed in the role. It was just a matter of them seeing that.

After a few Zoom interviews, I was sold on my desire to work in the company, and they were sold on me, too. They offered me the job, which came with a massive raise for me, on the following grounds: “We think you can help us get to where we want to go.”

Jobs are not handouts. They are hard-earned. You are contributing your valuable ideas to the company to help it reach its goals.

Every company faces a multitude of problems. Many times, those problems are the lack of the right team. As Jim Collins famously wrote in Good to Great, first you must get the wrong people off the bus, then get the right people on the bus, before the bus can head to its destination.

You are the right person for your dream job. It needs you. The company you yearn to work at wants you to come find it. You could be the difference between the company being average and the company being great.

How?

Most companies have a general application option on their jobs page, or an email you can contact to express your interest. In every case, your cover letter is more important than your resume (although you should do your best work on your resume, too). The cover letter is your unique love-story with the company that sets you apart from all other candidates.

Another method is to apply for a position that you’re underqualified for, like what I did with Vacasa. Write your love-letter (cover letter) and then voraciously follow up. I promise you, this is not annoying. When leaders are hiring for their teams, they are understaffed and overworked with the extra task of filtering through candidates. The name that keeps reappearing, saying, “Pick me!” will always get an interview over the one who silently submits an application and then waits to be chosen.

In every case in which I’ve stormed the castle for the job I wanted, how I got the interview was different. If you really want to work at a company and they have absolutely no positions open — not even a general application option — you’ll find a way. Use LinkedIn or Twitter to find people who work there and send authentic messages expressing your earnest interest in the company. You should not spam people. If this is a company that you genuinely want to work for, be that genuine version of yourself when crafting your message. Authenticity shines through.

What’s the worst thing that could happen?

The worst thing that can happen is you stay exactly where you are now. The best thing that could happen is you land your dream job and have an epic story to tell about it. And no matter what the outcome is, you’ll be a little bit wiser on the other side of this experience.

A guiding question I started asking myself this year is, “Is what I’m doing creating a story worth telling?” 

Life is short – do the “crazy” thing. Find a way to knock at the door of the company you want to work for and put your heart on the table. If nothing else, you’ll have a new story to tell.

Staying in your realm of comfort is not only a disservice to you, but also to the company that you could make a huge impact in. Give people a chance to meet you before measuring your “qualifications.”

Your dream job awaits you. Not the other way around. Go get it.