Preface
What I remember most about the job search is the locked doors.
You see, when I was twenty, I became obsessed with landing an internship. I used to lock myself in my university bedroom on weeknights and click through jobs listings for hours.
And I do mean hours. I still have relatively organised folders sitting in my inbox that can prove to you how hard I was trying. (I fished a boatload of embarrassing emails out of those folders for this book.)
If you put up an internship posting online any time between 2009 and 2012, chances are I considered applying.
I had lists. One time, I found the mother lode of lists. A clever internet search landed me an alphabetised directory of every advertising agency in Chicago. (I also found the same list for London.)
I spent days with that list. I probably still have it saved somewhere, in one of those relatively organised folders. Over the course of hours, I bookmarked all 400+ websites and copied down every email address I could find. I felt the adrenaline rush of a job well done.
I’d close my laptop and get ready for bed.
It would cross my mind, maybe while I was brushing my teeth, that I hadn’t actually accomplished anything, aside from copying and pasting links, adding to a never-ending list of hot prospects to check out tomorrow.
But that thought would leave as quickly as it came. I’d worked all night on this. I was going to be so very, very employed. Any day now.
Yep, just … any day now.
Any.
Day.
Now.
This book is for everybody who’s ever felt that way.
How to use this book
The sole purpose of this book is to elegantly guide you from Point A to Point B:
The 9-step approach laid out on the following pages has been adapted from the course curriculum that I developed for #ENTRYLEVELBOSS School (#ELB School for short!), a boot camp designed to rein in the chaos of the job search. A fitness plan for becoming gainfully employed, if you will. Which means I’m like Joe Wicks, or Oprah, or Kanye, or something — but for CVs.
I’m proud to tell you that we’ve been successfully transforming panicking job seekers into hired-and-happy humans since 2017, in fields ranging from public relations and sales to social work and environmental law. Over the years, I have guided thousands of students through the #ENTRYLEVELBOSS job search approach. I receive messages every single week from ex-students who, on their first day on the job, write to me from their new employee email addresses. I love those emails, but if I’m honest with you, I love the messages from the people who haven’t been hired yet even more. ‘It’s weird to feel this excited about trying to find a job,’ someone wrote to me once. ‘I don’t know how you manage to do it, but you somehow made job searching … fun.’ (She sent me an email just three weeks later telling me that she had landed exactly the kind of job she was hoping to get.)
Cheerful messages from people who haven’t even got the job yet, can you imagine? It’s a pretty cool magic trick, I think, to score a job you genuinely enjoy without overwhelm or despair. I’d like to help you do that, too.
How to get the most out of this book
I wrote this book knowing that you’d want to be shady and read the entire thing through without doing any homework first. Go ahead, binge read! Understand why your current approach isn’t getting you the right results. Take a tour of your fancy new strategy, front to back, and digest the reasoning. Underline stuff as you go.
Then, come back to the task lists at the end of each section. Flip back through when you want to recall how I phrased something or remind yourself why I warned you to do X instead of Y. Take everything in and then put it to work at a pace that feels right for you.
Your #ENTRYLEVELBOSS packing list
And, finally, my one promise to you
You will never again find yourself at a dead end, panicking without a plan.
There are lots of dangers to navigate throughout the course of any job search: internal panic, a lack of confidence, existential dread, bad communication habits, uncontrollable external factors, hiring managers, the annoying human needs of said hiring managers (see: weekends, sleep, etc.). The real reason that any job search spins out of control, though, is not because of these things. It is because, when faced with any combination of these demons, you get stuck. Everything feels out of your control. You don’t see a next move in front of you.
If you use this system, you will always be able to unstick yourself. This is my promise to you.
Look: you are not going to be magically employed by the end of the week just because you happened to pick this book up off the shelf. You’ll quickly learn that I wouldn’t lie to you like that. But if you try it my way, you will be able to put one foot in front of the other, to twist out of handcuffs, to walk through walls. You will be that person who always has another trick up their sleeve. Whatever it takes — within reason — until you arrive at your final destination and see that first paycheque in your bank account.
Until you’re hired and happy.
Meet me, the person who wrote this book
In 1999, a truly terrible film was released in cinemas. Baby Geniuses achieved an impressively low 2% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The basic premise is that babies are — you guessed it — legitimate Einstein-level geniuses from birth right up until the moment they learn to communicate in spoken human language. As soon as they learn to speak, they forget everything. They become fallible humans. All their baby genius knowledge is lost.
This film has become the metaphor I turn to when I am asked about this book.
I spent the first half of my twenties in education, unemployed, or underemployed — and job searching the entire time. I spent the second half being sought after by cool companies and growing my career at a breakneck speed. Once I crossed that magical threshold, it felt like I had entered into another realm. I finally understood what pretentious people were talking about when they would casually say, ‘The best time to get a job is when you already have one, eh? I haven’t sent anyone a CV in years, but I feel like I’m always turning down offers, haha!’
As soon as that transition happened — they wanted ME, finally! — I made a decision. On top of building my own career, I also started documenting my successes (and my missteps) as they were happening. I wanted to acquire as much knowledge as possible about career growth, so that I could pass it back to all the people who were still in education, unemployed, or underemployed. Like sending buckets of water down the line to throw on a raging fire.
I felt a sense of urgency. I had to tell people how this job search thing worked. I wanted to equip them with the tools they needed to survive out there. I wanted to teach them how they could become one of the lucky ones. Because — this chosen group of people? It wasn’t that they were all Oxbridge grads or working for their parents’ companies, it was that they had — consciously or because of dumb luck — figured out how to play the game.
I had to get the word out before I forgot. I had to do it now, before I became too much of a grown-up, before I became too employable, frankly, and forgot what it was like. Because I could see, so clearly, just how many of these elite, fancy, cool, job-having grown-ups had forgotten — just like the plotline of Baby Geniuses.
Those grown-ups were the reason I became a career coach at 25. Throughout my early career — a repeated smattering of hard-won contractor stints, hourly internships, and six-week freelance projects — the grown-ups consistently let me down whenever the topic of recruitment came up. I’d watch them tear apart CVs for sport. ‘Oh my God, look at what this one said on theirs. So stupid! Ugh, trying to find people for these jobs is so exhausting and boring,’ they’d lament to each other. I heard the same thing said a thousand different ways, over and over. They were making fun of us.
Sitting in their offices, lucky enough to be half-employed for a few weeks at a time, my blood boiled on behalf of every job seeker in the world. We: the unlucky, the unemployed, the underemployed. The bright-eyed dreamers, the hopefuls, the ones trying to break into a new industry, the young and the not-so-young, the ones who just want a more fulfilling job than the one we have right now. Please help. We want to come work for you. Why don’t you want us back?
It was heartbreaking and eye-opening to find annoyance instead of empathy again and again. It was a situation I felt so emotionally connected to — trying to find work and getting shut out time after time without understanding why. What a privilege it must be to poke fun at the people who are applying to be your assistants, your colleagues, your collaborators. I was taken aback by the total amnesia of the grown-ups. How could they forget? What a luxury, I thought, to forget.
Even though I was young, I understood that it could go one of two ways:
I get asked a lot if the advice in this book is only applicable to young people who are just starting their careers. My answer is no. Because my original audience was young, I managed to develop an insanely effective job search approach that works even if you have zero experience, even if you have zero knowledge of office politics, even if you have never had a single job in your life, even if you’re convinced you’re the least hireable person on the planet. I set out to develop a plan that would work when you had absolutely nothing to bring to the table yet. So imagine my surprise when I started to realise what this approach could do for job seekers who had a few things going for them already. (And PS: I find that most people — yes, even recent school leavers or university graduates — have more to bring to the table than they think.)
I am absolutely the type of person who, by this point, would have googled the author of this book. I’d be all, ‘Alright, nice person with the ideas, who are you?’
If you’ve done the same, I’m sure you found my websites, my Spotify, some very old YouTube videos, my various social media accounts, who knows what else. Maybe I will have gone viral and become a controversial public figure in-between me finishing this manuscript and you reading it. Either way, here’s some additional colour that you won’t be able to find out about me anywhere else:
If a speaker asks for questions at the end of a panel, I will always come up with one on the spot because I get too sad for them if nobody else in the audience has one.
If you put on ‘I Want You Back’ by The Jackson 5, I will scream every word at the top of my lungs no matter what time of day it is — a habit that got me in trouble occasionally at university parties that were trying to stay under the radar.
I’m more of a nature person than I had previously thought.
My least favourite foods are anchovies and sardines, because the idea of a fish I can smoosh with a spoon stresses me out.
I fantasise about growing up to be a morning person. In said fantasies, that fictitious fully-grown-adult version of me will also own a cake stand. The kind with a clear glass lid so that you can see how much cake is left.
As for my professional history …
The irony is not lost on me that, in writing a book about the job search process, I have no idea where to start in explaining how I know all the things I know and why you should follow my advice. Several times while attempting to write this section, I have freaked out about my own CV: Is it cool enough? Relatable enough? Will it make sense to people who just randomly stumble across this book on a shelf? Am I the right person? Should we have all waited for someone else to write this book instead? How can I prove to you that I know what I’m talking about?
Funny, isn’t it, how we so easily trip over our own personal narratives when we could craft somebody else’s elevator pitch in a heartbeat.
Anyway, hi, I’m Alexa: global career coach extraordinaire and creator of the #ENTRYLEVELBOSS job search approach. I transform panicking job seekers into hired-and-happy professionals.
I did not study employment in any academic sense. I’ve never worked as a recruiter. I’m just somebody who graduated at the tail end of a recession, inelegantly struggled to start my own career, and then became curious about why the job search felt like such an uphill battle. I’ve been deeply obsessed with the topic ever since, and have now ushered thousands of #ENTRYLEVELBOSS students successfully into employment using the 9-step approach I created based on years of trial and error, conversation, curiosity, and study.
But if I could offer up a single qualification for why you should trust me, it’s simply that I spent the first several years of my career applying for a lot of jobs I never got, and through that heart-wrenching and nausea-inducing process, I figured out a few tricks. And I wrote them down. That’s my big pitch.
I started sending out the #ENTRYLEVELBOSS newsletter — in which I documented crucial things I was learning about becoming a professional adult, such as how to apologise for being 15 minutes late for your final-round interview — when I was just beginning my own career.
I’d graduated from university four years earlier, but I was only two and a half years into being a fully grown professional human once you factored in my straight-outta-undergrad Master’s degree. At the time, it felt as if I’d haphazardly landed on my feet. I was an accidental freelance copywriter, and I finally had almost enough work to feel emotionally and financially safe enough to stop looking for a Real Salaried Full-Time Job. At least for a while. Which was great news, because, by my calculation, I’d been steadily looking for work for five years.
I genuinely enjoyed my profession, but, come on, it wasn’t like I’d planned for any of it to happen. I had only started freelancing because I couldn’t find a ‘real’ job. I had tried, I had applied, I had failed. Most of my applications simply sailed off into the dark beyond, to the Land of Misfit CVs perhaps, never to be heard from again. As for the employers that did want me, they didn’t ever seem to want me full-time. An hourly internship that might become a paid position? I took it. A six-month contract that might be extended, but we can’t promise you anything? I took it. Ten hours a week, on a month-to-month basis? I took it. A thousand emails left unanswered. A thousand false starts. A thousand rejections. I can craft a mighty strategic narrative around this story now, one that shines a light on all the things I learned during the journey, but when it was my reality, it felt like I was running a marathon I hadn’t signed up for, attempting to cross a finish line that never seemed to appear on the horizon.
During my last year of university, I’d watched what felt like all of my classmates get hired into massive corporations to become accountants and analysts and junior executives. They hadn’t seemed smarter than me when we were all drinking cheap beer and studying in the same library, but maybe they were. Maybe I just hadn’t noticed. I should have studied accounting. All the accountants have jobs now.
For a long time, I felt a lot of shame about never finding that first official foothold on the ladder. Even after I’d built a successful career as one of the most sought-after freelancers in the European startup world, I kept looking for what I could’ve sworn I had been promised: a full-time job with benefits and annual leave and an office coffee machine. All I wanted, so badly, for years, was to hear someone say, ‘You! Yes, you! I see the talent, and I need you FULL-TIME! Grab your coat and get over here, you’re officially on payroll, kid. This is your happy ending. This is your life now.’
I wanted this so much that, even after I got it, I continued to build an entire company around making that dream come true for others. Because I believe that everybody deserves their shot at landing a job they genuinely like. Because I believe that looking for work should be more celebrated, more straightforward, and more fun. And because I believe that a great permanent job, the kind where you’re getting paid to spend your days solving the problems you really want to solve, is one of the worthiest pursuits in the world.
The whole story
Throughout this book, I’ll be sharing emails and cover letters and CVs from my past, most of which are entirely unedited and unredacted. Because of my start-and-stop freelancing career — plus the fact that I’ve lived in multiple countries — I thought you might find it helpful to have a CliffsNotes version of my life history to date. In case you’re feeling nosy. Now, in order to lay this out for you, I’m going to do something you’re never supposed to do on CVs. I’m going to start at the beginning. (There, take it, your first lesson: Do as I say, not as I do.)
FULL-TIME KID, N/A
San Diego, CA, and Las Vegas, NV | 1989–2007
A happy childhood. I have two parents and a younger brother. When I was 14, we finally got a dog and we named her Rizzo — a multi-purpose reference to both Grease and The Muppets. She was bilingual and knew the days of the week.
UNIVERSITY STUDENT (ENGLISH MAJOR),
UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME
South Bend, IN | 2007–2011
I don’t think I’ve wanted anything in my life as badly as I wanted to go to Notre Dame. I didn’t really have the scores for it, but I refused to come up with a Plan B. I’ll talk more about this later and show you an email I wrote when I was 17 years old.
GIRL WHO STUDIES ABROAD, EUROPE
Barcelona, Spain | Summer 2009
I spent the summer between my second and third years of university alone in Barcelona, learning Spanish, and it turned my world upside down. I fell in love for the first time; I fell in love with the language, I fell in love with Europe. I take back what I just said — I wanted to live in Europe just as badly as I wanted to go to Notre Dame. I would go on to spend the next several years hustling my way into achieving that goal.
MASTER’S STUDENT (JAZZ VOCAL PERFORMANCE),
LEEDS COLLEGE OF MUSIC
Leeds, United Kingdom | 2011–2013
The summer before my final year of university, I had a pretty drunken lunch with my mother that wound up with us, six hours later, seeing a seventies cover band in a local San Diego bar. I have always been a singer, and had an intense, drunken revelation in which I realised I needed to pursue music. I quickly sobered up and decided to make a more safe and respectable choice for my career — but, remember, I also wanted to live in Europe. So I attempted to kill a lot of birds with one stone and went straight from university to northern England to do a Master’s in Jazz Vocal Performance. I still make music.
FIRST ‘REAL’ JOBS, MULTIPLE EMPLOYERS
San Francisco, CA | 2013–2014
I picked the first job that would offer me the slightest hope of making $40,000 a year after three initial months of internship work paid by the hour (which, by the way, I never completed). I hated that job. I sat in a windowless office. I had reverse culture shock from England, I didn’t know many people in the city, I had situational depression that spiralled into very real depression. I might refer to San Francisco throughout the book as my Worst Year Ever because it absolutely was. The hatred I felt for my career and the panic I felt about my life during that dark period are, on the other hand, part of what inspired me to start writing once things got good.
PROFESSIONAL HUSTLER, SELF-EMPLOYED
Berlin, Germany | 2014–2016
In San Francisco, I became obsessed with finding a way to get back to Europe. I got let go from a contract on the same day my apartment lease ended, and I took it as a sign. I’d never even visited Berlin. I moved without a job, without a visa, without a partner, without a plan. The only two ‘references’ I knew that could even vouch for the city were a SoundCloud employee I’d befriended on LinkedIn during a previous job search stint, and a romantic fling who’d been recruited for a role in Berlin at one point — the second of whom offered me some very clever, very un-American advice: ‘Go for six weeks,’ he said. ‘See if you like it.’
EXCEPTIONAL TALENT
London, United Kingdom | 2017
In Berlin, I ran my own consulting practice and rapidly transformed myself from entry-level talent into well-paid senior consultant for publicly traded technology companies. By following my curiosity, I became a specialist in an obscure-but-needed form of communication design work, helping software teams to build websites that would look good and function well in multiple languages simultaneously. I also started the #ENTRYLEVELBOSS newsletter.
Thanks to those two particularly niche CV high-lights, I was able to make the case that I was the best in the world at what I did. I decided to apply for a prestigious immigration route into the United Kingdom called the Tier 1 Exceptional Talent Visa. It’s effectively a golden ticket. Just 200 are given out each year for people who work in technology.
CONTENT STRATEGIST, FACEBOOK
London, United Kingdom | 2017–2019
I knew I was really good at what I did, but part of me still craved the one thing I’d never had before: a ‘real’ full-time job, the kind with the benefits and the annual leave and the office coffee machine. I wanted to know what it was like.
There was another part of it, too. I’d been writing the #ENTRYLEVELBOSS email for more than two years and I was successfully teaching thousands of people how to get hired, but I’d never actually held a salaried position myself. I’d been freelance for my whole career. Basically, I validated this entire method when I got an offer for a senior tech position at Facebook.
FOUNDER, #ENTRYLEVELBOSS
Worldwide | 2019–present
These days, I’m working full-time on all things #ENTRYLEVELBOSS. My goal is to empower job seekers like you to take your career destiny into your own hands. We are constantly teaching new students through #ELB School, the job search boot camp that inspired this book. Come check us out: entrylevelboss.com/school
As far as how this book thing happened? Well, I continued sending out the #ENTRYLEVELBOSS email, even while employed at Facebook. I slowly put together a book proposal. Kind of like sending in an application for a dream job, just to see what would happen. Then, I quit my job to write a book about how to find a job. Look at that — wild.
I have had a very, very, very lucky life. I really want to acknowledge that.
I’m healthy, I’m white, I’m straight, I’m cisgendered, I’m able-bodied, I’m educated, I’m a native English speaker, I come from a loving family that could lend me money. I was born into the type of privilege that offered me the permission to dream up crazy things, like moving to Europe just because it felt good. I am overwhelmingly grateful for that.
I don’t know what your situation was like. We might be twins separated at birth, but we probably aren’t. I have a good relationship with my parents and I feel like they would have told me something like that by now.
There are social barriers and prejudices that many job seekers face that can make the search for work, well, a lot more hard work. The approach outlined in this book has been tried and tested by thousands of #ENTRYLEVELBOSS students, many of whom have financial backgrounds, family situations, or race and gender identities that are different to my own. Regardless, I want to acknowledge that there may be specific techniques that are easier for some readers to deploy than others. I want you to make your own calls in those moments, because you know your own situation better than I ever could. My aim is simply to tell you everything I know about how to get yourself hired as quickly as possible with the skills that you already have and in the situation that you are facing, today. Because I believe that what I’m teaching should be available to absolutely everyone, not just passed along haphazardly around certain kinds of dinner tables.
Earlier on, I told you that the only pitch I can really offer you is that I went through my own trial-and-error and I wrote it all down. Hopefully, somewhere in these pages, in amongst all my mistakes and learnings, you’ll find something useful. Something that will act as a weapon for whatever unique version of the job search battle you might be fighting out there.