How to show experience, when you have none
The 3 most common types of startup jobs, and how to build personal projects to gain experience.
The #1 complaint I hear from candidates (well, aside from being ghosted) is that too many junior jobs ask for some kind of professional experience, when most jobseekers have none. But for many startup roles, you don’t have to wait for a full-time job in order to gain experience; you can create your own professional experiences in many different ways.
Find your archetype
To begin with, think about the ideal role you’d like to land. Is your ideal role a Creator, a Scientist, or a Networker? (Product Managers, go to the bottom of this piece!)
Creators
If your ideal role can be categorized as Creator, then your job is the easiest — create something! Always make sure you have a portfolio of some sort, whether that’s your blog, your Behance profile or Github projects. There doesn’t even have to be a lot of projects, you just need 2-3 high quality ones to start with.
Do two things with your portfolio:
1) Highlight it in your job application. In any interview process, you will be assessed on your technical abilities to create. If you can already show a few pieces of work, it could drastically increase your chances, and you can even argue to replace the task / challenge stage with something you’ve already created. For a recruiter, it’s very hard to sift through applications for junior roles. How do you compare applications when no one has work experience? This is where the portfolio can set you apart.
2) Promote your work. Put it on LinkedIn, Twitter, your Slack or Discord groups, and if you don’t want to come across as braggy (which, trust me, you definitely aren’t), simply ask people for feedback! Future hiring managers might just be scouting for cool projects and they would definitely want to at least take a call with the person behind it.
Promoting your work is just as important as working on it. A friend of mine is an ex-Google designer who now teaches design. I once asked him what he’d do if he were to look for a job now, he said: “Build a huge project and let it explode.” A few years back when he looked for a job, he created an in-person event and invited all his favorite companies to attend, then in the networking chats he’d casually drop that he was looking for a job… very smart.
Not sure what to build for your portfolio? Simple — think of your dream companies, and create something new for them, whether that’s a few social media posts or a piece of content, or a re-design of a certain feature. I interviewed a software engineer who landed his first software job after only 1.5 months of search about creating personal projects for job searching, and this is what he did:
I knew that my tech skills were good but they were obviously at a junior level so I needed to sell myself on other fronts. I am a huge proponent of documenting your learning. Every day I would study new tech and push that code to my Github, I would build little projects in new languages or frameworks and I would read extensively. When it came to my interview process I discussed, at length, my likes and dislikes for certain languages and frameworks. I showed them that I was able to learn and able to continue learning. I made sure that the project that I built were interesting from a technical standpoint but also interesting to discuss. For example I worked on an instagram bot that would every day upload a picture of my plants (https://www.instagram.com/plantbot.py/) or a twitter bot to produce cute emoji bands (https://twitter.com/theanimalbands). Not only do these demonstrate things that a junior should be good at (API calls, tests, etc.) but it also demonstrates a level of creativity.
You can also research typical interview processes in your ideal role:
In particular reference to coding challenges you are, 90% of the time, going to be building an API from scratch. I would spend upwards of a week building the best boilerplate API that I could and simply modifying it to the specific coding challenge I was presented with.
Scientists
For the Scientists out there, creating personal projects might not be as straightforward, as it takes data to do experiments and draw insights. Luckily, the internet is a magical place; there are plenty of public data sets for people to practice with and learn. A quick Google search tells me that Kaggle offers open data sets and machine learning projects, and Tableau gave links to other sites that offer free public data sets. You could first pick a topic that interests you personally, say, which movies are becoming more popular in the UK, you could then search for relevant data such as the BFI Industry insights.
If you are interested in marketing, aside from the popular online courses on SQL or Google Analytics, think of the specific type of customer your ideal company is trying to market to. Which region are they in, and are they businesses or consumers (B2B/B2C)? For B2C companies for example, they might work with Facebook Business Manager, and you can already explore the Facebook Ads Library even without a Facebook account.
One underestimated way of building personal projects for Scientists is to write blogs. The analytical skill is one side, what about the other side of deriving insights? Following those topics that interest you, what are some industry trends that would be interesting to share? Blogging turns complex data projects into easy-to-digest formats that are also shareable.
Networkers
Finally for the people-people of the startup scene — congratulations, the good news is that both sales (including sales development representatives, customer success managers, account managers) and recruitment are roles that have the lowest barrier to entry! You are most likely to find entry level Networker jobs that don’t require any work experience, because out of the three archetypes, Networker jobs are the easiest to teach and ramp up in a short amount of time. However, the downside is that you might also have the most number of competitors.
The value of Networkers is that they are good at connecting with people. Future recruiters can already start building up their network by checking out the open positions of their ideal company, then try connecting with candidates that might be good in those roles. If your ideal company is hiring software engineers, try speaking to a few software engineers. For future salespeople, identify your ideal company’s potential customers. Are they SMEs (small medium enterprises) or large companies? Which teams is the ideal company selling to? Get in the minds of those teams to see what challenges they’re facing.
LinkedIn might be a default for networking professionally, but checking out specific communities could also be helpful. Compared to LinkedIn, it’s a lot easier to speak to strangers on Twitter, and you can build Twitter lists of your potential candidates (for future recruiters) and potential customers (for future salespeople), which can already work as a type of personal project. Lunchclub and Clubhouse are other great ways to meet high caliber people if you’re early in your career.
Photo by Jo Szczepanska on Unsplash
Finally… Product Managers
I found that PMs don’t really fit into any of the archetypes, and based on my recruiting experience, most PMs always start their career in another area like engineering or design, and then move into product. But Will Lawrence, Product Manager at Facebook, wrote a great piece on building your own experience to get into product.
Are you building your personal projects and want to get more attention for it? Let me know and I’d be happy to share it on my Twitter or LinkedIn!