You get a job by convincing somebody that you will create value.
This isn't a new idea, but it bears repeating over and over again. You get a job by convincing somebody that you will create value. You get hired by convincing an employer that you will create economic value for them. Internalize it. Make peace with it. Like it or not, if you want somebody to give you a job, you have to convince them that you will create value.
The reasons for this is pretty simple. Businesses that are staffed by employees who create no or minimal value will eventually fail to make payroll and go bankrupt, because the employees are consuming more value than they are creating. In order for a business to succeed, it needs to produce more value, overall, than it expends.
"This is an overly-simplistic model, employees and payroll are not the only factors at play--" Sure, yes, yes, yeah, sure. The map is never the territory. However, this essay is called 'getting hired'. If you're reading it because you're unemployed, you don't need to worry about more sophisticated models. If you're job-hunting and your model doesn't at least begin with "you get a job by convincing somebody that you will create value", you're probably shooting yourself in the foot.
Right now (summer 2025) among my generation (twenty-somethings), in my field (software engineers), there's a lot of doomer-ism going on. The word on the street is that the entry-level job market is collapsing, unemployment for new grads is at a record high, and the end of white-collar work is near. It's bleak out there. This essay is entirely unconcerned with the truthfulness of all that. It might be accurate, it might not be -- I really, truly, do not care. These are things totally outside of individual control.
What is entirely within individual control is the model you use with respect to how you approach the process of getting hired, and the meta here is woefully under-optimized. I firmly believe that with the right approach, any reasonably bright young person can stand head and shoulders above the pack in pursuing basically any job.
The prevailing model I see goes something like this:
CONVENTIONAL MENTAL MODEL OF GETTING HIRED
From this pov, getting a job is a combination of credentials, luck, and performance. It's not entirely hopeless -- you can get a job thinking this, and doing this, the majority of young people do -- but it confuses heuristics for the thing those heuristics are measuring for. It also has the nasty side effect of inspiring an unpleasant feeling of powerlessness, since so much of the process is based on luck, and the best thing you can optimize for (better credentials) takes years to build.
Let's be totally clear -- employers not randomly giving away jobs as gold-star prizes for working really really hard in school. They are trying to run profitable enterprises. They give a shit about your resume, your degree, your side projects, your personality, your interview performance, etc, because these are the windows the conventional hiring process gives them into your ability to create value. Signaling value-creation-potential is the only reason any of these things matter. Once you notice this, it becomes obvious you can significantly increase your chance of getting a job by finding more direct ways to do this signaling.
"This is great and all but it doesn't change anything. Putting 'I desperately ache to create value' on my resume isn't helping me. I'm still applying to a hundred jobs a week against a hundred thousand other candidates. This is pointless"
Well putting 'I desperately ache to create value' on a resume might actually stand out, but I digress. Once you really internalize that convincing employers you can create value is the only way to get a job, you'll recognize that the usual process of applying for jobs is actually a pretty inefficient way to do said convincing. After all, you're going to be a small signal in a noisy channel, constrained by the structure of the job application, quickly reviewed by a disinterested HR employee who likely has little time or energy to consider any unique case you try to make for yourself.
So consider other channels. You are not limited to typical job applications, and recognizing that it's all the same thing anyway -- making a case for yourself as a value-creator -- should mean there's nothing wrong with doing that however you please. This is easier with startups and small companies -- email founders and explain how you could immediately contribute. Patrick McKenzie has a great template for this. Go to events where you can meet employers face-to-face, and strike up a conversation that shows interest in the pain points they're dealing with. Build a personal project in public that demonstrates an understanding of how a specific technology can solve a particular business problem. There is no correct answer or collection of correct answers. This is an open-world adventure.
"You're just exploiting side channels, any once those channels are exhausted, we're all back in the same place. This 'creating-value' nonsense is just linkedin-influencer style bullshit. Of course putting more time into more methods is going to get you a job eventually. The process is still fundamentally random and Sisyphean".
Ok well even if I'm just telling you 'exploit side channels', if that helps you get a job, you shouldn't be complaining about the reminder.
Yes, these channels are valuable because they're less-used and often more carefully-reviewed (at least, compared to being Job Applicant number 4554 of 17381), but that's marginal. The real value comes from the unstructured nature of them giving you way more freedom to make a compelling case for yourself. Hitting up a founder on linkedin and sending them a copy of your resume and the same cover letter you'd submit in a standard job app isn't going to stand out. What will stand out is a tight proposal demonstrating an understanding of their business niche, highlighting an issue they're encountering, and offering to use your skills to address that need. If you do this right, you are offering net-positive value for free. You are creating a no brainer win-win situation. You are a 100-dollar bill laying on the sidewalk.
That's not to say that making these cases is an easy thing to do -- businesses don't tend to advertise the issues they're facing. But you can get an idea by sniffing through news around the company in question, browsing current job postings, investigating common pain points in the industry, or even just asking directly. Again, let's remember the prevailing job-app meta is 'apply to random positions with the same resume and chatGPT-edited cover letter you use for everything until you somebody takes pity on you'. Any level of initial earnest research/understanding/preparedness has a good chance of standing out, particularly if it's arriving via a lesser-used channel that took some digging to find.
"This sounds soulless and life-consuming. I work to live, I don't live to work, I don't care about the problems these companies are facing and I don't want to spend time pretending I do"
This is slightly beyond the scope of this essay but important to touch on. This feeling is very real, and I don't think it should be ignored -- following it through rough terrain will eventually take you good places.
Focusing on value-creation has the side effect of tending to align the work you seek with the things you care about. It's difficult to sell yourself as a value-creator if you're pursing a job doing something you don't actually believe is valuable. That dissonance is very hard to hide. If you strive to create value, you'll naturally seek places where you actually believe value exists, just waiting to be uncovered and processed and realized. You're going to spend a huge percentage of your waking hours at your job -- it's worth seeking work that feels valuable, for your own sake and the world's.
Also, again, you only get a job by convincing somebody that you will create value -- even if you don't believe it yourself, that's why they're going to hire you. Might as well at least try to be on the same page, eh?