The Job Closer

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

This book is about CVs, resumes, interviews, and negotiating. It is sharp, to the point, and concise. It is focused on the science of job application and skips the fluff.

🎨 Impressions

I liked this book a lot, I think it is something I will refer a lot to later. The focus on the data is something that is thought-provoking. It is closly linked to my experiences in Job Searcing. I also like the fact that it was concise and had a big focus on what matters and simple but I think, quite effective rules for job interviews and searching.

I have used this as a reference when working on interviews a lot, and it is one of the few things that pops up again and again when approaching an interview setting.

✍️ My Top Quotes

The real voyage of discovery consists, not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. —Marcel Proust
Tips are job search junk food—satisfying in the moment but lacking any real nutrition,
In this book, I will point out when a step is more like baking (where precision is critical) than cooking (where approximation is OK), so that you know when you can experiment without risk.
Between 1989 and 2016, tuition grew eight times faster than inflation-adjusted wages
Ultimately, employers don’t hire people; people hire people.
Furthermore, networking just works. For every job that goes to an online applicant, twelve jobs go to internal referrals.
TECHNIQUE #2: “BRAIN DUMP” EXERCISE (2 min) This exercise is similarly focused on speed. Starting right now, write down every job that you think you would enjoy doing and could feasibly be or become qualified for one day
TIARA is a program designed to help individuals build relationships and influence others. It stands for Trust, Interest, Attention, Recognition, and Appreciation. The program uses a simple framework to guide individuals in building rapport and establishing trust with others through a series of questions that focus on the other person's interests and experiences. By doing so, the program helps individuals turn strangers into advocates and potential mentors in a short amount of time.
However, now I want you to start a habit of reading mindfully, so that whenever you read about an organization doing interesting work, you make a note of that organization’s name and sector, since it is a potential employer.
To that end, the Odyssey Planning exercise consists of first creating a plausible five-year plan for yourself and rating that plan based on four metrics: enjoyment, resources, confidence, and personal coherence. Then, the process is followed by…a twist so delicious I wouldn’t dare spoil it here. My students at Duke have loved this exercise for years now, and I think you would enjoy it too.
They found that on average hiring managers spent six seconds per resume.
Managers’ attention during that time period was focused on the following information. Candidate name Employer name(s) Job title(s) Dates of employment Schools attended
Specifically, they found that 80 percent of hiring managers’ attention during that time period was focused on the following information. Candidate name Employer name(s) Job title(s) Dates of employment Schools attended
Can you spot what they have in common? If not, let me help. Hiring managers spent 4.8 out of those six seconds looking at things you can’t change!
Easy-to-defend candidates, not perfectly worded bullets—at least in their initial passes through a stack of resumes.
Easy-to-defend candidates are the only ones who are “found” through online job postings, and even then, there’s no guarantee.
On any matter where everyone agrees, that information should absolutely be perfect. For resumes, this typically includes the following items: Proper spelling Correct grammar Aligned margins Internally consistent formatting (for example, when mentioning a range of years, don’t use 2022-23 in one place and 2022–2023 in another) Single font used throughout

What	Basic resume	Good resume	Great resume
Formatting	Error-free	Error-free	Error-free
Bullet Source	Job description	Annual review	"Greatest hits"
Bullets Describe Your…	Responsibilities	Major projects	Impact (and root causes, if any)
Results Are…	Not addressed	Provided when quantitative	Always provided

Resumes continue to be heavily emphasized because they give job seekers two critical perverse incentives.
“Your job search will probably take you about a hundred hours; your resume should take no more than three of them.” I call this Ed’s Three-Hour Rule.
Perverse incentives are an economic term for situations in which desired actions have undesirable results.
Perverse incentives are an economic term for situations in which desired actions have undesirable results. Perverse incentives are also sometimes referred to as the cobra effect,
An accomplishment statement is a description of the impact you made with the responsibilities you held, rather than just the responsibilities themselves. This is the key factor that differentiates Good and Great Resumes from Basic Resumes.
Responsible for refrigerated biscuit marketing budget of $400 million (BASIC RESUME) Analyzed advertising channels to optimally allocate $400 million marketing budget (GOOD RESUME) Optimized $400 million marketing budget by analyzing historical returns and increasing budget to highest-return channel (newspaper inserts), increasing profits by 22 percent (GREAT RESUME)
The good news is that cover letters are far more interesting than resumes. They illustrate how well you can construct an argument (when responding to the question “Why should we consider you?” specifically).
Imagining that this cover letter is an email to our boss’s boss. It’s going to be short, to the point, authentic, customer-focused, error-free, and done.
RAC (Reason-Anecdote-Connection) Model, a framework we’ll use again later during interviews to answer “Why?” questions (like “Why our company?” or “Why this role?”).
Essentially, a RAC Letter is a five-paragraph cover letter with an introductory paragraph, three RAC paragraphs in which you systematically detail why you think you’d be a good fit, and a short closing paragraph asking for an interview and providing contact info.
In almost all cases, a cover letter is accompanied by your resume. That is where your accomplishments are listed.
Use your cover letter to tell readers what your resume means to them. Interpret it for them, as you would your findings from a project
They need a nickname because of their sheer predictability and the fact that 60 percent of interview decisions are made by the time an interviewer has asked them, according to a 2015 study of 691 interviews by Frieder, Van Iddekinge, and Raymark. Note: Which nickname? TMAY most likely.
So, 5 percent of interviewers will make decisions on candidates within the first minute, based on their first impression.
Another 25 percent make up their mind between the first and fifth minute, the period when small talk is usually covered, perhaps with a transition to TMAY. Again, just a statement of fact: three in ten interviews are decided based only on first impressions, small talk, and (possibly) TMAY.
An additional 30 percent make up their minds between the fifth and fifteenth minute. This is typically the time when the Big Four get asked. Thus, 60 percent of interviews are decided based only on first impressions, small talk, and the Big Four.
They are the four interview questions you are most likely to get at the start of your interviews, namely: Tell me about yourself (TMAY). Why this job? Why our organization? Why this sector/industry?
While many of us have taken speech classes at some point in our education or careers, woefully few of us have taken listening classes.
FIT (Favorite part-Insight gained-Transition made) will help you maintain all the goodwill and rapport you developed during the small talk and quickly catch them up on how you ended up here with them in this moment.
There’s even a Latin phrase for this concept, omne trium perfectum—roughly translated, “every set of three is complete.”
The Ready-to-Eat recognizes that most projects in any profession follow a standard process of three Actions: Understand the challenge. Brainstorm solutions. Implement the best solution(s).
It’s a CAR story with a Takeaway (the T in CART) added at the end. Takeaways are unifying thoughts added to the end of CAR stories when you revisit the original question and very explicitly explain how your story answers that question.
It’s a common joke among and about strategy consultants that they will often start answers in a Rule of Three format (as in “There are three main reasons why…”) while having only two reasons in mind, but with full confidence that they’ll think of a third reason by the time they’re done talking. (I’m no exception; old habits die hard!
“The biggest thing I’ve learned about effective communication is to think like your audience before choosing what to say. What information will the buyers—not their bosses, nor Wall Street, nor the consultants—find most compelling?
The peak-end rule states that people rate an experience based on a combination of two moments—the experience’s most intense moment and the final moment of the experience—rather than an average of every moment of the experience.
“When will I hear back regarding my status in this process?” This question is for you. I can’t even tell you how many times I have seen job seekers panic for days, weeks, and even months after an interview because they failed to ask this one simple question.
I recommend making this question either a rapport-building question, an expensive question (again, that’s my term for a question that proves you’ve done your research), or a Research and Rapport (R&R) question that offers the best of both worlds. The general formula for an R&R question is “I read about [relevant trend in this employer’s space] in [reputable source]. Has that impacted you and your work? If so, how?”
There’s a concept called commitment and consistency that psychologist Robert Cialdini identified in his 1984 book Influence. In one study he cites, he found that bystanders who verbally agreed to watch a fellow beachgoer’s things intervened to prevent a (simulated) robbery 95 percent of the time, whereas bystanders who gave no verbal commitment intervened just 20 percent of the time.
For some interviewers, the thank-you note means nothing; for others, it means a lot. Remember that nearly a quarter of interviewers (22.5 percent) make up their minds after the interview.
In negotiation terms, the “because” is a show of good faith that you’re not engaging in arbitrary positional bargaining; there are real reasons underlying your request for more, and it’s a signal to the employer that you would like the same—for them to provide the reasons why, if they choose to decline your request.
It consists only of doing a brain dump of all the pros and cons of accepting an offer so they are out of your head and into a list. Add to this list throughout the day as more pros and cons come to mind. This isn’t about seeing whether accepting the offer has more pros rather than cons; it’s more about offloading them, ensuring that you do not constantly cycle through them one at a time in your head all day or, equally bad, forget one or more of them.
However, despite the power of coffee chats and weekly manager meetings to help keep your path to full-time employment and/or advancement on track, they are both widely underutilized and woefully underdiscussed.
Coffee chats are informational meetings that you’d conduct once you’re on board at a new employer.