Getting Hired at a Start-Up: How to Be More than Lucky

If you are in the market for a new job and the Fortune 500 crowd isn’t appealing—or available,
you may want to consider a start-up.

The speed and intensity of start-ups are appealing to many job candidates. Interns and entry-level hires often extol the common virtues of working in an early-stage company: you get to assume diverse functional responsibilities, you are valued for your ability to take initiative and figure things out on your own, and you are able to work closely with senior leadership from the get-go.

That being said, the same organizational attributes that make a start-up sexy can often make it difficult to get hired in the first place: hiring is often placed on the back burner simply because it takes too long—and there isn’t enough time to move through the process.

Several years ago, I was a career counselor at the University of Pennsylvania and received a unique first-hand glimpse at the hiring process from a Wharton School alum who had just received generous angel funding. When asked about his hiring process, this was his response,

When we first started we got some great press in major news outlets and we received an enormous amount of resumes which we just stacked up—the pile grew to over two feet. One day, we were finally ready to interview candidates and I said to my partner, ‘How do we make the first cut? What should we look for?’

He grinned at me, walked over to the pile and said, ‘I have a minimum criterion for all of our candidates: they all have to have one thing in common. They have to be lucky.’

He pulled out two inches of resumes, and threw away the remaining ones. And that is how we started the hiring process.

My take-away from this anecdote: there is less uniformity in the hiring process in a start-up environment, particularly as the Federal reporting requirements for employers with a small number of employees are less stringent than in large organizations.

If you want to work in a start-up, you’ll want to be more than lucky—you need to be noticed and in the right place at the right time. Here are three tips to get started:

1. Companies don’t know how interested you are until you tell them. Learn all you can about what the company is doing and mention your interest when you apply.
2. Make it easy for a company to hire you—i.e. if you have a contact within the organization, submit your materials to that person—but also monitor the “careers” website of the organization and submit your materials that way. (This streamlines the process for them, and speeds up the hiring process).
3. Be persistent in the follow-up—and be prepared to get started if an opportunity becomes available.

(Note: These tips are transferable, and can be used in the general job search as well.)

Making Generational Stereotypes Work for You

Make no mistake about it: life on Wall Street may never be the same after the events of recent weeks--and your career may be affected by the trickle-down effects of this change in the American landscape.

If you are seeking a job in this market, be patient and cautiously optimistic - employers across multiple sectors still need employees; you'll just need to put deliberate effort into researching opportunities and positioning yourself for hire. The good news: there are great ways to leverage technology so that you can conduct an efficient and effective job search. I'll be sharing many of these strategies with you in the coming days, but today, I'd like to focus on "stereotypes."

Demographers, trend setters, and the press love to talk about generational characteristics by making use of stereotypes. Today, an enormous amount of press attention has been given to analyzing and understanding millennials; here's one press release comparing Gen Y attitudes on work to that of Baby Boomers circa 1982.

I feel particularly sensitive to coverage of Gen Y based on experience as a Gen X'er. I too, graduated from college in the shadow of an economic downturn. Reality Bites was the movie of the day, and the press had a field day characterizing "Gen X" as a unilateral group of slackers. I recall sitting in the lunchroom at my first job in DC with my colleagues: we took turns acting angry and disaffected and mocking Saturday Night Live: "I'm angry, I'm just really angry," one person would say. "I don't know why, I just am. Everything makes me angry." We laughed, and then we went back to work. In reality, we were happy--unless we had to travel for work and give away our Nirvana tickets. We worked hard to prove to our employers that we weren't like the stereotypes, and we were rewarded when our organization moved to a generous employee incentive plan with quarterly bonuses.

While my colleagues and I chose to work hard to avoid being compared to our generation, it's easier to make it work for you.

Over at Fast Company, my friend Lindsey Pollak discusses "Why Your Company Needs Millennials: 5 Reasons to Love Gen Y Workers." Lindsey does a great job of addressing stereotypes and providing tips on how many of the negative buzz frequently used to label millennials can--and should--be reframed in a  positive context. My suggestions: read and re-purpose her suggestions for marketing your own skills--or counteracting complaints about "your generation."

As for myself, I can only say my life has been vastly improved by using the tools of the millennial trade: I'm off to hop on Facebook and continue planning my college reunion weekend with friends--given that we've been following each other's profile updates, playing games with one another and sharing pictures for months...there will be less "reunion stigma" than there was five years ago. I can't wait--especially since my college friends aren't yet into Twitter and we won't be texting each other to say, "She wore what?!"