How to Stand Out When Asking for a Job
Tags: Startup, Investing, Job Hunting, Jobs

We work with a lot of people at the beginning of their careers at 1517. Many of those people are founders. Others go to work for the founders we know and our portfolio companies.

Every now and then, we get questions about how to get a job working in tech investing and venture capital. Instead of just ignoring the person or telling them that we’re not currently hiring, we want to give constructive feedback on their job search.

We’ve generally found that very few students know how to effectively ask for a job that other people want. This is a skill best learned through trial-and-error and candid feedback.

Here’s what Zak, who wrote the response, said:

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Cold inquiries are a great way to go about searching for a job when they’re done right. I spent years teaching people how to do this, so don’t take this the wrong way — it can take some time to learn.

First, you don’t need to follow up on every medium immediately. Generally speaking, I encourage people to follow up via email or LinkedIn (if email is unavailable), 72 business hours later if you’ve received no reply. I cover in my email course what a lack of a reply on a first message can mean and how you can craft an appropriate follow up.

I also encourage people to be cautious about texting people directly if they’ve never had previous contact with them. Generally speaking, texting is a good way of getting in touch with somebody if they include their mobile number in their email signatures (or openly say elsewhere that somebody can text them). But if they don’t do that, then it can cross some social norms that people can be iffy about.

And if you’re going to hit up multiple team members, don’t use the same message for each one. That looks spammy. Tell people where you got their info, why you’re reaching out, give them reason or evidence to reply, and then make it ridiculously easy for them to reply.

Second, and this goes more towards the content of a good outreach pitch for landing a job, you’ll want to craft your pitch in a way that it is 1) compelling to the recipient firm and 2) unique to that firm. If your pitch can be sent to 10 firms with you just changing the name of the firm every time, it’s going to look like spam and generally get a lower response rate. A better approach would be to craft a specific why this firm in your outreach.

An even better approach would be to tell them exactly why them and what you could do for them. Put together a proposal and run them through how you can be helpful. I have an alum of my email course who did this quite well and landed a number of job interviews along the way.

Telling somebody, “I want to work for you” is only as good as the reasons you give them. If you show them that you can identify value that they need created and can create it, you take a lot of that work off of their plate. Loom is a good tool for walking people through what you can create.

Third and finally, do a lot of research on every firm you reach out to. That should be wrapped into point #2 as you put together value propositions, but you’ll want to know the team’s thesis, their fund size, their stage of investment, their last fund raised, etc. The fund size and number of funds determines how many people they can hire and how quickly they can hire. The thesis will tell you more about what they consider interesting.

For example, we have a very specific thesis that we can always tell when somebody has read over it and understood it before they reached out. We’re also a pre-seed fund, so experience in business school financial modeling classes just isn’t particularly relevant to us. There just isn’t that much data when we make investments.

So, for example, if you want to specialize in doing luxury investments and use your undergrad classes, find firms that do investments in the luxury space at or after the series A.

You can do this through research on Crunchbase. Find a few companies that are venture funded at the growth stage in the luxury sector, look at their investors, and find similar investors. Research all of those investors, put together value propositions, and cold email the partners and principals at those companies. Even better, find funds in this category that you know recently closed a new fund. That means that they have new management fees to hire folks.

I hope that’s helpful for your job hunt and you can use it to land a position at the right kind of firm!

Cheers,

Zak