How to land your dream job

Here’s a step-like program, very much based on the practice found in “What Color Is Your Parachute?”:

• research everything you can about the firm

• find connections, any connections, to people working there (e.g. same home town, same college, friends-of-friends, etc.)

• found out where they get lunch, go there and hang out, watch and learn

• flirt with the switchboard operator and with the executive assistants in the departments in which you’re interested, listen to everyone

• take people out to lunch, invest in them and listen to everything they have to say about their experience there

• ask for “informational interviews” with those people for whom you’d like to work

• ask those hiring managers intelligent questions, listen, demonstrate your knowledge of the firm

• at the end of the interview, ask them if you can work for them for free… for 2 weeks or a month… or at least ask how you can “earn the opportunity” to work with them

• be consistent, committed and tenacious

• put yourself in positions where you’re always “in the right place” so that you have a better chance of hitting “the right time”

I know two people who landed their dream jobs this way. Mind you, they also had 1-2 friends advocating for them all the way.