Over the years, I’ve hired hundreds of freelancers, VAs, and team members.
And here are the three big mistakes that candidates continue to make.
Hey, Dennis Yu here. And you’re watching this video because we want to improve your chances of getting a job with us. We’re hiring like crazy because we’re so fortunate to have so many clients and partners, but I want to tell you about some of the mistakes people make when they apply. So the first mistake is that they reach out to other folks or me in the team with zero preparation.
So if you send a canned message that says, dear, sir, it just has stuff that shows you didn’t put any time into researching what our company does. You’re not following us on social media. You haven’t clearly seen the kinds of projects that we have. Then you’re going to look like the thousands of other people that are just blasting their resumes out.
So number one, make sure you put in a little bit of time and personalize your message to say something specific about what you’ve learned. It will show that you stand out, and that will put you in 95% of the other candidates. Number two is grammatical errors and other kinds of mistakes. So we’re looking at your ability to communicate.
If you have errors in there and capitalization and punctuation, that’s going to hurt your chances, even if English is not your first language. That’s totally okay. We have a lot of folks in the Philippines, Pakistan, Brazil, and other places, but you have to show that you can communicate very clearly.
It doesn’t mean you have to be a writer or you have to be able to write books or things like that, but just avoid things that are sloppy or have grammatical mistakes. Number three is the follow-up. So when you want to know how you’re doing, then you want to make sure you’re paying close attention to the instructions.
The instructions for any particular job are going to be something like sending a note to Juan or making a one-minute video and posting it on LinkedIn. Or send something with a subject line that has a squirrel in it. These are all ways where we are testing your ability to follow directions. So, that’s what knocks out most candidates because they can’t pay attention to detail.
And so when we’re working in a team where it’s not just you, but a team of us working together in different groups, it’s absolutely critical that you can work closely with these other team members. If you come to me every single day, that shows that you can’t work in a team, right? It doesn’t mean I don’t want to hear from you, but if you can imagine, like the guy Jim, who started Costco, if everyone went to the CEO of Costco across all the different stores of Costco as they would just never get anything done.
Cause it would just be chaos. You’ve got to learn to follow directions and know whom to contact for whom, so it could be other team members. They could be someone who’s in a particular group. There are always some instructions. And you want to demonstrate that you can. Figure out who is the right person to contact or be able to solve problems for yourself or go through the training.
Certainly, reach out when it’s a question that does deserve to where there’s a clarification that you need. But remember that if you’re applying, the team evaluates your ability to follow directions. And then, the questions you ask, tell us your comprehension and how well you understand.
So if you can follow those three, yes, there’s a good likelihood that you will be way ahead of everyone else. Who’s applying for a particular position, or maybe you want to be a project manager? Maybe you already have 20 years of experience running an agency, and you want to work with us. That’s great too.
I can tell you if it’s working for me, the first thing I’m going to do is see whether you’ve engaged with our content and whether you have the expertise, as opposed to wanting to get me on the phone right away, where I have to explain what our company does. Because I’m going to look you up before we meet in the same way, you should look me up and figure out how to make the best use of your time and the best use of my time.
So I hope that helps you. Good luck. There’s so much opportunity. I would love to find some way to be able to create a million jobs, which is our mission. And so glad to have friends like John Jonas of online jobs, not pH, our friends at five. Josh Nelson who’s got a bunch of seven-figure agencies in his group.
So we’re helping agencies scale. If you’re an agency owner and you’re listening to this, watching this just for fun, by the way. Great. We would love to see you be able to hire more people. And the people that come through our program, it’s not just for us; it’s for all of us. So we want to create jobs together based on clear, fair instructions that anyone who can qualify, anyone who can get these things done, doesn’t matter where on the planet, doesn’t matter if there’s something.
It doesn’t matter if they’re broke; if you can get the job done, then we want to hire you. So I hope that is encouraging for you. And I hope that you can step ahead and be ahead of most of the people that make mistakes when they’re applying for a job, whether it’s with us or somebody else. So looking forward to seeing your progress, and if, for some chance, you don’t hear from us or you were declined because maybe you’re not ready.
We can always try again. We believe that people can always improve. The best thing is don’t make those mistakes in the first place. You want to accelerate your learning and invoice and avoid the pain that comes from making the kinds of mistakes that we’ve seen over the last 20-plus years in hiring. So go check it out, and I can’t wait to see your progress along the way.
My friend.
