This blog was written by Frederic Kalinke, an ex-Googler who is founder of Exactimo, a digital marketing training venture.

One of the most common questions I get asked following my workshops with the UpScale programme is: how can I land an interview in a digital technology company? Tech firms like Google and Facebook revel in the aura that has been created around their application process. Movies like The Intern and The Social Network and books like Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google? add to the mystique. In this post, I want to outline a few tips on how to create a powerful application that will give you the best chance of landing an interview in digital technology. In short, it’s about creating an application so good that they can’t ignore you.

I believe that too many graduates struggle with finding jobs because they don’t put enough thought into understanding what they want to do and then do not try hard enough in their application. The default behaviour upon graduation is to create a generic CV (A4; one-sided; Arial font) and hand over the reins to a recruiter who will find you a suitable position (read: fire your CV in a scattergun to hundreds of employees and see what sticks). This is not a good approach as it reflects a lack of thoughtfulness and tenacity on behalf of the applicant, which are two qualities that every employer treasures.

Created View, not Curriculum Vitae

Instead I suggest graduates should be highly targeted in their approach. They should think carefully about the sectors that interest them and then do more thinking to create an argument as to why companies in this sector should hire them. It’s all about taking a position; more power behind fewer arrows. If one wants to apply for a marketing role at a fintech company that is trying to create a new form of bank, one should do some competitor analysis on their positioning, pricing, marketing strategy and visualise it in a colourful presentation. If one is after a software development job in an organic food business, evaluate their technology systems and website, and offer a technical SWOT analysis. A CV should stand for ‘Created View’, not Curriculum Vitae. So how do you create a view?!

The first step is to analyse relevant data. Google Trends is a fantastic resource that provides search query volumes for any word or phrase. This is a goldmine as it enables you to understand brand affinity by the amount of times people are searching for a set of firms. You can easily plug in the names of the firms you are applying to and their top five competitors. If you look hard enough, there are several other data sets or reports available to provide the ingredients you need to construct your argument.

The second step is to construct an argument. One of the first warm-up exercises I do in my UpScale workshop (see this Birkbeck blog post for more information), is to get participants to imagine they are an alien marketer who wants to convince decision-makers back on Planet Zog to adopt the internet, as an alternative to billboards. I ask them to list the six key attributes of digital marketing that make it so powerful versus traditional advertising? If I was applying for a role at a traditional billboard advertiser (such as Clear Channel or JCDecaux), my argument would be that their strategy should be to make their product comply with the attributes that make digital advertising so powerful.

The third step is to present your argument in an engaging way. Don’t put all your eggs in the A4, one-page CV basket, but supplement it with a colourful presentation, a website, a video, an audio file. Anything to mark yourself out as thoughtful and tenacious.

Contact the CEO

The last step is to send your application (your ‘Created View’) to the CEO. Their email address can be easily found by combining tools like LinkedIn, hunter.io and ceoemail.com. Contacting the CEO is a fantastic tactic as he or she will not receive direct applications, especially ones with well researched arguments. The worst outcome is that he or she will not reply directly but send your application to the HR department who will then be compelled to reply.

I’ve suggested this approach to so many people with great results. One of my friends wanted to get a marketing job with an eponymous fashion brand. I suggested he created a view by evaluating the brand’s use of social media and then displaying his report on a website. He built a WordPress site (www.why[brandname]needsme.com), and emailed it to the CEO. Within a day, he had a call from the Chief Commercial Officer who offered him a paid summer internship!

Frederic has further developed this idea into a methodology in his digital marketing audit course.