The Most Efficient Way to Land a Better Job at One of the World's Top Tech Companies
Proven Strategies from a Former Google, Meta, and Salesforce Executive
Welcome to a paid member-only edition of Level Up: Your source for career growth solutions & community by retired Amazon Vice President, Ethan Evans. If you’d like to become a paid member, see the benefits here, and feel free to use this expense template to ask your manager.
We are thrilled to bring you a guest post by Alan Stein, Founder & CEO of Kadima Careers, where he is on a mission to accelerate 1 million careers by 2040.
A graduate of Columbia Business School, Alan spent nearly 30 years as a successful leader at Google, Meta, Salesforce, Tableau, and American Express. He's spoken at MIT, Columbia Business School, NYU Medical School, Blacks In Tech, and at AnitaB.org. Alan created The GROWTH Framework, a systematic process to help ambitious professionals break through obstacles, get hired by the best companies, and build generational wealth. Alan is a dad to three teenagers, two cockapoos, two doves (that he'd love to give away), and he is married to one unbelievably supportive wife. Connect with him on LinkedIn (all DMs are replied to) so please don’t be shy and say hi.
Below, Alan shares the 6 steps to his GROWTH Framework to help you land a better job. Alan includes personal examples of:
How he created a narrative to pivot from VC to the front office of professional baseball.
How he built relationships to land his MBA internship and then Google job.
How he responds to behavioral-based interview questions using the STAR method.
Specific phrases to use when negotiating compensation and more.
Apply to be featured as a guest post: If you are an expert and want to share actionable career advice with our readers, get in touch.
As someone who has reviewed over 10,000 resumes, interviewed 2,000+ candidates, hired hundreds, and promoted dozens throughout my nearly 30-year career at companies like Google, Meta, and Salesforce, I know firsthand how hard it can be to land a job at a top tech company.
The competition is fierce, and the hiring process can be biased and inefficient.
But I've also been on the other side of the table. I have experienced over 1000 interview sessions throughout my career (including my MBA and PhD Psych years), receiving over 60 offers, and holding 29 jobs at 21 companies. I've been promoted multiple times and even fired a handful of times. The last time I applied for a job, I applied to 300 roles, received 47 interviews, made it to the final round 20 times, and got 5 offers.
That means I was rejected 295 times, including getting ghosted or ignored 165 times.
Through these experiences, I've developed a proven strategy to help you break through obstacles, land a better job, and accelerate your career.
Introducing the GROWTH Framework
At Kadima Careers, we've developed a systematic process to help ambitious professionals land better jobs at the top companies in the world.
We call it the GROWTH Framework©
The 6 steps of the GROWTH Framework:
Set Your Goals
Realistically Assess and Leverage Your Strengths
Build Outreach Through Relationships
Work the System
Training and Tenacity for Interviews
High Impact Negotiating
Let’s dive into each.
1) Set Your Goals – Setting clear, specific goals is the foundation for a successful job search.
Here is a step-by-step process for setting those goals:
Define your personal values:
Some people value time with their children (I sure did when my three teenage kids were younger and still wanted to hang out with their dad :), and many people reading this are very focused on career and compensation trajectories. Still, other individuals need to feel aligned with the mission and values of the company. Values are deeply personal, and none are right or wrong. The important thing is to think about what you value and use that as input to crystallize your goals and targets.
Once you have your values defined, create a list of 40-100 companies with direct links to their job pages.
Visit these job pages weekly to identify relevant and fresh open positions.
Note: There are some tools and job alerts that can streamline this, but I do suggest checking out the first-party job boards, at least for your target companies, as jobs tend to be missed through other methods.
We know that selecting 40-100 target companies might be a daunting task, so, the team at Kadima Careers put together a list of the Top 100 Companies to get you started that you can grab at the end of this newsletter.
2) Realistically Assess and Leverage Your Strengths – Understanding and leveraging your unique strengths is key to standing out in a competitive market.
Identify your unique skills, experiences, and accomplishments.
Align your strengths with the requirements of your target roles.
Develop a compelling narrative that showcases your value.
When I pivoted from Venture Capital into the front office of professional baseball, my skills in evaluating startups were not the strength I put forth in my conversations. Instead, I highlighted my strengths in analytics and driving business outcomes. Leveraging these strengths led me to a conversation with a senior financial executive with the NY Mets, and that led to my eventual unpaid internship with the Mets’ minor league affiliate, the Brooklyn Cyclones. There, I launched the Cyclone’s first eBay team merchandise store and performed advanced analytics on its inventory management process. That led to increased sales of rapidly expiring merchandise (for instance a t-shirt that celebrates the 2002 season as we are about to head into the new year). My unpaid internship with the Mets was short-lived, because I was able to parlay it into becoming Director of Promotions with the New Haven Ravens (the farm team of the Toronto Blue Jays at the time).
3) Build Outreach Through Relationships – Relationships are the most effective way to bypass the biased and inefficient online application process. In fact, of the 29 jobs I've landed in my career, 24 of those opportunities began with a connection putting in a good word on my behalf.
Here is how you can initiate this process:
Re-engage with loose ties from your past.
This is exactly how I landed my job at Google. Despite five failed attempts at submitting resumes for roles that I was perfectly qualified for, the door to Google was finally propped open for me by a loose connection. Back in the Winter of 2011, I was catching up over beers with an old college buddy, Seth, who was in NYC for a quick stop-over. As I was sharing my frustration about American Express moving too slowly and paying me too little, he asked me “Why don’t you work for Google, you’d be great there”? I told Seth that I’d love to, but that Google had no interest in me. Rather than agreeing with me, Seth offered to put me in touch with his softball friend, Ben, who was a long-time Googler. Well, I did chat with Ben, and Ben was a great guy. He gave me lots of insight about Google, and most importantly he put in a kind word to the hiring manager for an open role. This referral is what enabled me to be considered for the job. Make no bones about it - the job was not handed to me on a silver platter. I went through 11 rounds of grueling interviews before eventually landing that offer, but if not for that conversation with my loose tie, Seth, I never would have been considered at all.
Leverage LinkedIn to connect with people at your target companies.
One effective tip is to find people who share a commonality with you and reach out to them in an authentic manner that acknowledges that common bond. For instance, I worked at American Express so if I wanted to find former AmEx connections currently at Netflix, LinkedIn tells me 34 potential people might be able to help me.
Engage authentically, seek advice, and nurture these relationships. Aim for 5 conversations per week.
As another good example of how helpful loose ties can be, they also helped me score my MBA internship. While pursuing my MBA, I wanted to transition from finance to marketing but I lacked the necessary experience. To overcome this, I reconnected with old friends, including my wife's former college friend, Jason, whose girlfriend worked at Kraft (now Mondelez). That conversation led to my resume being presented to a Brand Marketing Director, and a few months later, I secured an MBA internship at Kraft. There, I worked on analyzing the competitive landscape for single-serve coffee machines, which have since become a significant segment in the global coffee market. This valuable opportunity would not have been possible without leveraging the power of loose ties—the connections we have with people outside our immediate circle.
 | A guest post by
|