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Earlier this week I talked with a friend who’s in the process of job hunting during COVID-19. Many companies aren’t hiring or worse, they’re downsizing. The main piece of advice I gave him was to spend less time on his resume and cold applying to jobs online (many are out of date or not being checked) and spend most of his time building an online content portfolio. 

Traditionally, most career advice has centered around building an impressive resume. Most job hunters spend most of their time on resume reviews and practice interviews. However, in the internet era, a resume is way overrated.

The resume is dead. And content killed it.

Content will help you get any job or internship you want. This is especially true for those of you who come from diverse or non-traditional backgrounds (like me). This makes content the great equalizer.

Your content portfolio can consist of projects, code, essays, podcasts, videos, interviews, designs, art or any other artifacts you can think of. These artifacts will demonstrate your thinking, personality and execution abilities. This makes your content portfolio more important than the perfect bullet points on your resume and even having degrees from the ‘right’ schools or stints at ‘prestigious’ companies.

Why is content the best way to advance your career?

1. Content earns attention 

2. Content attracts serendipity

3. Content is proof of work

4. Content showcases how you think

5. Content is leveraged

Quality content earns attention

Attention is the most scarce commodity on the internet. Attention is not freely given, but it can be earned. The best way to earn attention is by being helpful or offering value to others in an authentic, thoughtful way. There are myriad ways content can offer value: by teaching someone something useful, showing them how to solve a problem (or how a product you built solves their problem), entertaining, helping someone discover a new perspective or way of thinking or bringing clarity to a confusing topic. High quality, helpful content will earn attention. Quality always rises to the top. By building quality content that earns attention, the contents of your portfolio (or Github, Dribble, blog, newsletter, Youtube channel etc) become far more important than your GPA in college.

Content attracts serendipity

A portfolio of content will open doors you didn’t know existed. If you put out authentic, thoughtful and helpful content into the world, it will attract interactions with people who are curious and passionate about the topics you cover. These people will comment on your work and want to meet you. These interactions are often with people out of your network who can open doors in your career search, or lead to introductions to people that can. Simply put, content expands your network by leading with something others get value from. They then reciprocate by giving value to you. (h/t David Perell)

Content is proof of work

Resumes are a proxy for what you can do. Content is actual proof that you can do the work. Content allows your work to speak for you. Rather than tell people you’re good at design/strategy/marketing/building software, you can show them your good designs on Dribble/ your blog analyzing trends in X market and predicting winners / your video about successful content marketing / past software you’ve built or your contributions to open source projects. Showing is better than telling. Content also allows you to make networking easier since you can show the value you can provide, rather than trying to explain it. (h/t Jack Butcher)

Showing proof of work is useful if you feel inexperienced or underqualified for the role you want. The advice I often give to college students I mentor, who are looking to stand out for internships, is to spend 2-3 weeks creating a piece of content (blog, video, slide deck, report etc) relevant to the company you’re applying to and make sure they see it. This shows that you put in effort and allows you to stand head and shoulders above someone who just dropped their resume on the company’s careers page.

Content showcases how you think

Content is a window into how you think and communicate. Content allows you to showcase your specific knowledge -- the skills that feel like work to others but feel like play to you. Content allows you to convey your expertise in the communication medium that’s most natural to your personality. Luckily with the internet, there’s plenty of content forms to pick from:

• Prefer the written word? Write blogs or essays and share them online

• More of a maker or builder? Create useful apps, products, code snippets, designs or other digital artifacts and teach others to use them. 

• Better speaker than writer? Create videos or solo podcasts of you talking about topics you’re passionate about and put them on Youtube/ Spotify.

• Don’t like large crowds, but excel in small discussions? Record podcasts where you have small conversations with your friends about topics you’re passionate about or about experiences you’ve had.

Don’t confine yourself to one content form. Often, you’re very good at one form of communication so use that as your primary form. Re-use content from that medium in others that you’re less proficient in (e.g publish blogs which highlight key parts of your podcast conversations, or videos which cover your essay topics etc).

Content is leveraged

With content, your inputs and outputs aren’t correlated. For each piece of content you create, you only have to create it once. But the upside of that single piece of content is limitless. The upside comes in the form of people who discover your content, introductions they make and potential job offers. In contrast, with cold emails or resume drops, you can get at most 100 positive responses if you do it 100 times. We often don’t imagine the immense upside that a single content piece can bring. The example that cemented this in my mind is how an acquaintance from college raised a multi-million dollar seed round of funding for a pre-product company, which later became Basis, because he wrote an in-depth blog post about stablecoins (a cryptocurrency concept).

But Avthar, isn’t it risky to put yourself out there online?

Yes, but that’s the point! You must take the risk of putting your work out there in order to open doors to serendipity. The secret is that only your wins matter, not your losses. Content that is authentic, helpful and interesting will be what makes the difference in the end. The process of building an online portfolio of helpful, authentic and valuable content takes time and effort. But by going through the process, you’ll attract higher quality people and companies. And you’ll end up in a better career position because of it. That said, you should avoid fatal errors. Be thoughtful about what you share and how. A good practice is to always get feedback on your content, especially if you think it’ll be controversial.

I believe that content wins because these principles come from my own experience.

I used these principles to secure my first job offer as a software engineer, without doing a single technical interview. My interview centered around two artifacts I created: (1) a strategic growth analysis and how the company could grow faster, and (2) a project I had built using the company’s product. I didn’t end up taking the job, because the company ended up investing in the startup I co-founded.

Conclusion

To thrive in the job market of the future, create and maintain a portfolio of content.

It’s the single most impactful thing you can do.

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