Is 3 days the right amount of time to wait before pinging a contact who is ‘circulating your resume’ through their company? One month into my job hunt and I had visions of paper-airplanes with my name on it floating through some beanbag-filled tech offices in London.

That was until I spoke to Hannah who showed me how to flip the whole job-search on its head using a tweet.

Write a mini-cv in a tweet

Hannah had successfully job-hunted twice in the past 12 months, each time using a tweet to gather leads.  The tweet was snappy, over before it started yet hitting all the highlights on the way and ending with a great call to action. I could instantly see how to do my own version (though turns out picking the right ending emoji was much, much harder).

 

Be brave, or get help to be brave

Writing the tweet was easy, pushing it out was much harder.

‘Now is not the right time’

‘Wait until you’ve told every one of your clients. And their children. And their pets’

‘What if nobody responds?’

The excuses made sense to me but my mentor Paula wasn’t buying any of them. I ran them by her and she deftly swatted each one away. Ignoring my cries and objections she made me get on with it and see it through to the outside world. I think to myself: Paula would make an excellent midwife, she can deliver anything.

Clear your schedules

I posted it and pinned it to my profile. I made sure my direct messages were open so anyone could get in touch. I posted it on LinkedIn too for good measure. Then I poured myself a stiff drink and waited.

First the retweets began, initiated by Hannah and Paula. Then the direct messages started coming in.

Folks I knew. Mostly folks I didn’t.

Big companies. Medium companies. Different people in the same companies.

Start-up founders. Single founders. Someone with a blockchain idea.

In a flurry of activity I responded to as many as I could and set about scheduling calls and in person meetups.

Know what you want & be a bit fussy

Hannah had equipped me with a simple way to qualify each lead: ask about the 3 biggest challenges and have your priorities sorted (hers was remote work, mine was open source related work). It worked well. Doing things in this way meant I was contacted by great folks: people with initiative who were very helpful and generous. Often I learnt about roles that didn’t really exist yet and they were willing to work with me to create something that fit with my skill set. I learnt a lot about the current landscape, made some great contacts and was able to boil down the opportunities to four I wanted to pursue.

A month after posting the tweet I accepted a job offer, for a role I had never done before but one that felt like I was meant to be doing all along. I never ended up needing a resume at all.

 

Credits: Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash