Three things I learned from pitching the CEO of Praxis
A company I’ve been interested in for years recently posted a job opening. While I wasn’t expecting it and didn’t completely fit the bill, I knew I had to seize the opportunity to get to work for a company I’ve been following since shortly after its inception.
I also knew that this would be an excellent chance, at the very least, to develop my job-crashing skills creating and sending off a tailored project or pitch. They filled the role prior to my scheduled interview, so my lessons concern the pre-interview stage.
1. Even if you feel some parts of your application are incomplete or require improvement, submit it anyway for the sake of being an early applicant. This makes an enormous difference in making you stand out and securing the interviewer’s ear early on.
You may have noticed, for example, that LinkedIn encourages early applicants when companies post a new opening.
I focused too much on building a tangible project for the application process rather than utilizing the timeframe between application and interview to do so. This likely cost me the valuable few days during which other candidates stepped in.
One thing I did well was not stressing too much over the video pitch. I could have obsessed over lighting, angles, my posture, voice, whether I worded a point exactly the way I envisioned, and so on.
2. Presentation matters. I embedded links within the pitch deck slideshow I created to minimize the number of hyperlinks in the email application. What I sent was one video file and one Google Drive link. In retrospect, I could have embedded the video in the pitch deck for an even cleaner look (and also renamed the file!). My email would have benefited from a sentence or two about my excitement for the role. Had I not been tardy in submitting, I would have had more time to attend to these details.
3. You probably aren’t following up enough. I was afraid of following up too soon and waited a week before asking whether I’d be invited to interview. Given how late I applied (about three days after the job posted), it would have been a better idea to follow up within three days about my consideration for the role based on the application. This could have saved me time in finding out that they’d already discovered the right person.
Following up promptly could also have given me the chance to show that I’d been updating the pitch deck and the samples during the week I was waiting to hear from the hiring manager.
Finally, I would have done well to send a confirmation email after scheduling the Calendly call and also the morning of the interview.
In the end, I’m benefiting from being more prepared for my next job pitch. I can see ways to improve and have some motivational inertia to continue to own my job search and ditch the gatekeepers.
