If you want to know how to stand out when applying for jobs, here's the short answer: stop applying like everyone else. Most candidates dump a generic CV into a web form, cross their fingers, and wait. Meanwhile, the employer on the other side is overwhelmed, distracted, and desperately hoping someone will just make their life easier. The candidates who get hired are the ones who understand that dynamic — and use it to their advantage.
How Do You Actually Stand Out in a Sea of Applicants?
When we post a job opening, we routinely receive 500 to 800 applications. For a video editor role, 500 people applied. For student success coaches, 800 people applied over two weeks and we hired four. Those are brutal odds — but they're beatable, if you stop treating job applications like a numbers game.
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Ali explaining what it's really like inside a business when hiring season hits
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One of the most powerful things you can do is go beyond what's asked. We include a question at the end of every application: "Is there anything else you'd like to tell us?" You'd be shocked how many people skip it entirely. What we've found is that there's a remarkably strong correlation between the effort someone puts into that final answer and how good a team member they turn out to be. Use that box. Make a short Loom video. Show your face. Build a mini presentation. People hire people — not CVs.
One applicant for a videographer role had a terrible resume and almost no formal experience. But he sent in a custom video pitching himself, showing his personality, his editing style, and his enthusiasm. He was fast-tracked to the top of the interview list immediately. That's the power of going the extra mile when no one else will.
Why Are You Getting Zero Responses to Applications?
If you've been sending out dozens — or hundreds — of applications and hearing nothing back, it's not just bad luck. There are structural reasons this happens, and most of them have nothing to do with you personally.
First, understand what's happening on the employer's side. The person responsible for hiring isn't a dedicated HR machine. They're a busy business owner or manager who is juggling a dozen other fires at the same time. They may have 312 applications sitting in an inbox they haven't opened in a week because a supplier just canceled, a client is demanding a refund, and they have three back-to-back meetings. The hiring process is not an efficient, well-oiled system. It's held together with duct tape.
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The Third Door framework: three ways to get into the nightclub (and which one actually works)
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Second — and this is the big one — up to 80% of senior roles, and many junior ones, are never publicly advertised. Companies fill them through their networks before a job posting ever goes live. So if you're only applying to listed roles, you're competing for the visible 20% of available jobs while the rest get quietly filled behind the scenes.
Should You Apply If You Don't Meet All the Requirements?
Yes. Absolutely yes. Do not disqualify yourself just because a job listing says they want five years of experience and you have two. The person who wrote that job description was probably guessing. They were trying to paint a picture of their ideal candidate while simultaneously dealing with seventeen other urgent problems in the business.
Job descriptions are aspirational, not contractual. What the hiring manager actually wants is someone who will make their life easier and solve a real pain they're experiencing. If you can demonstrate that you'll do that — regardless of whether you tick every box on the list — you have a genuine shot. Don't let a bullet-point list rule you out before you've even tried.
How to Network Your Way Into a Job (The Third Door)
There's a great framework from Alex Banayan's book The Third Door that perfectly describes how job hunting actually works. Imagine a nightclub with three entrances.
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The videographer applicant who had no experience but got fast-tracked with one custom video
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- Door One: The long queue. This is the standard job application — fill out the form, submit your CV, wait. Five hundred other people are in the same line.
- Door Two: The VIP entrance. This is who you know — family connections, industry insiders, people who can make a call on your behalf.
- Door Three: The side door nobody's talking about. Steven Spielberg used this door. He snuck off a Universal Studios tour bus, wandered onto a film set, and introduced himself to someone who could help him. There was no rulebook for that move — and that's exactly the point.
The third door is about hustle, creativity, and finding unorthodox ways in. Here's what that looks like practically:
- Identify five companies whose mission genuinely excites you. Not "I'll take anything" — specific companies you actually want to work for.
- Find people who work there on LinkedIn. Reach out and ask if you can buy them a coffee and ask about their role. Most people say yes.
- Use those conversations to learn about real problems the company is facing — then position yourself as the solution.
If someone reached out and said, "Hey, I noticed from your content that you're struggling with AI automations — I'd love to spend a month building those for you for free, no strings attached, and at the end you can decide if you want to keep working with me" — that would get an immediate response. That's the third door in action.
How Do You Get Hired When You Have No Experience?
Here's the reframe that changes everything: you don't need someone to give you experience. You can create it yourself.
Employers are increasingly asking about past experience — not hypothetical future performance — because it's harder to fake with AI. So the question becomes: how do you build that track record when you're just starting out?
You do the work anyway. On a weekend. Without asking permission. Want to apply for a marketing director role but haven't held that title? Go through the company's top ten competitors. Deconstruct their ad strategies, analyze their sales pages, and put together a custom proposal — with a personal website and a Loom walkthrough — showing exactly what you'd change and why. That single piece of speculative work will do more than a perfectly formatted CV ever could.
Build a personal website with a portfolio. Make things. Document things. Show, don't just tell — because AI can do all the telling now, and it means nothing without proof behind it.
How Should You Use AI When Applying for Jobs?
AI is everywhere in the job market right now — candidates are using it to write applications, and employers are using it to screen them. It's an arms race. But here's the thing: the way to win that arms race isn't to use AI better than everyone else at generating generic cover letters. It's to use AI to do research that most candidates won't bother doing.
Use Claude or ChatGPT to dig into a company's real problems. Ask it to analyze the company's competitors, surface weaknesses in their current marketing or operations, and help you build a targeted pitch. Then deliver that pitch with your face on camera, in your own voice, with your own take. That combination — AI-powered research delivered in a deeply human way — is almost impossible to fake and almost impossible to ignore.
What you should not do is use AI to churn out the same application fifty times. Employers can tell. And more importantly, it signals exactly the kind of passive, low-effort thinking they're trying to screen out.
How to Build Real Experience While Still at University
If you're still a student, the single best thing you can do right now is get involved in things that give you stories. Not just academic achievements — stories. Interviewers and application forms will ask you things like: "Tell me about a time you handled adversity." If your only answer involves a difficult exam, you're going to struggle.
But if you were the president of your university's May Ball committee, responsible for selling 500 tickets at $1,000 each, and a supplier canceled two weeks before the event — and you solved it — that's a story. That's a real, specific, memorable answer that no AI can generate for you, because it actually happened to you.
Join clubs. Run events. Start something. Take on responsibility that might go wrong. The stories you collect now are the currency you'll spend in every interview for the next decade. The good news? You don't need permission from anyone to start collecting them.
The Bottom Line: Think Like an Employer
The single biggest shift you can make in your job search is developing genuine empathy for the person trying to hire you. They're not a faceless algorithm. They're a stressed, time-poor human being who desperately wants someone to come in and make things better. If you approach every application asking "how can I make this person's life easier?" instead of "how do I get this job?" — you will stand out. Every single time.
