Alexa Shoen - #ENTRYLEVELBOSS

#ENTRYLEVELBOSS

Alexa Shoen, born in 1989, is the internets leading confidant for panicking job seekers and the CEO of #ENTRYLEVELBOSS: an online education company that transforms those job seekers into hired, happy professionals. She previously worked in design for Facebook, leading cross-platform initiatives to optimise the companys multi-billion-dollar advertising business. Before that, she was one of the most sought-after communication consultants in the European tech industry and advised high-growth companies in Berlin, London, and New York. Alexa is a beneficiary of the UKs Exceptional Talent (Technology) visa scheme, a prestigious immigration route awarded to just 200 world-leading technologists annually. Shes also an acclaimed independent jazz vocalist. Alexa is originally from San Diego, California.

To the 24-year-old girl who was utterly convinced that her career was already a lost cause. Look at us, honey. Look at what we did.

Love,

Older You

Scribe Publications
2 John St, Clerkenwell, London WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom
1820 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia

Published by Scribe 2020

Copyright Alexa Shoen 2020

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

9781912854417 (UK edition)
9781925849424 (Australian edition)
9781925938166 (ebook)

Catalogue records for this book are available from the National Library of Australia and the British Library.

scribepublications.co.uk
scribepublications.com.au

Contents

Preface

What I remember most about the job search is the locked doors.

You see, when I was twenty, I became obsessed with landing an internship. I used to lock myself in my university bedroom on weeknights and click through jobs listings for hours.

And I do mean hours . I still have relatively organised folders sitting in my inbox that can prove to you how hard I was trying. (I fished a boatload of embarrassing emails out of those folders for this book.)

If you put up an internship posting online any time between 2009 and 2012, chances are I considered applying.

I had lists. One time, I found the mother lode of lists. A clever internet search landed me an alphabetised directory of every advertising agency in Chicago. (I also found the same list for London.)

I spent days with that list. I probably still have it saved somewhere, in one of those relatively organised folders. Over the course of hours, I bookmarked all 400+ websites and copied down every email address I could find. I felt the adrenaline rush of a job well done.

Id close my laptop and get ready for bed.

It would cross my mind, maybe while I was brushing my teeth, that I hadnt actually accomplished anything, aside from copying and pasting links, adding to a never-ending list of hot prospects to check out tomorrow.

But that thought would leave as quickly as it came. Id worked all night on this. I was going to be so very, very employed. Any day now.

Yep, just any day now.

Any.

Day.

Now.

This book is for everybody whos ever felt that way.

How to use this book

The sole purpose of this book is to elegantly guide you from Point A to Point B:

The 9-step approach laid out on the following pages has been adapted from the course curriculum that I developed for #ENTRYLEVELBOSS School (#ELB School for short!), a boot camp designed to rein in the chaos of the job search. A fitness plan for becoming gainfully employed, if you will. Which means Im like Joe Wicks, or Oprah, or Kanye, or something but for CVs.

Im proud to tell you that weve been successfully transforming panicking job seekers into hired-and-happy humans since 2017, in fields ranging from public relations and sales to social work and environmental law. Over the years, I have guided thousands of students through the #ENTRYLEVELBOSS job search approach. I receive messages every single week from ex-students who, on their first day on the job, write to me from their new employee email addresses. I love those emails, but if Im honest with you, I love the messages from the people who havent been hired yet even more. Its weird to feel this excited about trying to find a job, someone wrote to me once. I dont know how you manage to do it, but you somehow made job searching fun. (She sent me an email just three weeks later telling me that she had landed exactly the kind of job she was hoping to get.)

Cheerful messages from people who havent even got the job yet, can you imagine? Its a pretty cool magic trick, I think, to score a job you genuinely enjoy without overwhelm or despair. Id like to help you do that, too.

How to get the most out of this book

I wrote this book knowing that youd want to be shady and read the entire thing through without doing any homework first. Go ahead, binge read! Understand why your current approach isnt getting you the right results. Take a tour of your fancy new strategy, front to back, and digest the reasoning. Underline stuff as you go.

Then, come back to the task lists at the end of each section. Flip back through when you want to recall how I phrased something or remind yourself why I warned you to do X instead of Y. Take everything in and then put it to work at a pace that feels right for you.

Your #ENTRYLEVELBOSS packing list

• Internet access
• A professional email address (use your full name instead of OneAchingHeart4433)
• A way to stay organised (go to entrylevelboss.com/dayone for digital suggestions)

And, finally, my one promise to you

You will never again find yourself at a dead end, panicking without a plan.

There are lots of dangers to navigate throughout the course of any job search: internal panic, a lack of confidence, existential dread, bad communication habits, uncontrollable external factors, hiring managers, the annoying human needs of said hiring managers (see: weekends, sleep, etc.). The real reason that any job search spins out of control, though, is not because of these things. It is because, when faced with any combination of these demons, you get stuck. Everything feels out of your control. You dont see a next move in front of you.

If you use this system, you will always be able to unstick yourself. This is my promise to you.

Look: you are not going to be magically employed by the end of the week just because you happened to pick this book up off the shelf. Youll quickly learn that I wouldnt lie to you like that. But if you try it my way, you will be able to put one foot in front of the other, to twist out of handcuffs, to walk through walls. You will be that person who always has another trick up their sleeve. Whatever it takes within reason until you arrive at your final destination and see that first paycheque in your bank account.

Until youre hired and happy.

Meet me, the person who wrote this book

In 1999, a truly terrible film was released in cinemas. Baby Geniuses achieved an impressively low 2% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The basic premise is that babies are you guessed it legitimate Einstein-level geniuses from birth right up until the moment they learn to communicate in spoken human language. As soon as they learn to speak, they forget everything. They become fallible humans. All their baby genius knowledge is lost.