Guest Post: Chengyao Gu

Chengyao is one of Chris' Fall 2011 Professional Speaking students at Carnegie Mellon. Here she writes about getting the job you want.

Lucky or Smart?

How to get the job you want? In most cases, we obtain the job opportunities as we expect and get fully ready; in other situations, however, jobs just come to us ‘by accident’. Today, I’d like to share some stories of my friend and myself, focusing on how to seize the job opportunity by consistent efforts or by coincidence, or maybe both.

One of my buddies Jason, a 22-year-old fresh undergrad, told me recently that he hopped from a local vehicle outlet to an international automobile corporation. Acquainted with Jason and his sales talent, I was not stunned by the promotion itself. Actually, what interested me most, was how he met with his new boss! He was playing online racing game at some weekend, and he hopped the job! That’s it? Yes, that’s all. Because the one who was playing on the other side of the online game with Jason was that ‘boss’. While chatting causally after the game, the boss found Jason knew a lot about the automobile market, including the models, trend, customer segmentation. And most importantly, boss found Jason a good person to work with. He liked Jason! So he offered the position of assistant sales manager.



The magical story provides several insights:
- Your specialties as well as extensive knowledge are the key to getting offers;
- In some unofficial context, there also exist job openings. Go and grab it;
- When someone likes you, especially when ‘someone’ refers to your boss-to-be, there is a good chance he will be your boss in the end.

You may say ‘oh, it’s quite lucky of your buddy Jason. Little chance of us to run into our boss of same hobby.’ That’s true. Actually, the common case is that we have already had a clear vision of what company to go or what position to hold. And what we need to do is just get prepared, prepared and prepared! Make ourselves a perfect fit to the certain position of the certain company. This reminds me of my interview experience with BI team in eBay. To be frank, I’ve got three chances of interview before finally getting into BI team. After each of the first two unsuccessful interview, I reflected on my performance while collecting the feedback from my interviewers. Then I upgraded my technical and soft skills, especially those needed for BI position. After almost one year, I felt ready. And by writing emails to those interviewers and managed to get another chance of interview. This time, I made it!

Thus, in either story I mentioned above, if you are the person the companies want and if you let them know that you are the right one, then the jobs are not that far from you.