How To Build The Career You Actually Want: Leveraging the Permissionless Model

How to Build the Career You Actually Want

TL;DR

  • The current traditional hiring/job seeking process is unnecessarily financially and resource expensive for companies, tedious and frustrating for job seekers and has a high error rate for both parties. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
  • These symptom painpoints can traced backed, either entirely or in part, to a fundamental value disconnect between the perceived value of the candidate and the actual value deliverable.
  • a solution designed to create, store, share and display value openly and upfront would significantly reduce this gap and the symptom painpoints it causes, reducing resource/time cost for both parties, increasing leverage for seeker, via more opportunities desirability, increasing the seeker’s income, satisfaction and professional freedom.

Value Proposition - Reading this will benefit you if want to:

  • Build a professional brand that allows you design your career to your own interests, and increase income by niching down and creating and sharing value
  • Understand how to use the leverage provided by social networks, self-productization and remote work to increase your opportunities and professional freedom & mobility
  • Want to understand how Jacob Dietle thinks, write and designs🙂

Introduction:

Background: Who am I and what what’s my point

The Problem Space:

Problem Statement: Sourcing, Interviewing, Landing, Negotiating and Deciding on Product Roles is Hard. It is hard for the job seekers & for the job posters.

<aside>💡 Information Asymmetry + Low Signal Value Vetting Tools = Value Disconnect [Perceived Value of Candidate =! Value Deliverable]

</aside>

Background: The Job Market

We all think we intuitively understand what it means to get a job, the job market, etc.  because most of us have participated in it throughout our entire lives, but I believe at large we approach from the wrong angle, I came to this conclusions thanks to Haseeb Qureshi’s blog post *Ten Rules for Negotiating a Job Offer* :

In our culture we call entering the employment market “trying to get a job.” This is an unfortunate turn of phrase. “Getting a job” implies that jobs are a resource out in the world, and you’re attempting to secure one of these resources. But that’s completely backwards. What you are actually doing is selling your labor, and a company is bidding for it.

Employment is just striking a mutual deal in the labor market…

…And yet, when people talk about the labor market, they think “oh, a company wants to give me a job! What a relief!” As though having a job were in itself some special privilege for which a company is the gatekeeper.

Dispel yourself of this mindset.

A job is just a deal. It is a deal between you and a company to exchange labor for money (and other things you value).

Labor Market Dynamics Visualized

Research:

background research (what inspires me/what ideas I am considering):

Anecdotal User Interviews:

  • John Fagan (Founder): hiring is a weak signal
  • Emma Fontana (HR Generalist):  hiring is hard, firm spent 800k last year on recruiters
  • Personal Experience (product role seeker):

Continuous background research statement: point I want to make.

Stakeholders in the system and what problems they are facing & their incentive systems

Stakeholders & Their Painpoints:

Job Seeker (Jacob 🙂):

  • Process is time and mental resource intensive, often focusing on skills unrelated to actual target role
  • High churn rate and constant self-evaluation is wearing and stressful
  • Even if you are perfectly suited for whatever you are searching for and are a highly sought after candidate, the constant recruiter, interview, yes/no, offer but not a good fit is fundamentally not an enjoyable process
  • Perceived value is often much lower than the value the candidate is actually able to deliver.

Job Poster (Founders, Recruiters/HR & Hiring Managers):

  • Hiring is extremely expensive in all aspects: high time investment, financial cost
  • highest cost is risk from a bad hire. A bad hire is the worst possible outcome for an employeer even including other costs
  • Techniques employed to separate noise from signal and ensure candidate ability/fit (behavioral interviews and case studies) are weak signals at best, and encourage system gaming
  • (perfect example of Goodhart’s Law imo as ability to STAR =! do the job)

Labor Market Painpoint Sources & Knock-on Effects

Visual 3 Final_ Core Problem & Second & Third Order Effects (3).png

Hypothesis:

Opportunity Statement:

Opportunity: close gap between percieved value and actual value

value gap.

what would it take to solve this problem and provide value

Solution Scope & Ideation:

background research (what inspires me/what ideas I am considering):

  • Visualize Value: Arbitrage reframe, permissionless projects, portfolio over posturing
  • Serendipity Mindset: Luck Surface Area, Openness to the Unknown
  • Better Ideas: Can’t pick the path, can only pick the pattern
  • Startup of You: manage your career like a startup
  • Ali Abdaal: Third Door, Be An Opportunist
  • Tim Ferris: Four Hour Work Week, Muse
  • Haseeb Qureshi: Ten Rules for Negotiating

Selected Research:

Going back to selected core pain points:

  • Perceived value is often much lower than the value the candidate is actually able to deliver.
  • Techniques employed to separate noise from signal and ensure candidate ability/fit (behavioral interviews and case studies) are weak signals at best and encourage system gaming

Problem Statement & Research Alignment:

Solution Goals:

  • increase value signal
  • increase luck surface area
  • grow Jacob’s experience & personal brand

Solution Goals: Reduce candidate value gap.

Value Proposition: reducing difference between perceived and actual candidate deliverable value, it will create a higher hire success rate, reduce searching time for both stakeholders, and thereby reduce costs for companies as well.

Abstract vs Individual Implementation:

Scope of this project was simply to solve my own problem, yet in the process of working on it I realized it would important to add a note between how we could shift hiring practices as a society vs what an individual can actually do to benefit themselves.

Individual Implementation Solution Functional Requirements:

  • Increases luck surface area

functional requirements (what this product needs to do):

  • increase value signal = demonstration of the skills * contextual relevance (solving for JP)
  • increase luck surface area = shareability * (resonance + value to user) (solving for Jacob)
  • grow Jacob’s experience & personal brand = continuous(creation, publishing) + feedback → iteration  (solving for Jacob)

High Value Signal Brand: Create Value First

Visual 4_ Internet Value System (2).png

All of this may just sound like a complex way to say: if you want to build a reputation for creating a lot of value → create value - that’s because it is, but I believe this is a simple truth hidden by layers of social norms and the reality that the model I am talking about was not possible 20 years ago as it is entirely independent on the leverage created by digitization (effectively you sell a digital product an infinite number of times for $0 additional marginal cost) and the leverage of the internet to distribute to interested people (social network niches).

What would the exact solution look like and what tools would we use to build it

Product Design Requirements:

Vision Statement:

A product that effectively and clearly communicates my product skills, is easily shareable, and I can use to grow my experience & body of work.

Use Cases:

Product Features:

website(portfolio[case studies, projects], resume, resources)

twitter(case studies, resources)

linkedin(resume)

ok we have the thing in place, how do we ensure Jacob keeps publishing and actively engaged in the system (behavior)

Design & Implementation:

Product Design:

My Portfolio Design Language (1)

Implementation & Tools:

Possible Tools:

how can we most effectively build this solution and what are benefits and tradeoffs we have to consider when selecting what tool to use

Tool Tradeoffs & Benefits:

Tool Selection:

Website: webflow vs notion

business requirements

Portfolio Design: goal, biz/tech reqs, feature design

Case Study Design: goal, biz/tech reqs, feature design

Integrating with Digital Presence Stack

resume site, twitter, linkedin

core components and purpose for each one

user flow

Notion CMS → Make Integration → Webflow Web Page

why and how

Production Delivery:

Solution Behavioral System:

Permissionless Lifestyle Career Stack:

Personal Virtuous Cycle: External Feedback Spins Flywheel

Visual 4_ Permissionless Career Stack_ Personal Virtious Cycle.png

Network Value Add Stack:

Selfless Self Promo & Permissionless Projects:

  • Public @ based Product Case Study
  • 1:1 Relationship based Product Feedback

Curated Free Resources & Content

Personal Side Project:

  • build for fun, develop skills and/or income (best case all of them)

Career/Consulting:

  • Niched consulting agency (ecommerce web design, early product development and branding)

Career or Major Client work:

  • early product development, product management and user feedback & practical psychology

Habitual Implementation:

Measuring Success: End Goal & KPIs

how are we going to measure the success of the product and the system, what do we want to happen

Summary:

Meta Statement Hi there ——

the purpose of this exercise, tie in with overall actual goal and show a willingness to learn be open to new experiences address the reader directly and ask for their participation, be human first

“The real takeaway should be: get so good that they can’t ignore you. Because once you are, they won’t.”@Haseeb Qureshi + “Deconstruction creates knowledge. Recombination creates value.” @James Clear

Be Human First.