Even the little hacks are fun, and they can teach you a lot.

My very first experience with programmatic automation was when I had the goal of generating myself new business for wordpress theme customization. I had been working a few odd jobs off craigslist, and then I thought, “What if I could see all the jobs posted to Craigslist each day, nationwide?”. It didn’t seem too difficult.

Luckily, I have an older brother that is a rubyist. He was particularly excited about data aggregation at the time, so within a day or two we had a crude script put together. It allowed me to copy and paste the urls of my target cities to a txt file, and it would aggregate the new posts to a CSV file each day.

At the time — mind blown.

I Became Enlightened

When we aggregated this data into the CSV file, I learned so much. I realized I had just put together a 30,000 ft view of the web development market nationwide, and I could see which skills were most desirable (around 15,000 job postings). Wordpress, Rails, PHP, and JS topped the list at the time, which was about 5 years ago. I have a feeling some variation of those job types are still highly sought after.

The other thing I realized was, most Craigslist jobs suck. Most of them aren’t even jobs that you can remotely approach. So that was enlightening too. I knew not to get my hopes up for a career here. Instead I could work smart by milking whatever value truly existed on Craigslist. I noticed there was a demand for remote contractors in specific skillsets (frontend/WP/Rails). So I was starting to see some tangible value from this data.

This data changed my confidence

Most importantly, my confidence grew when I saw this data. I felt like I had a special sauce in the job marketplace that no one else had. I didn’t just think I knew what employers wanted, I knew for sure what the employers were looking for and had data to prove it.

What did I do

I developed my web design portfolio around the skills that were in highest demand and then began approaching those jobs systematically (there’s another growth hack hidden in here). I now had much more confidence that the places I was applying, they would actually like my portfolio.

Baby Growth Hack

Now, I don’t advocate data scraping and automating engagements with real people. By automating you lose value and authenticity in your engagement. But sometimes, you can use programming to automate an interpersonal task that requires no creativity. The first step in applying for jobs is one of those tasks you can automate.

So I wanted to know, how can I apply to more jobs faster than 99.9% of applicants in the country. The only answer — automating the submission of my application. I didn’t, however, want to be perceived as spam or automated. So I needed to do something to be perceived as an authentic applicant (which I really was).

In comes the hack :)

At the time everyone using an iPhone had the email signature “Sent from iPhone”. Apple included this because there was still a stigma alive in the corporate world that phone emails were slightly less professional. Do you remember that? When employers/professors actually harped on employees/students for sending emails with less formatting? Go home middle-management… you’re drunk.

Anyways — The default iPhone signature at the time allowed emails to be identified as such, so employees (and anyone else) were held less accountable for typos and minor errors, but could still communicate quickly.

I knew that most people applying for jobs replied with LONG, DRAWN OUT email responses to these jobs. I wanted mine to be simple, real and authentic.

So for all of the jobs I wanted to reply to (about 30-40 at a time, daily), I sent out a boilerplate response like this:

Hi,


I'm interested in this position. You can find my recent 
work and portfolio below.

Please feel free to call/text/email me at your convenience.

http://iangolden.com
123-123-1231


Regards,
Ian

Sent from iPhone

Breakdown

1. The Signature - The simple email signature at the bottom of this email helped to eliminate the idea of automation being associated with my job reply. For anyone that has hired off of CL (I have), you will receive a ton of spam everytime. I was able to stand out thank to the signature.

2. The CTA - In this particular call-to-action, I gave them the option of texting me. Again, this is a more personal form of communication, eliminating the idea that my reply to the job could be ‘Spam’.

3. The Brevity - Short emails work, it’s just that simple. I kept the email short because I was also sending these as an ‘iPhone User’. The longer your emails get, the more clear it is that they are boilerplate. Keeping it short seemed more authentic.

4. My One, Specific URL - Lastly, I only gave the receiver one link to click, and it was clearly associated with my name. That makes them trust the link as a real portfolio. It is my end goal to get them to my website - the area that I control. If I control the environment that the employer is in when evaluating me as a potential hire, I’m able to create an advantage for myself.

Even in a short email, every single thing is thought out.

The Response

The response was great. Even if I didn’t generate interest from the email, many replied back to me to at least tell me I didn’t fit the requirements or I couldn’t work remote. I think the reason they replied was due to the brevity of my email.

I had a job within 2 weeks for 30 hrs/wk paying $25/hr. I ended up working about 1500 hours there and it funded my first web development company.

Not bad for my first two weeks as a college dropout.

Once I had the job — and my immediate needs were fufilled— I stopped digging into this hack. For a freelancer, this could be a fun project/idea to grow your business income. The real power of this experience was understand the fact that because of programming, I was able to be more aggressive and effective in penetrating the job market. I realized that, regardless of whether or not I held a degree, I was going to be forever enabled due to this new skillset I found.

Can you say freedom?

More growth hacks like this will be coming, with statistics and case studies to be more engaging. At the time, I had no intention of documenting my progress with this, just creating income.