“Have You Heard of the Internet?” How to Get a Job that You’re Not Qualified For

Have you ever felt unqualified for a job you were interviewing for? Or better yet, have you always felt unqualified for every job you’ve interviewed for? No? That’s just me? Hmm, well maybe this article is just for me then…

The job interview can be one of the most daunting and nerve-racking aspects of getting a job. Especially if you feel like you check many of the qualification checkboxes, but maybe not all of them.

Here are some tips on how to get a job you’re not qualified for:

Find a company that is desperate. Look for phrases in the posting like “needed ASAP,” “can start immediately,” “experience not required,” or “willing to train.”
Apply for positions on or just above your level. A good rule of thumb is to not apply for positions more than one tier above your current expertise.
Research the company. Knowing more about the company will help you ask more informed questions in the interview and provide well-informed feedback.
Go the extra mile in the application process. Take the time to send a personalized email or cover letter along with your resume.
Don’t lie or stretch your resume. It may be tempting to make reality sound better than it is. Don’t do it. Honesty is always the best policy – especially in business. Many companies will appreciate the honesty.
Your goal with the initial application is to get an interview, Once you’ve done that you probably fit most of their requirements. At this point you don’t need to worry so much about the “not qualified” thing. Instead focus on good first impressions, answering questions, and presenting well.
Nail the interview. You don’t have to worry so much about the “not qualified” thing if you can get an interview. Now you need to focus on good first impressions, answering questions, and presenting well.

Having a better understanding of the psychology behind job postings and qualification “requirements” can be incredibly helpful in positioning yourself for the best success possible.

Specialist vs. Generalist

First, it’s helpful to understand the differences between specialists and generalists.

Specialists refer to those professions where specific qualifications are legally required. This includes professions like doctors, nurses, lawyers, teachers, accounts (CPAs), stock brokers, etc. In the case of specialists, there are certain minimum thresholds that are non-negotiable. You need to have them in order to get hired, and they typically take a large investment of money and time.

Generalists are basically everyone else. This includes professions like software developers, business managers, tech and customer support representatives, most construction workers, etc. It also includes most industries with what I’ll call “light certification.” Meaning that some specific certification may be required, but it’s easy to obtain. This would include things like food handler’s permits, cpr certifications, and other skill certifications. It would also include some slightly-lengthy certifications like a commercial driver’s license. The key here is that we’re talking in terms of days or weeks for certification, rather than years.

What are Qualifications, and What Does it Mean to be “Qualified”?

By definition, qualifications should mean the list of requirements that make you capable of doing a job. In reality, many companies use them as a wish list or a “we think you need these in order to do the job well” list. The list was probably put together as a list of qualifications that the last guy had, plus a few things the company wished they had.

Ultimately, a company needs a particular job done, and would like to hire whomever will do that job the best within the allocated budget while not messing up the established company culture. So the trick for us comes in determining what actually qualifies someone for a job, and what we can do to actually be “better qualified” than the other people applying.

Which Qualifications Matter, and Which are Guidelines? What’s a Company Really Searching for?

I’d like to attempt to separate qualifications that matter from qualifications that don’t. This will help us determine which positions you should apply for and which to steer clear of.

Qualifications that matter:

Required professional degrees and certifications (which require large time/money investment)
Experience (really only for management/team leadership positions, or slow learners – companies assume most people are slow learners, so you may need to prove them wrong)
Do the job, and preferably do it well
Required physical strength for manual labor jobs that require lifting/endurance
Communication: reading/writing/speaking the language (for most jobs)
Passing a background/drug test (for most jobs)
Reliable transportation to get to and from work (for most jobs)

Qualifications that are often listed, but don’t matter (or are relatively easy to obtain):

X+ Years of Experience – if it’s a generalist position, this is only necessary if you’ll be training/leading others right off the bat – so long as you can learn quickly. Typically executives or senior-level employees will be expected to train and lead others, even if it’s not explicitly stated.
[Insert specific technical skill] – typically can be developed relatively quickly – especially if you have some experience in a related skill.
[Insert Slang Adjective] [Insert Skill Here] – for example: “Knock-your-socks-off customer skills” (real example). This basically translates to, “We’re a cool company, believe us. Also, we hope you can do the job.”
Good Attitude – a neutral attitude is perfectly acceptable for almost all positions. Should have been rewritten as “Not a Bad Attitude,” though that’s covered in the first bullet of the list below.
Ability to multi-task – nope. The company is saying “we’re disorganized but expect you to deal with it.” Multi-tasking is not desirable, and leads to worse work output.
High School diploma or GED – this mostly is used to ascertain if you can “do the job” and “communicate.” However, I would say that many companies view this as non-negotiable, and I’d recommend getting your GED, as not having it will limit your opportunities greatly.
Bachelor’s Degree in ‘X’ – nope. While I think college education is important, a bachelor’s degree is too general to be a requirement for anything. Again, they’re trying to determine if you can do the job. College often helps with communication skills, though typically only 2-3 classes are the main contributors. College can also help with technical skills, but again, it’s usually fairly generalized.
Deep knowledge of ‘X’ – nope. Not since the Googles were invented. Should be written as “able to find needed answers and apply them.” See below.
[Insert personal trait here] – examples include hardworking, dependable, detail-oriented, organized, etc. These requirements usually reflect more on what type of manager is doing the hiring than on the potential employees. In other words, the reason a company is looking for these traits is because something in their environment is lacking. They are presenting a problem that needs to be solved.

Qualifications that are not explicitly listed, but are important and are actually what they’re asking for:

Be nice, or at least don’t make the company hate you
Be able to find and apply answers/solutions regularly, i.e. be good at Google
Follow the rules that the company sets so they don’t have to worry about you doing your job – show up on time, be available for chats/calls, etc.
Be able to navigate computers and web browsers
Be able to quickly learn and apply the requirements of the job

As a side note, I briefly looked through a wide variety of about 50 job postings to see what they listed as required qualifications. 15 of them (30%) didn’t list qualifications whatsoever. Of the remaining 35 (70%), the average number of “required” qualifications was 7.

In summary, the real qualifications for most office jobs should look like this:

Be nice. Don’t make us hate you.
Be good at googling and implementing solutions.
Be able to navigate computers and web browsers
Be able to communicate well.
Be able to quickly learn and implement.
Follow the company expectations for work hours and availability.
Pass a drug/background test.
Do the job.

And then on top of that you can write a separate wishlist of “nice-to-haves” if necessary.

If you feel like you’re lacking in any areas on this “real qualifications” list, focus on that. These are the things that colleges should teach. These are the things that actually make you employable (at least for office jobs).

Main Tips Reviewed

The rest of this article will be dedicated to providing deeper explanations for the tips that were listed at the top of the post.

To recap:

Find a company that is desperate.
Apply for positions on or just above your level.
Research the company.
Go the extra mile in the application process.
Don’t lie or stretch your resume.
Your goal with the initial application is to get an interview.
Nail the interview.

I’ll also include a few honorable mentions at the bottom.

Find a Desperate Company

I think my first office job was a perfect example of this. My work and education history up until this point in my life consisted of manual labor (landscaping, construction, etc.), a highschool degree, and a little college working toward a pre-med degree. I was getting ready to head back into another year of college but was broke, and I couldn’t find a job in manual labor – let alone one with any degree of flexibility.

I had sworn that I would never have a desk job, since those are for business people and business people are “evil” (my actual thoughts, don’t judge me… too much). But at this point, I was getting desperate – I needed money. A friend of mine told me about a company where he had just interviewed where they had made a big mistake, and were desperate. They had force-pushed all of their legacy clients from their old website-building platform to their new one, and it broke most of the client sites. Overnight, tech support calls went up from about 100 calls per day on average, to over 1,000. I applied for the position, got a same-day call, and had an interview scheduled for the next day.

Here is my best attempt at accurately representing the actual interview that took place:

Interviewer: “So, you’re applying for a technical support position in web design and coding. What past experience do you have in tech support?”

Me: “None. If you look at my resume, my background is all in manual labor.”

Interviewer: “… I see… So what made you interested in this job?”

Me: “I need money for college. I’m good with computers, but I’ve never had to use them for work.”

Interviewer: “OK. Do you have any experience in HTML and CSS?”

Me: “Nope.”

Interviewer: “Do you have any computer programming experience?”

Me: “Nope.”

Interviewer: “Do you play video games? Have you ever implemented any custom mods in a video game?”

Me: “I have played some video games. I’ve never done any custom mods.”

Interviewer: “Have you heard of the internet?” (Yes, actual quote. I remember this one vividly).

Me: “Haha yes, I have heard of the internet.”

Interviewer: “Take this homework assignment. Build a website using our platform, and send it to me by noon tomorrow.”

The interview ended at about 2:00 on Wednesday. I spent the next 22 hours learning as much as I could about websites and web design and got to work building the site. I sent him a link at 12:00 the next day. I got a call from him about an hour later.

“Can you start on Monday?”

I was clearly not “qualified,” at least from the traditional sense. But it didn’t really matter. They needed human voices on phones. The website I built was probably garbage, I don’t really remember. But I was given a chance and I gave it everything I got. I’m grateful that they were willing to take a chance on me. Ultimately, it likely didn’t matter exactly what my website looked like or my “qualifications.” They were desperate.

Apply for Positions on or Just Above Your Level

To have the best chance of success, especially if you’re underqualified, make sure that you’re applying mainly for positions with seniority levels that more closely match your experience level.

Here are the job seniority levels:

No Experience
Entry-Level or Junior-Level
Mid-Level
Senior + Executive

So for example if you’re a 1 right now, “No Experience,” you should aim to apply for jobs that either explicitly require no experience or are entry-/junior-level. If you’ve been working for awhile at the junior level, you’re probably safe to apply for up to mid-level positions.

Another important principle to note here: have low expectations for compensation at the “no experience” and “entry-level” positions. Your goal here is to get a job (preferably in a field that will help build your career) and to get experience. You can then leverage that experience in a year or two (or even a few months) to get a better position.

Research the Company

Take a little bit of time to research the companies you’re applying for, especially if you’re offered an interview. When interviewing potential employees, I would often get extremely generic questions about the company (see below section on the interview for examples). This would show me that the candidate did no research into the company, and don’t really care what kind of job they get. This wasn’t the type of person I wanted on my team. I wanted the type of person who was excited at the opportunity, and learned everything they possibly could because they were interested.

Check out the company’s website and learn what you can about what they do, why they do it, and their target customer base. Learn about the members of the team and what drove them to create this company/product. Watch some promotional videos or tutorial walkthroughs to learn more about the company or its product.

If standard Google searches aren’t revealing much information about the company, you can check out social media to see if the company has a Facebook or Twitter account. Look for posts about recent company announcements, promotions, product launches, etc. If you’re still in the dark, consider checking out Crunchbase to see if the company has raised money recently, or has posted any note-worthy news.

So be interested. You can earn a lot of social credit by showing that you care about what they and the company are doing.

Go the Extra Mile in Your Application

“If your resume doesn’t stand out, make sure you do.” – Jason Stapleton (does quoting yourself work like this? Is this a thing?)

What are the things that stood out to me as a hiring manager when reviewing resumes? At the start of my career, I would look through resumes to try to determine who had the skills or experience that best matched the position. I would discard any resumes that didn’t quite match the job description, which inevitably left me with only a handful of resumes that I deemed “most qualified.” After several hundred interviews and a bunch of “back to the drawing board” experiences caused by lackluster interviews, I started to realize that a better approach is to remove “absolutely not” resumes instead. This would leave me with a broader range of candidates that were most likely to be “actually qualified” rather than “qualified on paper.”

Over time I became an expert at identifying things on the resume that disqualified an individual for employment consideration. Here are the things that are automatic turn offs in your resume:

Poor spelling or grammar
Multiple pages: In very rare cases I would receive a 2 page resume that was really well done. However in the majority of cases where I saw multi-page resumes, it was fluff and garbage. If you have a lot of experience, that’s great, but you can trim down what you put on a resume to suit the position. If you’re applying for several different types of positions at once, consider putting together multiple resumes that are tailored to the categories of positions.
Bad formatting or weird colors: I’ve seen many resumes that are just hard to look at. If at first glance, I have to ask the question, “what am I looking at?” then I’ll probably throw that resume out and keep moving. Colors shouldn’t make the text hard to read. You shouldn’t need more than one (black) or two colors at most. If you do find yourself wanting to use more color, make sure it’s tasteful, and matches your industry. A graphic designer would be a much better candidate for using a lot of colors than a software developer.
Truth-stretching: Don’t say “I routinely managed the health profiles and overall wellness of canines across a wide special-spectrum cohort” when what you mean is “I walk dogs sometimes on the weekends.” And yes, I did have to look up the adjective form of “species.”

After you’ve made sure to avoid those mistakes (and have a really well-formatted resume free of errors and lies), what are some of the things you can do to stand out, even if your resume isn’t particularly impressive?

Here are some ideas of things you can do to stand out over the crowd of job applicants:

Send a personalized email or cover letter along with your resume.
Thank the resume-reviewer for their time and the opportunity to apply for the position.
Sincerely congratulate the company on a recent noteworthy accomplishment. This is relatively easy to do if you’ve done your research (see above).
Send a food gift to the company depending on the industry and local culture/customs (as well as your budget), you could send the company some doughnuts, muffins, pizza, etc. $20-$50 could earn you a lot of favor with the team right off the bat.

There’s a fine line here, though. I often had applicants who would go the extra mile by sending me a thank you email, card, or personalized cover letter, and then they’d call me later to “check in” on the interview process or make sure that I received and appreciated their thoughtful note/gift. Ugh. The quickest way to drop from the near top of the pile to the absolute bottom was this sort of behavior.

Nail the Interview

If you can manage to get an interview, you’ve already beat most of the competition and are well on your way to getting the job. At this point, your on-paper qualifications don’t really matter that much anymore. You at least met the bare-minimum requirement for the position.

I’ll write a future article that discusses the topic of “nailing the interview” in-depth, but for now, here are a few quick pointers in how to ace the interview:

Dress well and use good hygiene. Dressing well doesn’t mean a tuxedo (looking at you Jim Halpert). Do your research. In some companies a suit and tie or business skirt is an absolute requirement for an interview, while other companies would view you as too stuffy.
Be a pleasant/friendly/happy version of yourself. Don’t try to be something you’re not. I’ve had clearly introverted people come in for interviews and try to impress me with their friendliness, exuberance, positivity, etc. And it feels really fake. You want the company to hire you, not a difficult-to-maintain figment of your imagination.
Mirror the interviewer’s body language. People tend to feel the most comfortable around people that behave similarly to themselves. However, don’t overdo it so much that you become a different person (see above).
Ask good questions and show that you’ve done your research. I’ve conducted so many interviews where a candidate would ask questions like, “so what does this company do?” It says what we do on our website. A much better question would be, “on your website it says you do ‘x’. Do you find that you have more of this kind of customer, or more of that.”
For problem-solving questions, think out loud. Many companies will ask questions ranging from the overgeneralized “how many golf balls fit into a 747 jet” to the specific “explain cases where SQL queries may be preferable over active record queries.” The company is often looking to know your thought process, more than your specific answer. Think/reason/evaluate/problem-solve out loud. You may not be used to doing this normally, and if necessary, practice. But this helps the company better evaluate you.

Prove Your Value/Abilities Before They Decide

Ask for a homework assignment at the end of the interview. I often recommend homework assignments as part of the interview process, as this helps to separate serious/organized candidates from the more casual job-searchers. This also helps give insight into the quality of work and attention to detail that a company can expect from an applicant.

As the potential employee, you can request an assignment, and then do everything you can to knock it out of the park. Check out my earlier story on desperate companies. I believe that my efforts in completing the homework assignment had a positive impact on the company’s decision to hire me. In my hiring process, the homework assignment was the single biggest indicator of whether someone would be a good employee. If the person took the time to do the assignment, and actually followed the instructions and did it well, they would get the job. Those who did the assignment the best always made the best employees.

Recommend a Trial Period

If the company likes you, but needs some convincing even after the successful completion of a homework assignment, you could recommend a trial period. If you’re able to commit to an unpaid or low-paid internship for a month or two, that may help the company get on board to give you a chance. If you go this route, make sure that you work hard and perform really well to get the best chance at full-time employment.

However, if the job doesn’t work out, you have another line item to add to the work history section of your resume to help with getting the next job. Also, you’ll have a better idea of the type of company or manager you don’t want to work for in the future.

You’re Probably More Qualified Than You Think

Some of the best employees I’ve ever had did not look great on paper. Being able to work hard, solve problems, think for themselves, and learn quickly allowed them to far outshine many of their colleagues who have degrees from a college that says that they should know how to do this or that skill, assuming they didn’t cheat or sleep, and assuming that they’re given equations, teacher’s assistants, and textbooks to do the work. Most workplaces don’t have textbooks or tutorials.

You can be the employee who goes the extra mile, and proves that you can be better than the people that are “qualified.” You can prove that your drive to succeed is better than any “qualification.”

You’ve got this. And if you don’t think you do, remember that the internet exists. If websites dedicated to societal decline like Facebook can become a success, you can get a job you’re not qualified for and knock it out of the park.