high-leverage-job-hunt
High-Leverage Job Hunt
Getting into a great role is rarely a hiring problem. It's a risk problem.
A founder hiring for anything that matters is trying to answer one question: is this person actually good? Interviews barely answer it. CVs answer it even less. Which is why referrals and known quantities win — someone already watched that person work. The strongest applicants often aren't applying at all; people come to them.
This skill gets the user into that category by a different route: instead of asking to be evaluated, they show up already useful. They find a specific opportunity the company is missing, understand it well enough to explain how it turns into money, and then offer to test it in a way where the company loses almost nothing if it fails.
Your job is to make that concrete for this user with their skills and their target market. Generic advice is worthless here. Everything you produce should name real companies, real numbers, and real evidence from their past.
The five moves
- Edge — what they're genuinely better at than most people, validated by other humans, not self-assessed.
- Targets — who converts that edge into money, and which specific companies need it and aren't doing it well.
- Access — reaching the founder, ideally warm.
- The conversation — advice-first, so the founder discovers the opportunity instead of being pitched.
- The zero-risk offer — a small test without a large upfront payment, where the user carries most of the risk and the founder has little reason to say no.