[Interview] Austin Belcak on how to skyrocket your chances of landing your dream job

career covid-19 performance

Despite our best hopes, COVID-19 is not going away anytime soon.

This will continue to impact how we think about and navigate education, skill development, job searching and our careers.

As far as job searching and your career goes, Austin Belcak has you covered.

Austin is the Founder of Cultivated Culture, which helps people use unconventional strategies to land jobs they love (without connections, without traditional "experience," and without applying online). He has also served Director of Partner Development at Microsoft in New York City since 2015.

Austin has helped thousands of job seekers land offers at Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Twitter, Uber, Spotify, Deloitte, Accenture, Sequoia Capital, Tesla, SpaceX, ESPN, The NFL, & more.

Cultivated Culture has continued to help people get great jobs through the pandemic, and his community has grown to over 350,000 people in just 4 years through his website, email newsletter, LinkedIn and Instagram.

Austin's unique strategies have also helped him become a regular contributor for Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., Fast Company, & The USA Today.

In this interview, we cover:

How Austin went from jobs he hated and 0% success applying online to job offers at Google, Twitter, Uber and Microsoft (5:34)
The problem with "hitchhiking" your internship or job search (12:25)
The only kind of advice you should ever seek (15:10)
The worst job searching advice out there and why your online applications aren't getting a response (20:40)
How to skyrocket your chances of getting hired, even during a pandemic (27:30)
How COVID-19 has affected job searching, skill-building and relationships (32:11)
The simple concept of creating value and the amazing opportunity a disrupted summer can be for students (39:00)
The most common failure committed by job seekers (44:27)
Projects that will make you irresistible to employers with a specific example that worked at Microsoft (46:52)
Specific advice on what to do if your internship got cancelled this summer (54:52)
The free tools Austin has developed to make a standout resume and find hard-to-get email addresses (1:01:35)
The "poster boy" strategy to connect with "impossible-to-reach" people (1:05:58)

Free Tools from Cultivated Culture

Interested in putting Austin's advice into action?

For Parents and Educators:

Check out 5 things students can be doing right now to impress schools and employers despite all the COVID uncertainty.

For Jobseekers:

Check out our Virtual Internship designed to give you an experience companies will love, from anywhere.

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