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Accelerate your career growth 🚀
Stephen Moore
October 03, 2023
Welcome to EH Weekly, the newsletter from the team behind Medium’s biggest entrepreneur-focused publication.
You can look forward to insightful lessons, practical takeaways and the hottest news stories delivered to your inbox every week.
In this week’s edition, we discuss:
The secrets to accelerated career growth
Why experience doesn’t count for much when hiring
🚀 The secrets to career growth (from a Google exec)
“There is no easy path. The elevator is broken and you need to take the stairs and climb fast.”
For the past 10 years, Daniel Rizea has been on an accelerated career growth path — from Jr. Engineer to Engineering Director, navigating through 2 acquisitions, holding over 1000 interviews, and building teams and engineering organizations.
Here, he shares 5 lessons that have helped guide him and will help you in your own pursuits.
Choosing the right opportunities — Every time you are presented with an opportunity, look at the risk/reward ratio. If you stumble upon an asymmetric opportunity with unlimited upside and limited downside aligned with what you want, then take it.
Compete where there is low competition — In every company, there are usually a few projects everyone wants to do and projects that everybody tries to avoid. The big, hard projects or the mundane ones that have a lot of value are usually overlooked. That is where you could have a big impact and stand out.
Get and keep trust — In the age of AI, competence will be more and more accessible. It will become a commodity; ask X bot, and you will get an expert answer. Becoming somebody trustworthy will be a competitive advantage.
Reverse engineer everything— Audit what are the things missing between where you are and where you want to get. You will know where you stand and what is required to get to the next level, and you can start actively working from that point.
Coach yourself — You can try to coach yourself by having honest conversations, giving advice to a friend, or reaching out to a professional coach who will help you discover and surpass the things holding you back.
👉️ Ready to accelerate your career? Read here: 5 Lessons on Career Growth From a Google Exec
🤝 Hiring for your startup? Experience doesn’t matter
“People who were most successful, who made the biggest impact, and who most directly influenced our journey were people who had virtually no relevant experience working on things like what we were building.”
Nir Zicherman has a tried-and-tested philosophy on hiring: Great employees understand fundamentals. They can learn the rest on the job.
From his experience, hiring processes that allow former work experience to play a role result in some damaging consequences:
It reduces the candidate pool — Hiring is a numbers game. Why reduce the eligible candidates to those who have worked in particular industries or have specific buzzwords on their resumes? Most successful business leaders did not start their careers in the same places they ended up.
It assumes the past repeats itself — When it comes to startups, most problems are new. Most situations are unique. Yet the more applicable someone's past job is, the more likely they will fall back to what they know. There's comfort in familiarity. Employees who frame every challenge through experiences they've had before are unlikely to appreciate and navigate the nuances new challenges contain.
It masks other weaknesses — When a yellow or red flag is brought up, it's often explained away by focusing on an impressive resume. "Sure, they didn't get that question right. But look what they did at their last job!" The problem is that the question they got wrong in your interview is much more relevant to the open role than they've accomplished before.
👉️ Learn more about hiring for your startup: Experience Doesn’t Matter