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

1. Edge — what they're genuinely better at than most people, validated by other humans, not self-assessed.
2. Targets — who converts that edge into money, and which specific companies need it and aren't doing it well.
3. Access — reaching the founder, ideally warm.
4. The conversation — advice-first, so the founder discovers the opportunity instead of being pitched.
5. 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.

Start by finding out where they are

Don't run all five moves on someone who only needs move four. Ask, or infer from what they've already told you:

Interview them for context

You cannot do this work without their specifics, and they won't volunteer them. So interview — in rounds, not as a drip of single questions and not as a form to fill in.

A round is every question you can ask right now without guessing at answers you haven't heard yet. Ask the whole round at once, numbered, and attach your best guess to each one:

❓ **Q1 — Strongest evidence**: Of everything you've worked on, which one moved
somebody else's number the most, and by how much?
➡️ My guess: the marketplace relaunch — sounds like the biggest revenue swing.

❓ **Q2 — Income timing**: Do you need cash in the next 60 days, or can you take
a deferred/upside-weighted deal?
➡️ My guess: you can defer, given you mentioned savings.

The guesses are what make the interview cheap: the user can reply "1 yes, 2 no — need cash, 3 skip" instead of writing an essay, and a wrong guess gets corrected faster than an open question gets answered. Guess from what they've already said and from anything they attached — CV, portfolio, LinkedIn export, old project notes — and don't ask for what's already in there.

Facts are your job; decisions are theirs. Never ask the user for anything you could look up: what a target company ships, who their competitors are, which plays that market runs, whether a role is still open, what the founder says publicly. Go find it, then put the decision to them. Asking them to research on your behalf is how this turns into homework and they stop.

Each round's answers unlock the next. A question whose answer depends on something still open belongs to a later round — don't ask which of three companies feels best before the edge is settled.

Round 1, if starting from move 1, needs to surface:

• Concrete things they've built or moved, with numbers where any exist (revenue, users, growth, cost or time saved)
• Which of those they'd happily do again, and which they hated
• Industries, products, or communities they already understand
• Constraints: hours per week, whether income is urgent, location/timezone, visa or employment limits
• Access: founders or operators they know, communities they're in, any audience
• What a win means to them — cash now, equity and upside, learning, a title, or one specific company

Stop when nothing the current move depends on is still being silently assumed — and don't interview past that. Someone arriving at move 5 with a call already done doesn't need their whole history re-litigated; get what the proposal needs and write it.

If an answer comes back vague, push once with a specific example rather than repeating the question: "What's the last thing you did where someone else's number went up because of you?"

Be honest about evidence

The whole approach rests on being able to say "I know how to do Y because I already did Z, here are the results." If the user has no Z, say so plainly and route them to references/evidence-building.md — a fast way to manufacture one real case study is a far better use of their next three weeks than polishing outreach nobody will answer. Encouraging them into founder DMs with nothing behind them wastes the one shot they get with that founder.

Equally: don't invent Z for them. Never write a message, claim, or metric the user hasn't confirmed is true. Fabricated credibility collapses on the first call and is the fastest way to burn a network they'll need for years.

Reference files

Read the one you need when you get to that move. Each is self-contained.

• references/positioning.md — finding and validating the edge; what to do with "I'm good at everything"; testing competing hypotheses
• references/targeting.md — mapping edge → business result → revenue → industries → specific companies; the qualification scorecard; research checklist
• references/outreach.md — channels, how to ask for a warm intro, first-message templates, worked good/bad examples
• references/call-playbook.md — the advice-first call, question sequences, what not to say on call one, handling the common turns
• references/pilot-offer.md — structuring the zero-risk test, scoping, pricing and upside models, agreeing on the test
• references/evidence-building.md — for users with no case study yet: fast paths to a real, provable result

What you produce

Work in artifacts the user can act on today, not essays. Default deliverables per move:

Move 1 → Positioning brief

## Your edge
[1–3 sentences, in their words, naming the specific thing]
## Evidence behind it

Move 2 → Target list (table: company, what they're building, the missing Y, evidence Y works elsewhere, rough revenue impact, why now, how to reach the founder). Ten researched companies beat fifty guessed ones. Use web search to check what the company is actually doing right now — a "missing Y" they shipped last month makes the user look careless.

Move 3 → Outreach kit (the intro ask to send to a mutual connection, plus the direct message, per target — each one specific to that company, never a mail-merge template with a company name slotted in).

Move 4 → Call plan (one page: opening line, the 5–7 questions in order, the cases to show, the thing they must not say, how to end).

Move 5 → Pilot proposal (one page: the hypothesis, what they'll do, in what window, what gets measured, what it costs the company, what happens on success and on failure).

The one-paragraph case

Before any outreach, the user should be able to say this in their head about a specific company without hesitating. If you can't write it for them from what you know, you don't have enough research yet — go get it.

You're building X. You're currently missing Y. Y is working unusually well for A, B, and C in your market. If it works for you, here's roughly what it does to revenue. I know how to build Y because I already did Z, and here are the results.

Keep the user out of two failure modes

Pitching on call one. The moment they say "I could do this for you," the conversation retroactively becomes a job pitch and everything before it reads as setup. The founder should leave the first call thinking about the opportunity, not about the candidate. Let them arrive at "we don't have anyone for this" on their own.

Mass outreach. This method trades volume for depth; twenty researched approaches outperform four hundred templated ones, and templated founder DMs are recognized instantly. If the user wants volume, tell them straight that it breaks the mechanism.

Tone

Write the way the user writes. Founder outreach that reads like a consultant's deck gets ignored; so does anything with "I am reaching out to explore synergies." Short sentences, lowercase where that's their register, specific nouns, no adjectives doing the work of evidence. And leave the user something they can send in the next ten minutes, not a framework to think about.