So you’re trying to get your first job in America in the year of capitalism suffering — congrats. You have now unlocked one of the most disrespectful side quests of adulthood. This is the Hunger Games but with office chairs, LinkedIn cringe posts, and 98 versions of your resume saved on your desktop named.
FINAL, FINAL2, FINAL_omgTHISONE, FINAL_lastoneFR.
In a country where entry-level somehow means “5 years in the same role you’ve never had yet”… welcome.
Breathe. Cry if needed. Drink iced coffee that tastes like self-loathing and burnt espresso.
This is the official how-to manual
Getting hired with absolutely nothing but Google knowledge, mild trauma, and your ability to “adapt quickly,” which employers will absolutely abuse.
Let’s begin.
Step One — Learn The Ancient Ritual Of Pretending You Have Experience (The U.S. Workplace Way)
Look. Nobody has their first job experience.
You think Jeff Bezos was out here optimizing Excel pivot tables at age 17?
He probably was. Bad example. Anyway…
The system is a joke. So you have to hack the joke.
Rule #1: Everything you’ve ever done counts as experience now.
- School project? EXPERIENCE.
- Group assignment where you did all the work while your teammates watched TikTok? EXPERIENCE.
- You ran a Discord server like a mafia? LEADERSHIP + COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT.
- You helped your cousin fix his basketball sneaker resale spreadsheet? DATA ANALYSIS.
We are lying but like professionally.
Corporate America loves professional lying.
Bold illusion to maintain at all times:
You were born with transferable skills.
Just never forget these 2 magic phrases to sprinkle everywhere:
- “results-driven”
- “cross-functional”
Do we even know what they mean? No.
Does corporate HR know? Also no. Perfect alignment.
And btw if you genuinely do have actual skills… congratulations?? why are you even here?
Step Two — Build A Resume That Looks Like You Are Tech Person Adjacent
A resume doesn’t need truth.
It needs aesthetic.
No one reads words.
They skim bullet points like they skim Netflix thumbnails.
Make it look expensive and competent:
- clean design
- margins not like extreme and tragic
- ONE PAGE (you are not Warren Buffett, pls relax)
- action words that sound like you could possibly maybe be useful
Resume verbs that employers worship (you will now memorize them)
executed, coordinated, implemented, optimized, developed, supported, ideated, scaled, analyzed, automated
Any time you doubt if you should add a verb — add the verb.
Employer will not cross-check. HR is tired and eating stale office almonds.
And yes… save it as a PDF. Always.
If you upload a .docx in 2025 this country should revoke your citizenship and send you straight back to Microsoft Word training camp.
Step Three — Network Like You’re Trying To Enter A Secret Society That Controls Reality
Networking in the U.S. is a cult.
A soft cult. An iced matcha drinking cult.
You just need ONE person to open a door and boom — suddenly your zero-experience job problem magically disappears because some guy named Tyler who works Product at a SaaS startup put “you should talk to this person” in a Slack channel.
Networking cheat codes:
- DM on LinkedIn like you’re a polite scammer
- Comment on posts like you care
- Slide into alumni DMs — they LOVE helping because it feeds their inner hero arc
- Go to meetup events — literally any meetup… even if it’s AI, Crypto, NFT, NoFap — there’s a recruiter in all of them somewhere
- Ask people for 10 minute coffee chats (10 minutes sounds non-threatening)
You are not begging.
You are strategically proximity leveraging socially leveraged humans.
Say this sentence exactly in emails:
Hi ___, I really admire your career path and would love to learn how you navigated your early roles. I’m currently entering the field and would appreciate any tiny piece of advice you’d be open to sharing.
They eat that up like gluten-free organic chia oat pudding.
People LOVE feeling superior and wise. THIS is networking.
Step Four — Apply Everywhere Like A Menace And Let The Universe Filter Out The Chaos
You’re not applying to 5 companies.
You’re applying to 200+ — and this is not an exaggeration.
This is just U.S. job hunting at scale.
This is the Marvel multiverse, except instead of superheroes… we have HR auto filters and resume parser AI that rejects you in 0.4 seconds because you didn’t include “proficiency with Excel pivot tables” once.
Job application strategy
| Platform | Strategy |
|---|---|
| Apply while you doom scroll | |
| Indeed | Quantity > quality |
| Company career pages | Where the weird good stuff lives |
| Hired / Wellfound | For startup chaos energy roles |
| TikTok resumes | Yes this is real. Yes Gen Z is unhinged. |
Referrals are 10x stronger than raw applying.
You don’t need experience to get a referral — you just need to not weird someone out.
Add “open to work” on LinkedIn only if you also mentally prepare for 47 spam DMs from fake Dubai CEO crypto men.
Step Five — Interview Like You Are The Main Protagonist Of An HBO Limited Series
Interview secret:
Employers do not want the “truth.”
They want the most confident version of you who disappointed nobody emotionally in the last 12 months.
They want you to perform like you have already done this job in 3 alternate timelines.
Use the STAR format:
- Situation
- Task
- Action
- Result
Pair it with a mild level of delusional confidence.
“I didn’t have experience but I figured the solution quickly because I love learning new systems every time.”
That sentence alone has gotten thousands hired.
If they ask what motivates you?
Say:
- impact
- helping others succeed
- building systems people actually enjoy using
If they ask what your weakness is?
Pick a fake weakness employers like hearing:
- I care too much about quality.
- I over-communicate.
- Sometimes I get too excited about solving a problem.
Do NOT say anything real. Do NOT accidentally trauma dump. Save that for your group chat.
If they ask about salary expectations — say this EXACTLY:
I’d love to understand the budget range you’ve set internally for this role before I share my number.
That’s how you avoid accidentally working for $17/hr during a recession while your landlord increases rent by 34% because he upgraded your apartment hallway light bulbs to LEDs.
Step Six — Manufacture Portfolio Proof (Just Enough To Look Employable)
You don’t need real clients.
You can create fake case studies.
You can do self-directed projects.
You can do mini builds.
You can do TikTok breakdowns with charts and fake analytics.
You can start a Substack analyzing niche industries like “the economics of Stanley cup girlies.”
The goal: create documented surface area.
Portfolio > experience.
Mini portfolio ideas:
- redesign an app screen
- analyze a trending company strategy
- build a landing page mockup
- make a pitch deck for a fake startup
- write a teardown thread on X about why Spotify Wrapped is the greatest marketing psyop of Gen Z history
These things count more than part-time Subway Sandwich Artist employment sometimes.
Every piece you add makes you more hireable than 60% of everyone applying.
Most people are lazy. Use that to your advantage.
The Brutal Reality No One Admits (But You Deserve To Hear It)
Getting your first job is 80% persistence and 20% delusion.
The U.S. labor economy genuinely rewards insane levels of stubbornness.
Some people literally get hired because they were the only ones still applying after month 4 while everyone else rage quit and became Etsy sellers instead.
If you can outlast the boredom, burnout, rejection notifications, polite rejection calls, ghosting from recruiters, interview panels that forgot you existed — you win.
Corporate America is basically an endurance match of who gives up last.
If you don’t quit — you eventually get hired.
That’s the secret.
That’s the whole spell.
Conclusion
Anyway. If you made it this far, congrats — you have at least enough patience to survive onboarding documentation at any future employer.
Getting your first job with zero experience is stupidly unfair, deeply comedic, and aggressively unnecessary — but it’s still doable.
Be unreasonably persistent, mildly delusional, aesthetically professional, and just confident enough to make HR believe you are at least 62% competent.
You will get in. Eventually.
Now go take a nap or scroll TikTok for 45 minutes pretending it’s “market research.”
Know “How to Write a Winning Resume – A Comprehensive Guide to Effective Resume Writing“