"I have never read a cover letter. Not once."
Mike Materasso has spent more than 15 years deciding who gets hired at Amazon, Slack, Brex, and Alpine Investors. He is not being dismissive. He is describing arithmetic: 8,000 applicants filter down to about 700, and he has roughly 20 seconds per resume to decide whether to read further.
Which is the thing worth sitting with. It is not whether you are good. It is whether what you are can be read quickly, by someone who is not going to work hard to understand you.
In this conversation, Mike explains why most senior roles are never posted at all, what he is actually listening for in the first ten minutes of a call, why a short stint on your resume gets read the way it does, and what he tells candidates to do instead of applying.
He also tells the story of an account executive hitting between 200 and 400 percent of quota, every quarter, for three years, who could not explain what he was doing differently. His method was real, repeatable, and had never once been put into words. Which is fine for the company and a problem for him.
Mike's own line for what to do about it: don't find your next role, make yourself findable for that next role.
I open the episode with my own version of this. Four months of interviews at Slack in 2018 with no read at all, calling my husband after every one certain I had not got it, and a reason for the delay I could not see from the outside.
Mike runs AQ Recruiting. His LinkedIn and the firm are linked below.
Website
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