Using X To Land Your Next Job

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In today’s issue:

• Introducing X Job Search, a feature you may not be familiar with yet

• Why using X is the best platform to engage and network meaningfully

• A long term strategy to build your network via X

• How to use that network to break into your dream company

In this newsletter, I’ll break down the best strategy into breaking into your dream company, and how X is arguably the best tool to do it.

I bet you didn’t know that you can use X to apply for jobs?

Yup, X Job Search allows you to search directly for positions online just like any other job board.

On top of that, they released a feature earlier this year that lets you companies post jobs directly on their X profiles so X accounts can apply to them directly.

In my opinion, this is an absolute game changer.

X Jobs - just like any job board - is a great resource for active candidates, I think it presents an amazing opportunity for passive candidates who have ambitions to break into their dream job/company.

Here’s why:

Unlike LinkedIn (which would also be used, but that’s for another time), X truly allows for engagement from “top to bottom”. Meaning you can gain the attention from high level executives, to senior individual contributors, down to the interns.

There’s literally no other platform in a world where you have people like Elon Musk, Brian Armstrong, Brian Chesky, Bill Ackman, and other accounts with massive followings responding to accounts with just a few followers.

Those may be extreme examples, but talented individual contributors, thought leaders, and decision makers engage on the platform all the time. At least in my experience, the difference between X and LinkedIn is that X doesn’t have all the cringy full.

LinkedIn = Talking in the office

X = Talking at the happy hour

Not sure about you, I’d rather network with people at the happy hour.

Especially in a job market today - we need to use every tool in our arsenal to give ourselves the best possible chance to land our next position - and X is just that.

The long term strategy to break into your dream company

In this example, I’ll be a software engineer who wants to break into X as an employee.

While I’m using X as the example, you can apply this strategy to any other company that has a strong online presence on X (i.e. Tesla, Coinbase, Morning Brew, Beehiiv, AirBnB, etc).

This strategy focuses on a long term approach to build relationships from scratch, nurture them overtime, turn them into a network, to eventually tap into them to refer you into a job application.

While you may be just thinking to yourself “why don’t I just apply right now”, getting referred into a company gives you the absolute best chance to land a job offer.

Now a referral certainly doesn’t guarantee an offer, but it gives you a much higher chance your resume is seen. On top of that, depending on the political equity of the referrer, you come with that much more credibility attached to your resume.

First, we’re going to build our foundation.

1: Resume

We’re going to want to update and tighten up our resume. Linkedin and X profiles are great but at the end of the day we need your resume because that’s the source of truth regarding your experience.

Some tips:

• Every bullet point should answer either:

  • What you did, how you did it, what you achieved

  • What you did & why it mattered

• Tailor your resume with relevant technical skills and quantifiable achievements - specify programming languages, frameworks, and metrics (e.g., "Reduced API response time by 40% through MongoDB optimization")

  • Quantifiable achievements aren’t always possible and that’s fine. But even if you take out the 40% in this example it’s a great bullet point.

• Lead with a strong technical summary highlighting your most impressive skills and career accomplishments in 2-3 lines - this serves as your elevator pitch to hiring managers

• Structure your experience section to showcase project impact, using action verbs and focusing on outcomes rather than duties - describe systems built, problems solved, and improvements implemented

• Include a dedicated technical skills section organized by category (languages, frameworks, tools) and list only technologies you're comfortable discussing in interviews

• Keep formatting clean and ATS-friendly with standard sections, consistent spacing, and minimal design elements - use a single column layout and include keywords from the job description naturally throughout

Here’s a link to my free resume templates here, and here’s an example of a candidate I’ve placed in the past below.

2: LinkedIn & X Profiles

Next, although we are applying to X, we’ll still want to button up our LinkedIn profile because your dream company may be different and they’ll definitely check it out. Recruiters and Hiring Managers use it as an added verification of “you are who you say you are”. You’d be surprised at the amount of candidates I talk to that give me one resume, but the companies, titles, dates, skills etc are misaligned leading me to believe they are either lying, overselling, or just an overall red flag.

For a deep dive into how/why to optimize your LinkedIn, you can check out a previous article here.

For your X profile, you can follow similar steps.

Building Your Online Presence

Next, we’ll want to start engaging with the people who directly work at X.

There’s a reason to this - the goal is to build awareness that we actually exist and to build meaningful relationships.

Engage with their posts with intellectual insights - consistently. This makes us stand out against everyone else who’s just replying “agree” and will develop a meaningful “back and forth” conversation overtime as you keep replying to them.

Especially considering the company we are using in this example - their entire platform is made to engage with each other.

Create A “List”

First, I want you to create a list. You can make it private so only you can see it and no one gets notified when you add them to it.

This creates a specific type of “feed” for you outside of “for you” and “following”. This feed specifically shows only the posts of the people you add to it.

Adding To The Target List

From here, we’ll want to add in people we want to prioritize engaging with from the company.

Again since we are using X for this example, I’ll head to their company profile. You’ll see a tab called “affiliates”.

These are all the accounts that will be mostly employees that are officially affiliated with the company, meaning they’ll be employees.

Now the key here is NOT to add in literally everyone to your list. We want to focus on quality engagements, meaning the people that will have the most impact to helping you eventually land into the company later on.

Focus on adding 2-4 folks at a time and make sure they’re in your niche. Check out their bios and the content they post to do some research on this.

Engage

Next, we’re going to use the “reply guy” strategy. This essentially means we’re going to prioritize replying to the posts of the people in our target list from above.

This is arguably the most important step out of this entire roadmap.

You might be wondering why/how:

• You essentially are aiming to build authentic relationships by consistently engaging with their content - don't just drop generic "Great post!" comments, but add genuine insights that showcase your expertise in that specific area/niche.

• Focus on value-driven engagement with larger accounts that align with your niche - thoughtful replies to their posts put you in front of their engaged audience and create natural discovery opportunities.

  • Chances are, other accounts/employees from that company are also following and engaging. So the better your reply to the original post, the more likely you hook in other employees of that company to engage with you.

• Use the "digital breadcrumb" approach - each reply should contain a subtle hook back to your core message or expertise, making curious readers want to check out your profile and content

• Stay top-of-mind through strategic timing - engage early on viral tweets from key players in your space, positioning your reply where it's most likely to gain traction and visibility

• Transform casual observers into followers by maintaining a consistent voice and point of view in your replies - treat each response as a micro-piece of content that reinforces your personal brand.

Some more notes:

• This is all about the long game. We are staying consistent with this for at least 90+ days just purely focusing on engaging

• We are not asking them for anything. Our sole purpose here is to make it about them and providing value/insights.

• While it’s important to stay consistent in engagement, you don’t want to be annoying.

Your Own Posts

If your goal is to be a content creator and a respected authority in your niche, then you should spend more time here. That being said, growing a following is harder than you’d expect. You’ll still have to double down on the reply guy strategy until you hit a few thousand followers. For more info on how to do this, follow Alex Finn.

The goal of this isn’t to be a content creator, so you don’t need to spend too much time on this. It’s so when people check out your profile, they can figure out if:

• Who you are

• What your niche is

• You actually know what you’re talking about

• If you’re someone they’d want to “grab a beer with” (aka they vibe with you)

Unless you’re a content creator, no need to go crazy. A couple posts per week is fine. You can either create content based off what you’re doing day to day, lessons learned in your career, industry news, etc.

Again the point of this isn’t necessarily to create a following (unless that’s what you’re going for) but more to create added credibility once they do eventually click on your profile.

Hitting Their DMs

The reason we spend time replying to our target lists’ posts is so by the time we do DM them, the outreach becomes “warmer”.

Hopefully by then, they’ve appreciated our replies and thought of them as valuable, so they then recognize us when our DM hits their inbox.

After commenting and replying for some time, it’ll likely end up in one of two ways.

1. If they’re starting to reply to you, then you’ve won. You can confidently start to slide into their Dms and take the conversation there. Don’t stop commenting their posts though, you still want to help push their engagement levels online.

2. If they haven’t replied to you, you can try to hit their DMs this way. Instead of commenting with something insightful, you can hit their DMs with your reply. Ideally you also supplement that reply with an interesting article, or another piece of content that relates to the topic at hand.

When you’re DMing them, some suggestions that has worked for me:

• Provide more personal stories to a piece they posted or replied on

• Send them a piece of content from someone else or an article that’s extremely relevant to their niche

This will look much better than sliding into their DMs asking to “pick their brain” or for a “coffee chat” cold turkey looking like a bozo.

Remember: We are still playing the long game here.

We are not asking them for referrals or a way into X (or company of your choice yet). We are still prioritizing engagement and relationships first and foremost.

Preparing For Interviews

As your “target list” is growing and your relationships are getting warmer, you’ll want to start preparing for interviews.

Yes, I am suggesting you prepare for interviews before you’re even applying to any jobs here.

1. We are still in an employer’s market. While the market is expected to make a slight uptick in favor of job seeker’s next year, it’s not guaranteed. Plus, at prestigious orgs like X, they have rigorous interview processes so the more time you put in to prep - and the earlier - the better.

2. You never know where any of these conversations land. Maybe you really hit it off and they have an immediate opening they you have to apply to now. You want to be able to seize the moment instead of doing a complete belly flop.

Some steps to prepare:

• Research the company. X makes this extremely easy given how online they are. But for your other target companies, you can use tools such as Perplexity to scrape 10ks, earnings reports, recent news/events, and socials and then summarize it to you in an outline format.

• For SWEs you’re definitely going to have to grind on leetcode hard. Virtually every technical position requires a coding interview these days.

• Upload the job description to your favorite AI tool and ask it to give you questions (and answers) that a hiring manager would ask. This should point you on the right direction on what to expect.

• Practice and record yourself answering these questions because you’ll get a good sense on your tone, timing, and body language when preparing.

Fast Forward —> Minimum 90 Days

By now we should have solid relationships built out with either individual contributors and/or decision makers within the organization.

Of course if you feel your relationships aren’t warm within these 90 days, then push out this timeline.

Now, we’ll head to X Careers Page Account to check out their openings. (X has a separate account for their careers, your target company likely has it on their main profile).

Their open positions will be listed right at the top of their profile.

Based off the resume I have from earlier let’s check this role out.

This role looks like it’s a pretty good fit. Now I’m going to hit the apply button and it’ll take me here.

Before you actually apply to the real job posting, let’s take a pause.

Now is when we’re going to tap into the network we’ve built the last 90 days.

We’ve engaged with them, built relationships, and established credibility. We’ve done this for months at the very minimum.

So now we re-engage the target list and see who can help us.

Start with the strongest relationships you’ve built. This shouldn’t be too hard if you did it the right way, at least 3 people should pop into your head the second we do this.

This is the sole reason why engaging and building relationships is so important. Because everything we have done up until this very day has been “what can I do for you”. Hopefully by now, we can tap into a favor.

Should we ask for a referral before or after we apply?

Definitely reach out to your contact before applying. This allows them to:

1. Prepare an internal recommendation in advance

2. Potentially flag your application to HR/hiring managers

3. Share helpful insider context about the role and hiring process

When they do say yes, make sure to provide them the specific job id/url that you’re applying to, so it makes it easier for them to track down the job (and more importantly the hiring manager) to refer you to.

These steps can significantly boost your chances compared to applying first and requesting a referral after the fact.

What if they say no?

Do NOT get offended.

Remember, by asking for a referral they are putting their entire reputation at risk. If for some reason you don’t work out, there is a chance they don’t take their future referrals seriously, so at the end of the day they have to be extremely selective.

This is exactly why it’s important to emphasize building as strong of a relationship as possible before asking for one.

This is also why we’re building relationships with more than 1 person at the company. If one person says no, we just go down the list.

Rounding It Up

If you're serious about landing your dream role at X or any other company with a strong online presence, now is the time to start building these relationships - and X is the best place to do it.

The job market may be challenging, but this approach gives you a significant advantage over candidates who simply submit applications through the standard channels.

Put in the work, stay consistent for at least 90 days using this exact strategy.

While it requires patience and consistent effort, the relationships you build will be valuable throughout your entire career – not just for this one job search.

Even if you aren’t able to land a job at your target company - you can keep this network for life. You never know where these people end up later in life, and maybe if they switch companies they bring you along for the ride.

Here's your action plan for this week:

1. Update your resume using the guidelines we covered

2. Create your private Twitter list with 2-3 target employees at a time from your dream company

3. Start engaging meaningfully with their content every day, even if it's just one thoughtful reply

….

If you’re looking for a strategy to land your next gig - or any other career advice - feel free to book a call with me here.

I also wrote an e-book that details all my job search advice outlined in one place called From Application to Offer: Mastering the Modern Job Search, which you can buy here for just $5.