This article originally appeared on Business Insider.
It’s notoriously difficult to get a job at Google.
The tech giant, once famous for its lavish perks, receives millions of applications a year, with some estimating that it’s nearly 10 times harder to land a job there than to get accepted to Harvard.
For Mariana Kobayashi, an account executive currently working at Google’s Dublin office, it was all about standing out from the crowd.
After being laid off from LinkedIn, Kobayashi said she set her sights on Google in June last year.
But she told Business Insider that she decided to take a different approach to applying: curating a video about why she should get the role.
The video ran through her work experience and had pre-recorded references from former colleagues and friends in the industry.
The whole process took about 10 hours, she said. After it was done, Kobayashi used ContactOut, an email lookup tool, to send it directly to the hiring manager.
She also posted the video online — and it quickly went viral.
“Lots of people reached out to me offering coffee chats and letting me know about positions,” she said. “Then the recruiter for the role reached out, and I had a call with her.”
A ‘purpose-driven’ application
Kobayashi said the Google recruiter told her she was overqualified for the grad scheme she’d applied for.
However, she said she was impressed with the video and Kobayashi’s LinkedIn content and promised to keep her in the pipeline for further roles.
“I followed up every two months, letting her know my progress and what I was up to. In September, I saw a position for an account executive,” Kobayashi said.
Kobayashi said she was able to get a referral from a friend and applied immediately despite being slightly underqualified for the role.
The recruiter also reached out about the role, offering to connect her with the hiring manager.
“It was a very purpose-driven application, so I think that made me stand out, and then because the recruiter was already kind of on my side, that helped,” she said.
Acknowledging her ‘red flags’
Kobayashi said she sent out two documents after the interviews. One highlighted why a company should hire her and another detailed what she perceived as her “red flags” or employment gaps.
“It was a document saying: ‘This is why you should not hire me,'” she said. “But I also included a page saying: ‘This is how I’m going to turn my red flags into green flags.'”
She said she lacked sales experience and wanted to acknowledge this while showing she had a plan to address it.
A three-step interview
She said the interview involved three stages of roughly 45-minute calls, including a case study and a leadership assessment.
“After an interview, I’d send them the documents, and they loved it,” she said.
After completing the interview process, she followed up with the recruiter weekly.
“I had to wait one month until I got a response telling me I was in the final pool of people,” she said. “A week later, I got a job offer.”
