EP 1821 I love listener questions. This is a good one and I offer my usual No BS advice.
Someone wrote a question to me, I'm going to paraphrase it here. "Should I apply for a senior position although I am only a junior?" Wooo! Terrible. Terrible. And I taking this from Quora, I'm just gonna make sure I have the full question correctly . . . "Apply for a senior position, even though I'm only qualified to apply for a junior position?" Now I understand the logic behind the question. Normally, people will answer something along the lines of, "well, maybe they have a junior job there, too." Sometimes people will suggest that, maybe, just maybe, this company, mislabels their jobs, and they just call everyone a senior and they could be really a junior. I'm going to tell you something. This person is looking at a job ad. When they're looking at a job ad, it's got a number of years of experience specified. So most seniors are going to have more experience than this person has. It's not the title that's involved. It's the job description that's offered up. They may described a senior as having eight to 10 years of experience; this person has two months, two years. What do you think the likelihood is that you match up with this job? Seriously, you know the answer. And if you send your resume, all you are is a spammer. You don't like spamming in your life, right? Why would you duplicate that behavior for employers who are busy and will stare at your resume for six seconds tops, see that you have two years and delete it? Seriously? Why would you put yourself in that position and have people mutter about your background and how you're a thief stealing their time. And that is what you're doing is stealing your time. So, should you apply for this senior position? No. If you're interested in working at this firm and willing to put in some effort, then you try to network, not by applying for this job, but by networking through your LinkedIn network, through relationships, trying to meet people who work with the firm who will introduce you to hiring managers, who generally will hire a junior people. That's the way to do it. Not by applying here. So
Preparation.” If you are starting your search, order, “