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Getting a job right now is hard. Businesses aren\u2019t hiring<\/a> amid economic uncertainty and AI advancements and for the few jobs available, employers are constantly adding more hoops for candidates<\/a> to jump through.\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s why 25-year-old psychology grad Ashleigh Spiliopoulou took matters into her own hands when she stumbled upon her dream employer, PR firm Emerge, on Instagram<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI fell in love with the whole ethos, the whole vibe,\u201d the Gen Zer explained in a viral TikTok video, before adding that she trawled their website only to find \u201cthey weren\u2019t hiring.\u201d<\/p>\n Instead of waiting for a job to come up, Spiliopoulou emailed Emerge\u2019s founder directly with her CV reimagined to look like the company\u2019s website and the subject line, \u201cproposal to hustle\u201d\u2014and it worked.\u00a0<\/p>\n Now, one year later and working as Emerge\u2019s senior account executive, she\u2019s describing cold emailing employers as the \u201clife hack to avoiding long interview processes.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cDon\u2019t wait for the opportunity to come because when you do that you\u2019re against so many people\u2014you get lost in the noise,\u201d she concluded in the TikTok video that\u2019s racked up over 1.3 million views.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you\u2019re looking for a job and there\u2019s a brand that you like reach out to them, put yourself out there and just be like \u2018I\u2019m going to shoot my shot, what the hell have I got to lose?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Many Gen Z graduates are currently finding themselves \u201cunemployable<\/a>\u201d\u2014but Spiliopoulou wasn\u2019t one of them.<\/p>\n The London-based TikToker was a semi-professional Heptathlon athlete before venturing into the world of PR. She had a full-time job when she emailed Emerge.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019d become quite disillusioned with PR as an industry. I felt like it was talking the talk and not really walking the walk,\u201d Spiliopoulou told Fortune<\/em>, adding that she wanted to be \u201cpart of an organization that was pushing itself to the limits and was really delivering.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI woke up on a Saturday morning, which is how a lot of my decisions get made and I was like, I just want to change my life,\u201d she said, adding that she didn\u2019t get out of bed for two hours until she had hit send on the email that would change her career.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a pretty on-the-moment decision. But I feel like when your gut tells you to make a decision, you should just do it.\u201d<\/p>\n In the worst-case scenario, Spiliopoulou\u2019s email would have fallen on deaf ears.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s nothing to lose\u2014yeah, your ego might get a little bit burned, but that\u2019s about it,\u201d she added. But by Monday, Emerge\u2019s founder and CEO Emily Austen had responded with the offer to meet for coffee.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are always looking for new talent, so despite not actively hiring for this role, we can create seats at the table,\u201d Austen wrote back, in an email viewed by Fortune<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Even once it came to meeting in person, Spiliopoulou kept the ball in her court and acted more like the employer than a hopeful candidate.<\/p>\n \u201cI asked them a lot of questions,\u201d she recalled, including what its hybrid work policy and work-life balance was like.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe world is big and there are loads of opportunities out there\u2014even though it can sometimes not feel that there are\u2014and I just didn\u2019t want to jump into something which wasn\u2019t going to be right, because there\u2019s so many things I could do.\u201d<\/p>\n In the end, she described the process as \u201cthe absolute easiest process and interview\u201d (after all, there were no other candidates she was up against). So she recommends unemployed Gen Zers to \u201cjust be a human\u201d and email their elevator pitch to dream companies.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not the first time Spiliopoulou has emailed an employer out of the blue asking for work\u2014it\u2019s how she landed one of her first gigs while at university.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was for a social media company called Vinco, which basically did the results for athletics competitions and as an athlete myself, I always felt like the results were very slow to come up on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram, they weren\u2019t very detailed and didn\u2019t have a lot of insight\u201d she explained.<\/p>\n \u201cSo I just messaged the founders like, \u2018I think I could do a better job, here\u2019s my background\u2019 and I got a job,\u201d the Gen Zer added. \u201cBeing exposed to elite athletes, the people who shoot their shot and just go for it are the ones who get what they want\u2014and now I just live that way.\u201d<\/p>\n Plus, she\u2019s not the only one who\u2019s successfully \u201cshot her shot\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is how I found my job,\u201d one user commented on her TikTok video. \u201cMy position didn\u2019t even exist in the company and I\u2019ve now started a whole department on my own.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAs a founder, I have hired every single person who sent me an email like this, and they are my best employees,\u201d an employer chimed.<\/p>\n However, even Spiliopoulou noted that creative industries and startups may be more receptive to random emails from aspirational workers than finance bosses, for example.<\/p>\n \u201cMy approach wouldn\u2019t work for every company,\u201d she told Fortune<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThose really big corporations are a little bit more structured, they are a little bit more red tapey\u2014they can\u2019t just do things like that, they\u2019re not as agile and nimble.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nBusinesses willing to \u201ccreate seats at the table\u201d<\/h2>\n
This isn\u2019t the first time she has cold-emailed an employer<\/h2>\n