How to make your job application to Glo stand out

In the past seven days, Glo received just over 300 applications to our open positions. We’re really lucky to be receiving so much interest, and we want to give every candidate a fair shake. But the sheer quantity means that on average, we’re spending a few minutes on each application when making a first cut about moving folks on to the next round. 

We have a few suggestions for making your application stand out. The one-sentence version: help us understand the connection between your work (and your values) and Glo’s work (and our values).

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We’re still a young company. Show us why you connect to Glo’s mission.

We get a lot of applications from folks who, apparently, send dozens of resumes out at a time without doing a lot of research or customization. That might work for some people at some places, but at Glo, as our CTO put it at a company retreat, we hire based on “mission fit.” We’re looking for people who are excited about providing basic income to people in extreme poverty. 

If your previous work experience was at a basic income NGO, great! We can probably infer mission fit. If your experience is totally different, perhaps let us know why you’re looking to make a shift to a mission-centric organization? This isn’t strictly necessary, but we appreciate when people help us connect the dots. A brief cover letter, or a post in our Discord (we have a #jobs-at-glo channel!), or really anything that makes the alignment clear can really help.

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Cover letters are optional, and they don’t need to be formal.

A lot of advice on the internet about cover letters is about the details—how to format it, whom to address it to, etc. To be candid, we don’t care about that. (Most startups don’t.) Your cover letter, should you choose to write one, can be brief, to the point, and informally styled. 

This is the cover letter, verbatim, that got me (Seth Green, Researcher-Writer) an interview at Glo:

(By “few minor suggestions” to the white paper I actually meant like 200 proposed changes 😉)

Please don’t copy this cover letter! The point is that you can write something that’s authentic to you, and you can write it like you’re communicating one human being to another. 

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Show us that you understand the role you’re applying to.

We get a lot of applications from folks whose previous job experience is not obviously connected to the role they’re applying to. That’s totally cool, I myself have never had a job title more than once. But we’re not going to make that leap of understanding on your behalf. If you’re applying to be Lead Writer and you’ve never been employed as a writer before, show us your portfolio! This is not a position for someone who just likes to write; it’s for someone who will lead the entire company on language matters. A track record of doing that kind of work is ideal. Otherwise, show us something you’ve written that reveals that kind of potential.

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Questions, comments, concerns?

Happy to hear from you via email, Discord, Twitter, etc. – and we look forward to reading your application 😃

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