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If you dont get the job, you have nothing to lose by asking for feedback.
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Back in 2023, social media management platform Buffer wrote a blog post about how it had received 1,518 applicants for a single role on its marketing team. While thats a jaw-dropping number, its a common occurrence for companies with well-paying jobs that boast a great company culture. In the present job market, many job seekers are discouraged knowing theyre competing against hundreds (if not thousands) of applicants. For some roles, a résumé will only get you so far. A personal brand helps you stand out before you ever apply for a job, making the application process tip in your favor. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/04\/workbetter-logo.png","headline":"Work Better","description":"Thoughts on the future of work, career pivots, and why work shouldn't suck, by Anna Burgess Yang. To learn more visit workbetter.media.","substackDomain":"https:\/\/www.workbetter.media","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}} You can break out of the résumé mold Résumés often have very prescriptive formats. Youve probably heard the common advice: Keep it to one page, highlight your accomplishments, make it easy to read. These days, résumés are often fed directly into an applicant tracking systemso any creativity is stripped, and a résumé reviewer only sees text. Yet many companies have a required field on their applications: the URL of your LinkedIn profile. This is where you can shine. Anyone can have a polished headshot, colorful banner, and interesting headline. But you can set yourself apart with a compelling About section, links to projects in the Featured section, and recommendations from former colleagues. Your LinkedIn profile is like your résumé with a microphone. Instead of passively waiting for someone to review your work, youre amplifying it. Of course, to do this, you need to create content. Start with a small, manageable posting schedule LinkedIn can be a very intimidating place, especially if youve never shared content there before. The feed is full of people who are Excited to announce a new job or want to tell you how to “10x your career.” One Gen Z user referred to LinkedIn as the overachievers Facebook in an article for the New York Post. Creating content is a way to showcase your personality in a way that your résumé and profile cant. You dont have to set out to be an influencer, but you can share relevant experiences from your careerand even a peek into your personal interests (if youre comfortable doing so). I started with one post per week, sharing anything work-related that popped into my head. I had no particular goal in mind, but recognized that LinkedIn was the platform where work and opportunities happen. Eventually, I started becoming more strategic and shared content that showcased my expertise and personality, but not until my weekly writing habit was well-established. You can bypass gatekeepers and make connections A personal brand will open doors in a way that a résumé wont. In an intense job market, you need anything and everything that distinguishes you from other job seekers. With a personal brand, you can make connections with potential hiring managers and rely on those connections when applying for a job. Do this before you apply. Start connecting with people in your industry or at companies youd like to work for. Engage with them and continue posting content. When a role opens up, you can apply and also send a DM saying: Hey! Just wanted to let you know that I applied for XYZ role. Really excited about the opportunity. It might move your résumé to the top of the pile. Significant attention A personal brand might also bring offers directly to youwithout needing to apply. You might catch the attention of hiring managers or recruiters who will reach out with potential opportunities. Im self-employed, so my experience isnt the same as a traditional job seeker. Still, I can attest that I get a significant amount of attention on LinkedIn after several years of building a personal brand. Connections have brought opportunities my way that I would not have had otherwise. Because of my content, people know who I am, understand what I do, and trust that my personal brand matches my work ethic. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/04\/workbetter-logo.png","headline":"Work Better","description":"Thoughts on the future of work, career pivots, and why work shouldn't suck, by Anna Burgess Yang. To learn more visit workbetter.media.","substackDomain":"https:\/\/www.workbetter.media","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}}
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E-Commerce
Adam Kucharski is a professor of epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and an award-winning science writer. His book, The Rules of Contagion, was a Book of the Year in The Times, Guardian, and Financial Times. A mathematician by training, his work on global outbreaks has included Ebola, Zika, and COVID. He has advised multiple governments and health agencies. His writing has appeared in Wired, Observer, and Financial Times, among other outlets, and he has contributed to several documentaries, including BBC’s Horizon. Whats the big idea? In all arenas of life, there is an endless hunt to find certainty and establish proof. We dont always have the luxury of being sure, and many situations demand decisions be made even when there is insufficient evidence to choose confidently. Every fieldfrom mathematics and tech to law and medicinehas its own methods for proving truth, and what to do when it is out of reach. Professionally and personally, it is important to understand what constitutes proof and how to proceed when facts falter. Below, Adam shares five key insights from his new book, Proof: The Art and Science of Certainty. Listen to the audio versionread by Adam himselfin the Next Big Idea App. 1. It is dangerous to assume something is self-evident. In the first draft of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, the Founding Fathers wrote that we hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable, that all men are created equal. But shortly before it was finalized, Benjamin Franklin crossed out the words sacred and undeniable, because they implied divine authority. Instead, he replaced them with the famous line, We hold these truths to be self-evident. The term self-evident was borrowed from mathematicsspecifically from Greek geometry. The idea was that there could be a universal truth about equality on which a society could be built. This idea of self-evident, universal truths had shaped mathematics for millennia. But the assumption ended up causing a lot of problems, both in politics and mathematics. In the 19th century, mathematicians started to notice that certain theorems that had been declared intuitively obvious didnt hold up when we considered things that were infinitely large or infinitely small. It seemed self-evident didnt always mean well-evidenced. Meanwhile, in the U.S., supporters of slavery were denying what Abraham Lincoln called the national axioms of equality. In the 1850s, Lincoln (himself a keen amateur mathematician) increasingly came to think of equality as a proposition rather than a self-evident truth. It was something that would need to be proven together as a country. Similarly, mathematicians during this period would move away from assumptions that things were obvious and instead work to find sturdier ground. 2. In practice, proof means balancing too much belief and too much skepticism. If we want to get closer to the truth, there are two errors we must avoid: we dont want to believe things that are false, and we dont want to discount things that are true. Its a challenge that comes up throughout life. But where should we set the bar for evidence? If were overly skeptical and set it too high, well ignore valid claims. But if we set the bar too low, well end up accepting many things that arent true. In the 1760s, the English legal scholar William Blackstone argued that we should work particularly hard to avoid wrongful convictions. As he put it: It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer. Benjamin Franklin would later be even more cautious. He suggested that it is better 100 guilty persons should escape than that one innocent person should suffer. We dont want to believe things that are false, and we dont want to discount things that are true. But not all societies have agreed with this balance. Some communist regimes in the 20th century declared it better to kill a hundred innocent people than let one truly guilty person walk free. Science and medicine have also developed their own traditions around setting the bar for evidence. Clinical trials are typically designed in a way that penalizes a false positive four times more than a false negative. In other words, we dont want to say a treatment doesnt work when it does, but we really dont want to conclude it works when it doesnt. This ability to converge on a shared reality, even if occasionally flawed, is fundamental for science and medicine. Its also an essential component of democracy and justice. Rather than embracing or shunning everything we see, we must find ways to balance the risk that comes with trusting something to be true. 3. Life is full of weak evidence problems. Science is dedicated to generating results that we can have high confidence in. But often in life, we must make choices without the luxury of extremely strong evidence. We cant, as some early statisticians did, simply remain on the fence if were not confident either way. Whether were sitting on a jury or in a boardroom, we face situations where a decision must be made regardless. This is known as the weak evidence problem. For example, it might be very unlikely that a death is just a coincidence. But it also might be very unlikely that a certain person is a murderer. Legal cases are often decided on the basis that weak evidence in favor of the prosecution is more convincing than weak evidence for the defendant. Unfortunately, it can be easy to misinterpret weak evidence. A prominent example is the prosecutors fallacy. This is a situation where people assume that if its very unlikely a particular set of events occurred purely by coincidence, that must mean the defendant is very unlikely to be innocent. But to work out the probability of innocence, we cant just focus on the chances of a coincidence. What really matters is whether a guilty explanation is more likely than an innocent one. To navigate lawand lifewe must often choose between unlikely explanations, rather than waiting for certainty. 4. Predictions are easier than taking action. If we spot a pattern in data, it can help us make predictions. If ice cream sales increase next month, its reasonable to predict that heatstroke cases will too. These kinds of patterns can be useful if we want to make predictions, but theyre less useful if we want to intervene in some way. The correlation in the data doesnt mean that ice cream causes heatstroke, and crucially, it doesnt tell us how to prevent further illness. Often in life, prediction isnt what we really care about. In science, many problems are framed as prediction tasks because, fundamentally, its easier than untangling cause and effect. In the field of social psychology, researchers use data to try to predict relationship outcomes. In the world of justice, courts use algorithms to predict whether someone will reoffend. But often in life, prediction isnt what we really care about. Whether were talking about relationships or crimes, we dont just want to know what i likely to happenwe want to know why it happened and what we can do about it. In short, we need to get at the causes of what were seeing, rather than settling for predictions. 5. Technology is changing our concept of proof. In 1976, two mathematicians announced the first-ever computer-aided proof. Their discovery meant that, for the first time in history, the mathematical community had to accept a major theorem that they could not verify by hand. However, not everyone initially believed the proof. Maybe the computer had made an error somewhere? Suddenly, mathematicians no longer had total intellectual control; they had to trust a machine. But then something curious happened. While older researchers had been skeptical, younger mathematicians took the opposite view. Why would they trust hundreds of pages of handwritten and hand-checked calculations? Surely a computer would be more accurate, right? Technology is challenging how we view science and proof. In 2024, we saw the AI algorithm AlphaFold make a Nobel Prize-winning discovery in biology. AlphaFold can predict protein structures and their interactions in a way that humans would never have been able to. But these predictions dont necessarily come with traditional biological understanding. Among many scientists, Ive noticed a sense of loss when it comes to AI. For people trained in theory and explanation, crunching possibilities with a machine doesnt feel like familiar science. It may even feel like cheating or a placeholder for a better, neater solution that weve yet to find. And yet, there is also an acceptance that this is a valuable new route to knowledge, and the fresh ideas and discoveries it can bring. This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
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