🧑🏻‍💻👩🏻‍💻 Standing out in job applications with relevant projects (PROOF of competence)

TalentGeist Newsletter

Immediately-actionable career insights for ambitious individuals.

Boosting your resume/portfolio with work experience —

If you’re in SG — we’re running a free career program sponsored by gov.sg. Limited spots (94.8% already taken).

If you’re outside Singapore — leave your email here; we’re expanding globally in 2026!

Earlier this year, we wrote about how AI tools nowadays can write your resume and polish it, all in less than 30 seconds.

If this sounds easy for you….well, it’s easy for literally everyone else as well. I.e., you won’t stand out with AI alone.

To stand out in the job application, you need to PROVE that you will be competent on the job — typically by tackling projects that are similar to your desired role. If you’re ambitious and willing to do whatever it takes to succeed — what we cover today is in your control and WILL set you apart in job applications!

Let’s look at a few case studies of HOW other applicants have shown their dream company that they’ve got the competence to succeed.

Example 1: Multiple ‘standard’ applications to AirBnB failed, so Nina decided to proactively do the work & analyse future expansion markets for AirBnB. Got hired!

Example 2: Post speaks for itself. Literally happened in 2025, for a hyper-growth FinTech company (KAST) based in Singapore.

And if you don’t want to post your work on LinkedIn? Don’t make that the excuse. Doing the actual work (re-designing their app to improve UX) and just sending it to the company would’ve still worked wonders.

Example 3: Even Stanford students struggle — but what set Tristan apart was NOT his fancy degree (he was rejected 8 times with no response on ‘standard’ applications). Rather, he literally did the work (lining up advertisers & improving company revenue) and proved his worth before he was hired.

There are literally hundreds of these examples that you can find online.

Why do they work? Because, well, think about it from the company’s angle — why should they take a chance on someone else, when you’ve demonstrated clear-as-day that you can ACTUALLY do the job well?

However, the small issue with these more ‘extreme’ examples is that you’d be doing a separate project for every company you apply to — which, at a certain point, won’t be sustainable.

This is why we built the Work Simulation Program with the Singapore government — we gathered the most important skills to succeed in Marketing/Business (inputs from hundreds of companies), and turned them into ‘work simulation projects’ that you just do once, but can apply across your future job applications.

✅ Learn Marketing/Business work skills from top-tier professionals across Google, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, etc. Including 1-on-1’s!

✅ Tackle work simulation projects that you can put on your resume/LinkedIn to immediately boost your employability.

✅ Earn Certificate of Career Achievement — upon completion, you’ll receive a Certificate, with stamp-of-approval from the Singapore government.

✅ Earn paid internships — those who do exceptionally well will be hired by our network of companies; to date, 50+ students have been hired for paid internships directly out of our Program. You can find some of their testimonials here.

If you’re outside of Singapore, leave your email here — we’re expanding globally soon given increasing demand from other locations (e.g., HK, US).

For now — let me know if you have any questions on what we covered above. Always happy to chat more.

Until next time, folks!

Best,

Vincent (feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn 🙂)