Can you get a startup job with no experience?

Does experience matter when applying to a startup?

Less than at a corporate. Founders care more about how fast you learn and how hungry you are.

Corporate job listings ask for three or four years of experience and filter on it. Startups mostly don't. When I was applying, one founder told me plainly that he didn't care what I could already do. He cared how curious and how hungry I was.

That doesn't make it easy. Junior roles feel harder to land right now than a few years ago, and with AI taking over more entry-level work, my sense is that bar keeps rising. But the thing being measured is different, and you can prepare for it.

What do founders look for instead of experience?

Evidence that you learn fast, stay on top of things and take work off their plate rather than adding to it.

Across several conversations with founders, they are watching for a pattern. Are you curious? Do you pick things up quickly? Are you on top of what you said you would do? Do you get things done without being chased?

The single strongest signal you can give is to teach them something in the call. Something about their market, their competitors or their users that they didn't know. It shows you've absorbed information fast and done the work before being asked to.

Underneath all of it is one question: will hiring you give them fewer headaches or more? Everything you say should be pointing at fewer.

What counts as experience if you have never had a job?

A personal project, something you grew, or a problem you studied properly. It counts as long as you can tell the story.

Founders will still ask experience questions. Tell me about a time you closed a deal. A time you solved a hard problem. A time you were under a lot of stress and how you handled it.

You don't need a previous employer to answer those. A hobby you turned into something, a project you shipped, an account you grew, or a problem you studied properly enough to explain how you'd tackle it all count. The story is what they're listening for, not the job title attached to it. What a founder reads on your CV goes into how to present it.

Which startup roles take people with no experience?

Sales is the easiest way in. Engineering and growth want proof you have built or grown something first.

• Sales is the most realistic entry point. The learning curve is steep, but it is learnable, and startups are used to training people into it.
• Engineering usually wants proof you have built something. A computer science degree with only theory behind it is hard to hire on. But if you are clearly sharp, not knowing Git on day one doesn't matter, because you'll pick it up in a week.
• Growth favours anyone who has already grown something: an account, a newsletter, SEO for a site.
• Customer success usually wants a bit of experience, though the learning curve is manageable.

Should a junior join an early-stage or growth-stage startup?

Growth stage is the realistic door. Early stage is the better experience if you can get in, but it is harder without a track record.

A ten-person company wants someone who takes problems off the founders' plate from week one. A junior who needs to ask how to do everything is adding work, not removing it, so early-stage companies lean towards people with some experience. That's reasonable, not snobbery.

A company with fifty or more people has room to teach. Often it has already hired two or three sales development reps, and joining that group means learning from people doing the same job next to you.

If you can get into an early-stage company as a junior, take it, because it's the steeper learning curve. What stage should you join? covers how that choice changes with your circumstances.