Given the number of opportunities (people interested in me interviewing, not job offers) that I come across which also seem compelling, the idea of making an in depth cover letter or completing a small project for each one seems a little absurd. Oh, and quit my job to work for you for a week in the hopes of getting a full time offer? Yeah, no thanks.

Yeah, you guys are both making the mistake of thinking that we're talking about yet-another-tech-job.

For yet-another-dev-job or yet-another-QA-job or yet-another-design-job at a cool-sounding company that nobody thinks is going to change their lives, you're right. It's a sellers market for talent. The prospective employer should be the one going to extreme lengths to hire people.

Some people aren't looking for yet-another-job. They have a laser focus on one or two companies that they want to work for --- and not only that, but they know exactly what role they want in those companies. They (gasp) aren't even necessarily looking at the job reqs. They're walking up to 37s and saying "I could really kick ass helping you with your interfaces, here's why, let's get talking."

So, two things:

(1) Fried is saying, you want to run your company in such a way that you're getting exposed to those kinds of people. Which means, you're running a very tight ship with a small number of people so that any ANY hire is going to end up having a dramatic role in the company. You can't be Google and expect people to build mini-sites to get an interchangeable-product dev role.

(2) As a potential employee, you want to consider whether you want to spend your career bouncing from job-req job to job-req job. This isn't touchy-feely startup-y 37signals-y talk here; the entire book "What Color Is Your Parachute" has "get jobs this way" as its theme. Pick a company you think will be awesome, and then sell yourself to that company. You'll be happier than trying to fit yourself into one of the "available" jobs in the industry.

I'm not making that mistake, although you probably couldn't tell from what I wrote. I just think that if you are that talented, why do you want to waste your self-promotion efforts securing yourself a job working for someone else, when you could work for yourself or start a company with someone?

Because starting your own company is incredibly difficult and risky, and because established companies offer a lot of opportunities that you are very unlikely to obtain on your own. That said: I started a company.

If it's true that this advice is only relevant for "supercool" companies like 37Signals, then that should be included either as advice ("become supercool like us") or as a disclaimer.

But I don't think being a supercool company is any reason to treat your candidates disrespectfully either. It's one way to make sure you only get childless employees though. Only a truly irresponsible parent would ever quit his job to work for a company for a trial period, no matter how much they mght like it.

You're totally missing the point(s), so I must be communicating it badly. I'm sorry.

There are two points here.

First: if you are an employer:

Don't hire often. Hire only when you absolutely need to. That way, the people you hire are assured to be critical to your business. Roles where people can be business-critical are inherently more attractive to strong candidates. Strong candidates + business-critical roles = organic hiring, where you simply don't have to put out a req and take the best of the results.

You also need to be a successful business (not "supercool") and you also need to be a good place to work (again, not "supercool"). But lots of successful businesses with good work environments run a recruiting system that forces them to select the best candidate out of a pile of resumes after posting a req, and that sucks.

More importantly:

If you are a prospective employee:

Consider a career-style where you don't ever look at job reqs. Don't look to see who's hiring. You don't care. Instead, you think about what you do best, and where you could be most effective doing it. Are you an animator? Pixar!

Then, beat down their doors and get a job there.

You are going through more effort than normal job seekers do. But at the same time, you are getting more degrees of freedom with your own career, and an assurance that you are really going to fit wherever you land.

Lots of companies won't be able to hire you if you approach them this way. Good. Those companies are assuredly not staffed with people who beat down the doors to get in. You don't want to work there.