Your Qualifications Aren't Getting You Hired | Here's Why - Amir Muradali

The Stairwell at Two in the Morning

I've sent out plenty of applications in my life that went nowhere, and I've sat with that same question Amir describes: am I actually good at this, or have I just been telling myself I am. Most of us don't talk about that stretch. We talk about the job we landed and skip the part where we didn't know if we ever would. Amir Muradali doesn't skip it, so neither will I.

Amir Muradali was three months from finishing his MBA when he sat down in a stairwell at his school at two in the morning. He had a rejection letter in his hand. He thinks it was number fifty. He had stopped counting somewhere around there.

He had spent eight years before that as a research engineer. Deep technical work. The kind of career where the skills on your resume speak for themselves. Then he made the jump into a twelve month intensive MBA program, one of the top schools in Canada, and figured the degree would do the same thing his engineering credentials had always done: open the door.

It didn't. Classmates were getting pulled out of lectures for interviews. Amir was getting form letters. He told me the questioning that comes with that kind of streak doesn't stay in your inbox. It gets into your head. Am I actually cut out for this. Did I waste a year and a small fortune finding that out at two in the morning on a concrete step.

Blue Ocean

Around that same low point, Amir's business strategy class was working through a case study on Cirque du Soleil. The company didn't try to out-compete the traditional circus industry on price or spectacle. It built something the traditional circus industry wasn't offering at all, and it owned that space by itself. In the class, they called it blue ocean strategy. Red ocean is the crowded market where everyone fights over the same customers and cuts each other's margins to do it. Blue ocean is the space nobody else is fishing.

Amir realized his resume was a red ocean pitch. Engineer with an MBA and eight years of experience. Somewhere out there was an engineer with an MBA and nine years of experience, and on paper, that person beats him every time. There was no value in that sentence because there was no space that sentence owned.

So he asked himself a harder question. Not what do I have. What do I do, and what have I always done, since before any of the degrees. His answer: he solves complex problems. He'd done it as a kid, sharpened it in engineering school, and sharpened it again in his MBA. That was his blue ocean. Not a credential. A pattern.

The Meeting That Changed Everything

Once Amir knew his value, he went looking for where it was needed. He landed on Alberta's oil sands, which were in the middle of a massive boom in 2006. He didn't send resumes into that industry. He got curious about it. He talked his way into conversations with executives, first through connections at his school, then through the people those people knew.

Two of those conversations turned into meetings in Calgary on the same day. In the morning, he met with a VP at Enbridge Pipelines. Enbridge had to move product out of a boom that might not last, using infrastructure built to last forty or fifty years. That mismatch was their problem, and Amir had come in already curious about it. They offered him a job before the meeting ended. There was no open position. They created one.

That afternoon, he met the managing partner at IBM's office in Calgary. The partner told him, “You have to work for me. I'm not gonna take no for an answer.” Then he asked if Amir had brought a resume. Amir said yes. The partner looked at it after he had already offered him the job.

What Actually Changed

Amir put it plainly: leaders weren't picking up on his stress about rent and student loans, because that stress was never their problem to solve. What they picked up on was that he showed up already thinking about their problem, not his own. Curiosity and a job hunt look almost identical from the outside. From the inside, one is asking for something, and one is offering something.

Amir has quadrupled his income in the seven years since. He's built a coaching practice around that same shift for other people navigating a pivot.

AI and What Comes Next

We spent the back half of the conversation on AI. Amir doesn't sugarcoat what's happening. Layoffs at major companies didn't hurt earnings, they helped them, and that gave every other executive team permission to chase the same numbers. A lot of that hasn't delivered the return companies expected. Some are already burning through their AI budgets faster than planned.

Even with all that, Amir calls himself an AI optimist. His read is that the technology removes problems we've quietly accepted as permanent, and it opens room for businesses and roles that don't exist yet. He thinks everyone is going to face a choice in the next few years: stay and become the kind of asset a company can't replace, build something of your own in the space AI just opened up, or step back and let it play out. He's clear that the choice gets made either way. Standing still is still a choice.

None of that changes the thing he told me first. Executives are still going to need people who can carry a problem all the way to a solution. AI doesn't remove that need, it raises the bar on it. The engineer with an MBA and eight years of experience still loses to the one with nine, but the person who shows up asking the right question about a real problem doesn't compete on that scale at all.

One Thing You Can Do Today

Amir ended with an exercise he gives his coaching clients. Send an email to the three people closest to you. Tell each of them three specific things you appreciate about them. No critique. No “here's how you could improve.” Just what you see in them that's true.

Then he did it live, on the show, for me. He told me he'd watched a few episodes before we recorded, and what he said he appreciated was that the conversations are real, with real people, about things that actually affect them.

I'm doing the exercise this week. If you listen to this one, I'd tell you to do the same before the day is out.

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See the full episode: https://youtu.be/31uRiWfRfz8