If you're an MBA student or recent grad still relying on resume drops and application portals to land your next role, you’re probably playing a losing game.

Gregory Heller has seen this pattern – and the results – time and again. At UW Foster School of Business, he wears two hats: he teaches professional communication to the full-time and evening MBA programs, and as Sr. Associate Director of MBA Career Management, he works as a career coach and trainer. He's also been publishing content online for over 20 years, which gives him a useful perspective on what builds a professional reputation over time.

So… what’s happening with MBA recruiting?

Heller says the resume drop has become a lottery ticket: "How can any recruiter go through a thousand resumes and really pick the people who actually want that job most and are most qualified?" he asks. “If they can only screen 50 people and interview 20, and they got 1,000 resumes, it's a crapshoot.”

That's not a criticism of any one recruiter or company. It's truly a structural problem, and one that AI has made significantly worse. Anyone (or their AI agent) can apply to hundreds of jobs per day, and anyone can create a cover letter in 30 seconds. As Heller points out, so can everyone else.

Speed and volume aren’t going to get candidates where they want to be. So, what breaks through?

Heller differentiates between two types of “showing your work.” The first is what most MBAs default to: being able to talk about your skills in an interview. The second – and the one that can actually get you to the interview – is demonstrating those skills somewhere visible before anyone asks.

For the professional world, that mostly means on LinkedIn.

“There's a tendency to be like, 'I don't want to be spammy about what I've done,'“ Heller says. “But if you go on LinkedIn and you haven't posted anything – ever, or in six months – and the other person someone recommended has been posting interesting stuff about the business, the industry, the role, every couple of days or weeks... who are you going to interview?”

The answer seems obvious, but most candidates still treat LinkedIn as an afterthought – a place to build a static profile and wait.

Heller's argument is that a digital footprint does work for you when you're not in the room. When someone sees your name on a resume, or gets a referral with your name attached, they're going to Google you or pull up your LinkedIn profile. What they find – or what they don't find – helps shape whether that referral goes anywhere.

Beyond posting, Heller is a strong advocate for portfolio projects – tangible things you've built, researched, or created that demonstrate the skills you claim to have.

This is especially relevant for AI skills, which are increasingly expected but notoriously hard to evaluate on a resume. Saying you're “proficient in AI tools” is close to meaningless – that’s table stakes for any MBA. Showing that you actually built something with them is not.

Recently, along with a colleague who directs The Product Management Center at Foster, Heller ran a four-week lab for MBA and specialty master's students, where participants worked on building something: an app, a tool, or other prototype. One team built a travel planning app that generates itineraries based on the filming locations of a movie. Others recreated physical games as digital apps. Several built tools around food, recipes, and diet planning.

“About 15 or 16 students made it all the way through,” Heller says. “And from there, we had about 12 prototypes that these students can now talk about, put on a portfolio website, write about on LinkedIn, and discuss in interviews.”

The bar isn't as high as people think. The point isn't to build the next great consumer app. It's to have something real to show – and a story to tell about the process.

How can MBA jobseekers approach this process?

“Scratch your own itch,” Heller says. “If there's something that really frustrates you where you're like, 'I wish this existed' – start there. Prototype it. See what you come up with.”

The good news is that the tools have dramatically lowered the barrier to entry. What might have taken a cross-functional team 120 hours at a hackathon five years ago can now be prototyped by one person in a fraction of the time. That changes what's possible for a business student with a weekend and a genuine problem to solve.

One mental block Heller sees often is the pressure to get things perfect before posting publicly. MBAs tend to be high achievers who want anything public to reflect well on them. That instinct isn't wrong… but it’s often pointed in the wrong direction.

“Your first 10 or 20 posts might be garbage,” Heller says. “But you have to produce that garbage to get to the other side.”

For MBA students, it’s about building a consistent habit. A two-year program is roughly 88 weeks. If you produce three to five things per month – posts, articles, short videos, project write-ups – you'll have 60 to 100 pieces of content by the time you graduate. Nobody's going back to look at what you posted in week two. Instead, they're looking at the last five things you put out. By that point, you’ll share something refined.

The internship, Heller notes, is an underutilized opportunity: “The internship is a real opportunity to reflect on what you're learning, share some key lessons. That's going to become helpful during full-time recruiting.”

The underlying reason to build a digital footprint and portfolio projects isn't just visibility – it's to give referrals something to stick to.

“I think we're moving back in this direction, for better or worse, where referrals are going to be a lot more important,” Heller says. “And the higher value thing in a referral is not just 'I got a good vibe off this person' – it's 'they showed me this really cool thing they built.'“

When you're building something, reaching out to people with a genuine project to discuss, and putting ideas into the world, you have control over your momentum. When you're submitting applications into an ATS black hole, you don't.

“Outreach. Creating things. That's the numbers game that increases your chances,” Heller says.

Gregory Heller is a Senior Associate Director of MBA Career Management at UW’s Foster School of Business where he also teaches professional communication. He's the host of the Conversations on Careers and Professional Life podcast that discusses career development and professional growth.