You have to read the fine print of this rule—or at least read between the lines of the rule. ‘Loved’ is past tense and—unless the next words in your cover letter are, “and I love bikes even more now”—it means that your desire to be intimate with bikes fizzled out long ago.
Loving bikes as a kid is cool. The fact that you haven't done anything with bikes in the past 15-years kind of means that you probably didn't love bikes all that much and might be thinking that by throwing the noun ‘bike’ in your cover letter you are good to go—a shoe in for the bike geeks at Seven. Well, guess what; pretty much everyone tells us they loved bikes as a kid. It doesn't really help. In fact, it doesn't really even matter to me; I didn't love bikes as a kid.
What does matter, a lot, is that you have, at the very least, a strong connection to bikes today. As they say, you’re only as good as your last ride. If you have a way to show concrete love of bikes today, that goes a lot further in landing a job at a bike company.
So, if you want to make it difficult to begin a career at Seven, do the following: explain, in your cover letter, in excruciating detail about how you loved bikes as a kid. And then follow that up with a resume that shows no cycling experience since junior high school. Nothing says 'I really want to work in the bike industry' more strongly than no industry experience, no adult cycling experience, and a tenuous dusty old connection with bikes.
Photo note: The photo is of Elliot Carter—one of my father’s favorite composers. Elliot rode a bike as a kid, too—and appeared to have loved it—and look what happened to him; he never got a job at a bike company. Of course, that’s fortunate for us all.
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