Turn networking into referrals

And that’s where I think most job seekers really struggle. How do I reach out to these people? How do I really develop a relationship with somebody that I don’t know from a hole in the wall? And then how do I really convert that into more of an actual referral for me?

We’re ready. Yeah.

Absolutely. I’m very excited to be here, excited to be the first guest.

So, a little bit about my background, my I guess quest into career coaching. Prior to coaching I worked in the ad tech industry. I was in ad sales for about 10 years. I started off at a small e-commerce startup, I was a marketing coordinator, I moved into account management from there, then as an account executive in sales, and just very typically climbed the corporate ladder and had what you would consider a very successful on-paper career.

But while all that was happening, really internally I felt very disconnected from what I was doing, and I always questioned myself and my confidence. I knew deep in my heart that this wasn’t what I wanted to do, but I also didn’t know what else I could do or should do. And so I kept making a series of changes on my own, thinking, okay, maybe if I make this small pivot from this industry to that industry, or I change my job title a little bit, that will help in me feeling more connected or more fulfilled. But none of those changes really led me to a place that I wanted to be, and I kept finding myself in that same place, feeling disconnected, feeling unhappy.

And that’s what really led me on a deeper journey to figure out, okay, what is it that I really want to do in my career? I did a lot of self-reflection and introspection, thinking about the skills that I had that I actually enjoyed using and wanted to leverage going forward, a lot of market research, conducting conversations with people in different roles that sounded of interest to me. That really led me to the world of coaching, and I realized, okay, this feels aligned, this feels like a great fit for the skill sets I have, this feels like a great fit for the impact I want to have and want to make.

So while I was still working at the time, I went to a program to become a certified professional coach. I figured it was a great way to dip my toes in the water and see, okay, do I like this, does this feel good? And I loved the program. So I started my coaching business really as a side hustle, like so many people do, and I did that for a little while until I was ready to go full-time. I went full-time now about five years ago already, so it’s crazy, the time has really flown.

And within my business now, it’s really supporting people almost in similar positions to the ones that I was in, who are feeling maybe unhappy, disconnected, maybe feel like they’re not really leveraging their full potential, and they’re wanting to make a change in their role but not feeling quite sure what that change should be. Or maybe they have a sense of what that change should be but need support in actually executing and getting there. My belief is, I always say, I want to help you create a career where you actually look forward to Monday mornings. That’s really our mission and what we’re looking to achieve in the coaching business.

Yeah, I would say it’s a big range, in the sense that I would say the majority of people, probably 60 to 70% of people, come to us feeling like, I’m unhappy, I don’t feel like this is what I should be doing, but I feel stuck on what I can do next. And maybe they have some ideas, but they’re not really quite sure, and they’re not really sure if the ideas that they have are even ones that they should pursue.

So a lot of the support that people are initially looking for is clarity, and really understanding, okay, again, based on what my strengths are and my skill sets are, based on the work that I actually enjoy and that engages me, how can I take all that and figure out where that should put me next? So a lot of it is that clarity work. I’d say that’s really the majority of our clients.

Of course, again given the job market right now, which is a competitive job market, we have the clients who are saying, you know what, I’ve been trying to make a change for a while, I know exactly what it is that I want to do, but it’s just not happening. There must be something in the process that I’m pursuing that just isn’t working, and I need support in really tailoring and fixing that. So we definitely have those clients as well. But I would say a lot of them are in that initial clarity phase of, okay, help me in the first place just figure out what it is that I want to do next.

Dumbledore.

Dumbledore.

Yeah, I think it’s such a great question, and there’s a lot of points within that.

First and foremost, I’m glad you bring it up, because I think that people tend to confuse career coaches versus recruiters and what the roles are that people play. What I like to always talk about from a career coach perspective is, like any coach in any sport: if you are working with a coach and you’re playing baseball and you’re really wanting to hit a home run, the coach isn’t going to come up to you and actually swing the bat for you, right? It’s still your job to swing the bat. But they’re going to teach you everything you can do to best make contact with the bat and be able to hit it out of the park.

It’s the same idea with a career coach. No career coach is going to go up to you and hand you a role or hand you a job offer and say, okay, here’s your job, you got it. But what we are going to do is teach you everything you can to successfully land that offer on your own, of course with the support of the coach, but you’re the one who’s ultimately landing it. I think it’s an important distinction, because with a recruiter, people often think, okay, a recruiter, you’re going to hand me an opportunity, you’re going to connect me to this role, help me out with the hiring manager, we’re going to get me hired. That’s not what a career coach does.

What we’re really about is empowering people to learn and understand the strategies so that they can implement them on their own. And then in five years from now and 10 years from now, when you’re considering another change or another pivot, or want to level up in your career, you have all those strategies already built in because you’ve learned them. You’re not relying on somebody to provide the opportunities for you; you’re learning ultimately what you need to do to provide them for yourself. So I think that’s an important distinction to make.

So what I would say, when people are thinking about career coaching, is if you’re in a place where you’re saying, you know what, I’m unhappy in what I’m doing, I want to make a change, and first and foremost I don’t even know how to go about making that change or what I should be considering to influence my change, that’s definitely something a coach can help you with. And being ready to be open-minded, and being ready to self-reflect and be introspective, and being ready to do the work and the market research to really figure out, okay, what feels most aligned and how do I pursue this. And then ready to also do the work to execute: to be reaching out to people, to build relationships, to take the feedback and the insight that you’re learning about how to optimize your resume and integrating that.

So yes, it’s about having that partner and learning the strategies, but then it’s really about you taking those strategies and implementing them yourself. Does that make sense?

Yeah, so I think the mid-career folks, or the millennials, this is a person or an individual who’s already been working maybe eight to 10 years or so. So they’ve gotten their foot in the door, they’ve probably built traction where they are, but they’re kind of hitting that plateau of either, I feel like there aren’t future growth opportunities for me on the current path I’m on, or I have future growth opportunities but I’m not interested in them. So now I have to figure out, okay, how do I strategically make a change at this point, when I already feel like I’m somewhat invested in what I’m doing, and make sure that this change can be built off of what I’ve already created?

I think that’s a big part of it, as opposed to somebody who’s entry level or just starting out, where they’re very fresh and they can pick all these different avenues. A lot of the times when you’re mid-career you have this feeling of, I want to make a change but I don’t want to start over. So how do I ensure I can make a change I’m excited about but still leverage what I’ve ultimately built so far?

Yeah, it’s a great question, and it’s so important. You and I were talking before about just the fact that this is such a competitive job market, and that unfortunately it’s not as simple as, update your resume and send it to a few places and you get an interview. That’s just not what the market is.

So networking is a really pivotal piece, because there are so many stats and reports that show how valued referrals are, and how many hiring managers and recruiters will look to referrals before they look to anything else. So you want to get yourself in that referral pile, and you really only get in the referral pile through the relationships you build when networking.

So when it comes to networking, there are two different avenues that I like to think about, that I call the low-hanging fruit and the high-hanging fruit. Low-hanging fruit are individuals that you’re already connected with. Maybe this is a prior coworker, a family friend, somebody that you’re connected to on LinkedIn that you’ve developed a relationship with. These are the people that you already know directly, who reaching out to isn’t as challenging or strenuous. So it’s always easiest to first tap into this low-hanging fruit and really explore, okay, based on the direction I believe I’m targeting, who can help me? Whether they work in a similar role, whether they maybe work at a company you’re interested in. These are people that you can send a text message to, or send a quick email and say, hey, I want to catch up, hear how it’s been going, where you’re working or what you’re doing, and would love to just spend time catching up and learn from you. Those are very easy, and they can be really helpful and really valuable, especially if these people again are in the industry you’re interested in or connected to a company that you’re interested in. So it’s the easiest avenue to tap into first.

The problem is that most job seekers stop there, and they think, okay, my networking is just limited to the people I already know. But that in itself is very limiting, because what if you are looking to make a pivot and you’re targeting these three companies and you have no connections to those companies? Then you assume, huh, it’s out of reach for me, I’ll never be able to get connected to those companies or make any inroads there. So that’s where the high-hanging fruit comes into play, and this is about developing new connections and new relationships with individuals who are at these companies, in said industries, to be able to really make headway there.

And that’s where I think most job seekers really struggle. How do I reach out to these people? How do I really develop a relationship with somebody that I don’t know from a hole in the wall? And then how do I really convert that into more of an actual referral for me?

Absolutely.

Of course. And that’s the key, you said it: I do want to learn more about this person. Building a genuine relationship is obviously not going to come from me reaching out to somebody saying, hi, I see you work at so-and-so, I’m really interested in working there, can you help me get hired? Of course, that’s so transactional. Like you said, the person’s immediately on the defense and they just feel like they’re being used.

Also, realistically, no one is going to go to bat for you if they don’t know you from a hole in the wall. They’re putting themselves on the line when they refer you in, and if you’re not a right fit, or you’re a crazy person, whatever it might be, that’s a really bad look for them.

So a genuine relationship needs to be established first, and that’s why we have to approach everything from the perspective of genuine curiosity and, like you said, learning from somebody. So when we are targeting people, we should be targeting people that we genuinely want to learn from, that we say, wow, that’s a really interesting job title, or wow, they have such an interesting career trajectory so far, I would genuinely love to learn how they got there, what they’re doing to be successful, what some of their challenges are, because perhaps there are ways that I can help them now and add value.

So we want to think about approaching it from that perspective and think, okay, who are the people that I really want to build relationships with and learn from? And then we approach them from that vein of saying, hey, I really appreciate you connecting with me here on LinkedIn, I was really intrigued by some of the work you did at X, Y and Z, I’d love the opportunity to learn a little bit from you, to understand how you’ve been able to accomplish all the incredible things you’ve accomplished. We lean into the flattery, into being complimentary, into showing genuine interest in them, with the goal of learning from them and, like I said before, figuring out at the same time, is there a way that maybe you can help them right now in some of the challenges that they’re working through? So that’s how we want to think about it when we are reaching out to somebody that we don’t know personally.

It can feel intimidating, because there are so many different people. What I really like to think about, and this is why it’s so important to have clarity on the types of positions you want to pursue ahead of time, is to really target people who are in roles that you want for yourself. So, you want to become a project manager: probably beneficial to talk to people who are project managers at the company that you’re looking to work at. You can learn a tremendous amount from them in terms of what they’ve done to be successful there, what’s the prior work that they had accomplished that helped them get that role.

So I always like to target people who have the positions, or at least are on the teams that you want to join, and then anybody in more general senior leadership positions, because of course you can learn a lot from them, and the more senior you are the more influence that you have. So I like to think about those two angles, versus somebody who is on a completely different team or somebody who just started at the company a year ago. Those conversations, while it’s still important to consider them — if you don’t know anybody and you happen to know somebody who’s only been at the company for a year, that can be an in and they can introduce you to more people — but in an ideal world we’re targeting those more high-level positions, or people in the roles that you want for yourself.

It’s kind of a culmination of a lot of different things. I tell my clients all the time that successful outreach requires some A/B testing and seeing what’s working and what’s not working. So if you can find their email, go for it. We know that with email, people check it every single day usually, and so the likelihood is that it will get seen. If it’s harder to find their email, LinkedIn’s of course a really great avenue, and if you can connect with them and then message them, that’s great.

But then I would also encourage you to engage with their content as well. If they are somebody who’s avidly posting, show them some love, leave some thoughtful comments. That’s a really great way to get their attention, because sometimes just that outreach message doesn’t necessarily work, and you kind of have to play a few different avenues.

You also have to follow up. A lot of the times people reach out one time, they don’t respond, and they go, oh, that’s it, I tried, I made my effort. It usually requires a couple of touch bases or a couple of reach-outs before you can really get someone’s attention. So I don’t necessarily say that there’s only one avenue that works. It’s just about being flexible, about experimenting and trying different things and seeing, okay, what am I seeing is driving the best results in terms of responses and people ultimately being willing to have a conversation with me.

Yeah, I think again that email is always a good avenue, and these days there’s so many ways to figure out somebody’s email. A quick Google search for what the email address format is for somebody, Google will tell you what the format is and then you can kind of guess it from there. So I think email is a good avenue if you’re confident that that person isn’t engaging on LinkedIn.

It is hard, because these days almost everyone does have a LinkedIn profile, but then the question is, do they actually go on and check it or not? Usually you can do a quick spot check on that: if you go on their profile and they have nothing really filled in, they don’t even have a profile picture, and it just seems like a very sparse profile, the likelihood is they aren’t really checking there very often and the best avenue might be to go via email instead. But if you go on and you see they have a decent amount of connections, they have a lot of their sections filled out, it’s worthwhile to at least try there.

And also, you have to think that yes, you’re not going to get a one-to-one response on these things. So if you’re like, I am really targeting working at Pinterest in their account management department, well, then you probably need to reach out to like four or five people who work in account management at Pinterest, because you’re not going to get a response from everybody. So you’re going to have to plant multiple seeds with the hopes of at least one of those people being willing to connect and have a conversation.

So, there are a few things that people always think about when they’re applying for jobs. There’s obviously the role you’re targeting, there’s the industry you’re targeting, and then there’s the companies you’re targeting. And some people will have clarity on the role but not clarity on the industry, and things like that, so it kind of depends on what pieces of the puzzle you do have clarity on. Maybe sometimes you have no idea about any of it.

So what I usually start with is the role, and really helping you understand, kind of what we were talking about a little bit earlier, based on not only your strengths and skill sets but based on what you really enjoy: how do we understand where you’re engaged, what your strengths are, what your values are, to really align that with the right type of role for you? And then from there, again, if you have a sense of industry, well, now we know this is the industry we’re targeting, we now have clarity on the role we’re targeting, and now we want to think about companies.

I am a very big believer that where you work doesn’t actually matter as much as you think it does, because what ultimately matters the most are your values. Do you value collaboration? Do you value creativity? Do you value work-life balance? Do you value adaptability? All these different values that can come up in your career. And the truth is that you can find those at so many different companies. Maybe it’s at an Amazon, but maybe it’s at a tiny startup. So first I like to help my clients not pigeonhole themselves so much by thinking, I’m only going to work at Amazon, Google or Pinterest, because the values that are important to you probably exist at other companies as well.

So we really try to focus on it from a values perspective, but then also say, okay, are there brands that you engage with on a daily basis that you really enjoy? Are there people that you know that talk really highly about the company that they work for, and if so, what are those companies? If we have a sense of some of those companies, can we do some research to figure out other similar companies that resemble that? So it’s a lot of that market research, maybe just some inclinations that you have, to then expand and build out a more specific strategic company hit list.

I usually say around eight to 10 companies at most on that list, and even that is probably a little bit wider than we’d want it to be. But the truth is that we kind of whittle it down as the process goes on, and as you start learning about some more of these you might say, oh, you know what, I thought this was a company I wanted to work at but it’s not really a company I want to work at. So it might dwindle down from there. But ideally, when you’re starting, a target list of about eight to 10 companies would be ideal.

Exactly, exactly. Yes.

Yeah, it’s a good question. I think resume and LinkedIn are incredibly important. You’re of course not going to land the role that you want if your resume is not strong, if your LinkedIn is not strong, that’s for sure.

I usually find that the reason it’s not working isn’t as much that. I mean, it could be a combination of things. I think it still generally tends to be related to the relationships you’re building, or that you’re not building, and relying on your resume to do the talking for you rather than your referrals really advocating for you.

But the resume is incredibly important, and I have seen enough poorly written resumes in my day to know that if I am speaking to a candidate who is networking like crazy and they’re really targeted in what they’re doing, and they’re still not even getting traction in terms of getting interviews at all, then there definitely could be an issue from a collateral perspective, of their resume and their LinkedIn, for sure.

Exactly. I love to focus on numbers and data, and before you make assumptions about why something’s not working, really investigate that. That’s why I say, if you are somebody who is very targeted in the types of roles that you’re approaching, and you have really built relationships with people who are going to bat for you and advocating and saying, hey, I have a friend, you should speak to them, you should bring them in for an interview, and that’s still not even driving phone screens, then the likelihood is, okay, there is something about your resume that is not effectively telling your story and not conveying your value, and that needs to be addressed.

But then again, if you are getting phone screens and then those phone screens are never going to second-round interviews, there’s probably an issue in terms of how you’re interviewing. So you have to really think about, where have I been putting all my effort, and where is the bottleneck? Is it going from referral to interview? Is it more so early in the process of, I’m just applying and I’m just getting completely rejected? Have I put myself out there for enough opportunities in general? You kind of have to look at the numbers and see what’s causing the issue before you drastically change anything.

I think the first mistake is that people are just not utilizing it. They have a very bare-minimum profile: yeah, they have a picture, they have some of their experience there, but they’re not leveraging all the tools that the platform offers. I always say LinkedIn is the one way that people can find you without you having to find them, so why not leverage that tool to its full extent?

So of course, having a strong headshot, having an optimized headline. Think about when a recruiter is searching for candidates, and obviously recruiters have their own LinkedIn recruitment tools. When they have a search result and they have hundreds of people coming up in that search result and they’re deciding whose profile they want to double-click on and look at more, what do they see? They see your headshot, they see your headline, they see the company you’re currently working at. So you want to really make that headline as engaging and as eye-catching as possible, so that just from looking at your headshot and your headline someone can get a sense of the type of work that you do and have a sense of, okay, is this the kind of person that makes sense for me to reach out to?

And then, assuming they do double-click and they’re looking at your About section, are you telling a compelling story? Do you have a clear snapshot there of the type of work that you’ve been doing, where you can really add value, what some of your achievements are? We want to make it as enticing as possible for them to go, okay, based on everything I’m seeing here, this is captivating, this is catching my eye, this is somebody that I should be having a conversation with.

So, thinking about your headline, thinking about your About section, obviously making sure that your experience section really encapsulates what you have done and the value that you bring, and really using that tool to the best of your abilities. And then also thinking about some other parts of your LinkedIn profile that people often don’t. I mentioned in my newsletter the Featured section, right at the very top of your profile. There are all these different parts where you can link out to a website or a portfolio, or maybe content that you’ve created, and right there that recruiter gets to see a really good sample of the type of work that you do. So it’s so worthwhile to use that, especially knowing that so many other similar job seekers out there are not necessarily using those things, and you want to do what you can to stand out.

Over the years my feelings on that have changed. Now I think that they absolutely don’t hurt, and I think if you have a number of really strong recommendations on your profile then of course that’s helpful. Do I think it’s a make or break, that if you don’t have recommendations on your profile a recruiter isn’t going to reach out to you? No, I don’t think that that’s the case.

So I wouldn’t necessarily — I always go back to, what’s more important? You reaching out and trying to get 10 recommendations from people and spending the time doing that, or you spending time cultivating and developing relationships with people at your target company? I think that’s going to have way more weight and way more importance. But it definitely doesn’t hurt, and if it’s just a quick and easy thing where you’re like, oh, that prior coworker, I’ll ask them to write me a recommendation, I can write them one in exchange, and you spend a couple of minutes sending out some emails to people and it can generate some for you, then it’s definitely helpful to have.

Exactly. And it’s all the way at the bottom, too. We have to think about how people consume and scroll: when they’re looking at your profile they’re starting at the top. So I like to focus the same way as in a resume. They look at your resume for six to seven seconds, so I want to really make the focal point everything higher up, because we know that people read from top to bottom.

This is like a bane-of-my-existence question, because LinkedIn has changed recently: when you are sending connection requests now, if you want to include a short message, you have to have LinkedIn Premium. It didn’t used to be this way, this is a recent change in the last few months, and I’ve been really frustrated as a career coach, because they’re virtually forcing people to get it, to an extent, if they’re planning to do a lot of outreach.

You can always send a request without any note in it, and honestly I sometimes see clients have a lot of success with that. Again, if you have a really optimized profile, so it makes sense why you would be reaching out to this person that you don’t know. Some people are like, I’m fine, I’m just going to test it out without sending a connection request message. But if you do want to send a connection request message, you basically have to get Premium now, which is very frustrating. So I usually say, think about it as a temporary investment where you’re going to do this for a couple of months while you’re really focused on outreach and developing relationships, and then it’s something you can always cancel when you don’t need it anymore.

Yeah, it’s really important, because something I’ve talked a lot about is that there’s a very common misconception, because we hear it all the time, of, pursue your passions, chase your passions, that’s going to lead to happiness and fulfillment in your career. But passions definitely don’t equal career fulfillment.

The example I always give is, let’s just say you love sports. You’re a sports fanatic since you were a little kid, you land a job working for your favorite sports team and you think, this is my dream fulfilled, my passion is sports, I’ve made it. But you have a horrible manager, you’re a creative person and they don’t allow you to be creative at all in your role, you’re doing work that 90% of the time is well below what you’re able and capable of doing, you have no life balance. It doesn’t matter how passionate you are about sports, you’re not going to be happy in that role, because passions don’t equal career fulfillment.

So what you have to really get clear on is, what are my values? Because again, if I value collaboration, creativity, flexibility, and I’m not getting any of those three things in my role, that is going to make me feel really discontent and really unhappy. So it’s really important to explore that.

And there are a lot of ways that you can understand and uncover your values. I think oftentimes people are actually more aware of their values than they realize. I just did a workshop yesterday for a company and we were talking about career values, and I was asking everybody in the chat, drop the top three career values that come to mind when you think about what’s important to you. And so many people had responses. If prompted, they’re there, but you just don’t spend the time really thinking about and reflecting, do I feel like these are showing up where I’m working?

So if you’re not aware of it, you can go online and take a quiz that really helps you, even just do a values quiz, there are so many different things that will pop up. I like to think about different questions, like: what is the time in your career that you felt most fulfilled, and why? Usually the answer there will uncover a few values. Maybe you say, well, there was this one time I achieved this project and I got the recognition for it, so there might be a sense that you really value achievement. Or, who are either career or life mentors that you really look up to, and why? The likelihood is that there are some underlying values around there. So I think it’s that process of self-reflection and asking yourself some of those questions to pull them out, some online quizzes which can be helpful at times, and then really just thinking if there’s anything that immediately comes to mind. Sometimes your gut has a good sense of that.

So I think that once you have a sense of those values — and I usually recommend coming up with the three to five that you feel are most important to you — having a clear sense of that as you’re pursuing roles, as you’re networking. Maybe you just write out, okay, my top five career values, and you have it as a sticky note above your desk, and you’re making sure that you’re always rooting yourself in that.

So when you’re networking with somebody to learn a little bit about their role or their company, and again you value collaboration, you can ask about, what are the structures of teams like? Is it more people working autonomously, are there opportunities to collaborate? So you can gut check things against those values and ensure that whatever you are targeting feels like it will truly be in line with those values.

Absolutely. And then it can also help you in interviews, because they’re going to ask you about your values, or what you think about the company’s values.

In an interview you should be able to talk about — when you’re talking about yourself and positioning yourself, be able to say, I’m somebody who really values collaboration and the ability to be creative, by doing X, Y and Z. You want to be able to capture those values, to make sure that they feel that those are in line with the role. Because again, if there’s a misalignment there, you’re not going to be happy ultimately.

And you also want to have a sense of — collaboration and autonomy are just easy ones to talk about — if you know that you value collaboration but you’re consistently hearing these people in the interview talk about how they value autonomous workers and independence and all of that, you have to say to yourself, you know what, this might not be the place for me.

I think not necessarily as much red flags. Obviously if you’re networking with somebody and they’re at the company and they’re like, don’t work here, avoid it at all costs, obviously that’s a red flag. I mean, you have to take it with a grain of salt, because everybody has their own experiences and one person might hate it and you might love it.

But I do think having that sense of what your values are, where you’re super engaged, and again doing all the clarity work beforehand to understand what your core strengths are, what your values are, what your transferable skills are, and having that in your mind when you are networking: if you’re feeling like a lot of what you have discovered about yourself isn’t relevant or connected to the role, based on what you’re discovering in market research, that in itself is maybe not a red flag, but that’s a sign that maybe this isn’t a company that I should pursue.

I think once you get into the interview process you get some of the more typical red flags of, they’re not answering, they’re being very vague about how they answer questions, maybe they seem super disorganized when you’re going through the interview process with them, they’re not giving you a lot of time to make a decision. Some of those more typical red flags can pop up during the interview process.

Yeah, it’s such a good question. I feel like sometimes for myself I’m still figuring it out too as I go, because it’s ever changing.

I think that there has to be an expectation that it is a market where things can take a bit longer. Whereas in the past you might have said, you know what, I’m going to come in, I’m going to get committed to landing a job and I’ll be able to do it in the next two to three months, that’s not necessarily what we’re seeing now. We see the average job search takes about three to six months. Obviously we want to expedite that, and hopefully working with coaching can expedite that. There are so many different factors too, though, because again, are you pivoting? If you’re pivoting, do you know what you’re pivoting into? How much groundwork have you laid down already? So there are a lot of factors that influence the length of time that it takes.

But I think it’s just about setting effective expectations that it is tougher and more competitive, so you have to be willing to be persistent through that and not give up. I think a lot of people are just like, I’ve been trying this for two months, it’s not working, screw it, I’ll just stick to where I am. It doesn’t mean it’s not working, it just means that you have to be persistent through that.

It means that you really have to focus on non-traditional ways to apply for jobs, which means don’t just rely on LinkedIn easy apply, don’t just rely on being like, I’m going to set a target of applying to 15 jobs a week and that’s going to land me x amount of interviews. That just doesn’t work anymore. It really comes down to relationships and referrals.

So we really focus on, okay, how do we plant as many seeds as possible at our target companies to ensure that even if this company is not actively hiring right now, if in six weeks from now they open up a role, I am top of mind, because I have already developed that relationship? And I give myself a really strong opportunity to be brought in for that phone screen, to maybe even be interviewing for the role before it gets publicly posted. That’s what we want to focus on: planting seeds early, not taking a reactive strategy, which is basically wait for the job to be posted and apply, but taking a proactive strategy, developing the relationship before the jobs are even posted.

Yeah, it’s so important. I think that a lot of the times job seekers, especially when they think about their LinkedIn and their resumes, there’s this feeling of, I need to showcase everything, I need to show the breadth of my experience, and I did this role, I did that role, I did this project, I did that project, and they feel this need to put all of that there. And that is really not effective, and it works against you.

What you really need to focus on, rather than the breadth of your experience, is the depth of your experience, and really think about, okay, everything that’s on my resume should be relevant to the role I am applying for. So am I gut checking and saying, okay, here’s the job description that I have and here’s my resume, can I draw a line between everything that is on my resume and one of those bullet points on the job description? So, really focusing on going deeper on the skill sets necessary, versus just highlighting 10 different skill sets. That’s a really big one that I think people all the time really mess up on, and they just go way too wide.

I think it’s really about being more value-oriented versus task-oriented. That’s a big thing I talk about. A lot of resumes read like job descriptions, where it’s basically like, put together deck for sales team to go out and pitch. I could have — you could pull that off a job description. Anybody who is applying for that role should be able to say that they can do that same thing. But it’s not about what you did, it’s about the outcome that that provided, or the value that that provided. So really saying to yourself, okay, you’re putting together these pitch decks for the sales team, what did that drive? Did that drive a certain amount of incremental revenue? Did that bring in a new client? So really ensuring that your resume is not just the tasks but it’s the value behind those tasks. I think those are the two really big things that we want to think about when we’re thinking about both our LinkedIn and our resume.

Exactly. And it will probably require removing some of the stuff that’s on your resume, which people have such a hard time with. They’re like, but I did this, and I’m like, yeah, but it has nothing to do with the role, so let’s not waste valuable space talking about something that isn’t meaningful to that recruiter or to that hiring manager. And shorter is better anyway.

I think the stat is like six or seven seconds.

And formatting too, I think people forget about that as well. If there’s a lot of text, there’s pictures, it’s just not clean and easy to read. For myself, I’ve hired people in my business before, I’ll throw out a resume without even looking at it sometimes if it’s just overwhelming to look at. I’m like, I don’t want to deal with this, let me go on to the next person. So, clean and easy to read formatting, in addition to the actual content of course.

That’s such a good question, and I’m doing all my end-of-year reflections and everything right now. I think that when I started this business five years ago it was very much just a me business, and I was a one-man show doing it all, or a one-woman show. And this past year it’s really been about scaling. I’ve brought on a lot of coaches on my team so that we can serve more people, and so I can focus on some of the bigger picture items.

I think that’s going to continue, building and scaling our coaching team, and really focusing on — actually, for me, these kinds of things. I love podcast interviews, I love media and being able to go out and do workshops, I did one yesterday. So being able to focus on some of that more high-level brand awareness development and building. I’m in the process of, I have a book proposal out right now, we’re trying to get a book deal, so hopefully that will come across the table in 2025. So it’s some of those bigger brand building, brand awareness projects that I’m really focused on for 2025.

Thank you.

I think we talked obviously a lot about networking, and I know I bang people over the head with that and I always will. But I think, like I mentioned before, it’s consistency and persistence. It’s not an easy job market, but still people are landing jobs every single day. That’s going to require you being consistent in your efforts. That means that if you’re looking to land a job, it’s something that you should be focusing on to the extent that you can daily, not doing it for two weeks and then taking two weeks off. That’s not going to drive results.

And being persistent in that: you know what, that avenue didn’t work, but now I’m going to try this avenue. And being able to manage rejection, because you’re going to get rejected. It doesn’t matter how qualified you are, how good you are, how ambitious you are, you could be the best of the best, you are going to get rejected. The more quickly you can accept it and move past it and then just go on to the next one, the more overall successful you will be. So it’s managing rejection, consistency and persistence.

Yeah, my general rule of thumb is the applying should be the last thing that you do. It’s almost like a last-ditch effort. If there is an active job that you’re interested in, I really try and encourage my clients to try every avenue they can to reach out to who they think would be a hiring manager or recruiter, which usually takes some detective work to figure that out, and just reach out and say, would love to be able to chat with you about this. Obviously write a more meaningful message and highlight your specific achievements and experience. But doing that, and trying to set up even a 10-minute phone call with somebody before you apply. The application is the last thing that I want to do.