N/A i can assure you that you can do this there is absolutely no reason that you cannot make a career transition right now it is super easy to be discouraged uh this has been obviously the most difficult year of our lives uh for most of us uh and and uh it has changed us in many ways and i think in some ways given us perspective on what's important to us and what we want out of our career on what we're willing to put up with in our job on a day-to-day basis and so it's no surprise that you've chosen to join for an hour because you may be thinking about making a change you may also find yourself on the beach and i'll tell you specifically that the market is surprisingly strong and i'll give you some very specific ideas this evening as to where you may want to direct your efforts i'm not going to spend a lot of time on me because diana went through it i just wanted to share briefly my perspective which is that i work with a lot of venture capital and private equity backed companies these are growth stage companies and man they are hiring so i'm not saying that's the only place to direct your efforts but that is one example of a category of folks that are hiring and so what we're going to do over the next hour is to go through step by step a methodology of how to find what it is you're looking for i'm going to talk about where some of the opportunities are specific industries i'm going to name them uh and i'm also going to talk about some of the big mistakes that i see people make continually especially during this very unique time and i'll just touch on linkedin profiles as well towards the end so we've got a lot to cover i have sat in your shoes even though i'm a headhunter today and a kellogg alum as well although from many many years ago my first job search coming out of kellogg was super challenging the market wasn't especially strong i wanted to pursue a technology company and back then if you can imagine this back in 95 there were no tech companies that came to campus uh and so i was the guy that did the off-campus job search um but what i learned along the way was that if you developed a target list and built a marketing funnel and worked to close these opportunities that you could be very successful much like a sales process and even if you don't think of yourself as a salesperson maybe you think of yourself as an engineer same thing it's a process and tonight i'm going to walk you through the process and i was lucky enough to get seven offers wound up at intuit where i worked on quickbooks but the point is that it can be done uh even when you're on your own now it's super easy to be discouraged by the headlines right now uh let's take a macro look just for a moment if you can imagine uh as diana was talking about 12 months ago we were looking at the lowest unemployment rate in 50 years we were at 3.5 percent here in the us and uh since that time we zoomed back up obviously to you know double digits and we're now back at about six and a half percent so we're making headway but we're still a long way from full employment that said that is an overall number and what you have to remember is that for college educated white-collar professionals much like you and the folks on this call the actual unemployment rate is far lower in fact it is it is close to full employment and all you have to do is look at a career builder or indeed or zip recruiter or any one of the 90 000 headhunters in the u.s and you'll see millions of job openings so while it is an efficient inefficient market there are millions of people looking for a job and there are millions of jobs looking for a person they can't always find each other but if you focus on the headlines it's just really easy to get down and so it's important to understand that there is always opportunity especially right now this is a great time of change change historically always presents opportunity i'm going to talk about some sectors but even within your sector the change if you think about it if you uncover it will lead you to opportunity and we'll go through some examples i call this value migration uh or or job dislocation we are seeing huge movement of people and of jobs and of dollar value obvious example would be from retail to e-commerce that has accelerated over the past year or from traditional health care and your doctor visits to telemedicine over the past year i suspect these are not just going to go back to the way they were and so that's going to create a ton of opportunity now value is going to migrate from one sector to another jobs will disappear over here and they'll reappear over here so yes there is change but that change creates opportunity if you're willing to invest the time to understand where the job is going i also want to touch on this concept of what i call the great reshuffling i think you're going to be hearing a lot more about this over the next three months and i say that because many of my clients are starting to have this discussion and what i mean is that companies are making a decision for themselves as to what their new officing or real estate strategy is going to be some companies like twitter and facebook and others have already decided and announced to their workforce that they are basically going to blow up the office requirement you can now work wherever you want for as long as you want for the rest of of your career with the company that's kind of one end of the spectrum the other end of the spectrum i certainly have clients who are excited about getting back to the office and as soon as it's safe and as soon as the employees have been vaccinated the hope is to return to the office and then there's a lot of companies in between that are trying to decide okay are we going to develop a hoteling strategy or every monday and thursday or in the office and the other days you work where you want the point is that i suspect you're going to see a great reshuffling here because as companies decide they're going to blow it up and go remote or virtual there are co employees that don't want that right that they like working in an office maybe they're extroverts or maybe that's where they do their best work some people just can't work at home as i think we found out over the past year on the other hand there are companies that are requiring people to go back to the office i spoke to one today and she said you know what i'm done i'm not doing an hour commute every day losing two hours of my life i don't do my best work in the office anyway and so she's already decided to start looking and so the point is you're going to see a great reshuffling that's going to create a lot of job opportunities and job openings over the next few months this is going to happen very quickly so the point is to keep calm the point is to not believe the headlines and have a plan and i think that's where a lot of people go wrong is they just don't have a plan so let me touch on some of the big mistakes N/A that i see people make as they take this process on the first of course which is the obvious one is to panic right that's not going to get us anywhere and so we're going to put that on a shelf also having no plan um you know at kellogg we learned it was drilled into us the importance of planning whether it's marketing or sales or finance or inventory or technology this is no different the difference is you have to do it for yourself but you need to have a plan even a pretty crappy plan you'll get far better results than what most job seekers do which is to just kind of approach it in a random haphazard way another big mistake that i see people make often especially over the past 12 months during this covet era is leaving one company and joining a competitor to that company and frequently the the exact issues that they were trying to move away from are the same issues in this company because as you know just like stocks move together in a basket if they're in the same industry you have the same largely the same business issues from company to company in an industry and so typically you might want to think about looking outside your industry which may feel a little uncomfortable but you may often find that your best move and i see a lot of candidates forget to do that another mistake taking a role without conducting due diligence i am continually surprised how even sophisticated well-educated people don't invest the time to do their own due diligence on the company on the cash in the bank and the burn rate and some of the business issues and and that can lead to uh mistakes that are kind of unforced errors really have no one to blame but yourself i'm holding out for the perfect situation this over the past 12 months has been a common one um my advice has been over the past 12 months and you've probably heard me say this or write about it is to take the first acceptable job you can find because if you don't you may be waiting three months six months 12 months for that next one to come along now that the job market's improving pretty quickly my advice still remains the same it's just to raise your bar right bring bring your bar up in terms of what you're willing to accept and i'll give you some examples shortly um spending a lot of time on your resume not a great use of time right that's not going to get you the job that's not going to get you meetings so look there are a lot of mistakes we're going to talk tonight over the next 45 minutes about an action plan that you can put into place whether you're actively looking whether you're thinking about looking and even if you're not looking at all and you maybe you've just taken a job and you're still joining us tonight you know i always say dig your well before you're thirsty and so i'm going to touch on that as well now remember you don't have to be perfect at this you don't have to outrun the bear you just have to outrun the guy in front of you and i say that half jokingly because there is no perfect in job searching there's no perfect job there's going to be trade-offs any way you look at it the key is to have a plan and the key is to know yourself well enough to know what you want and then how you're going to find it and that's what we're going to go N/A through now you can't start that process without knowing two key pieces of data and this is different for everybody for for each of us the first is the importance or the urgency of making a move at all now if your company is an unprofitable startup and has three months left of cash in the bank before it files for bankruptcy and we've seen a lot of bankruptcies the past 12 months then you need to get moving now you're already late if you've got three months left on on that burn rate you also need to understand your household's burn rate and your risk tolerance which will guide you in how selective you can afford to be and i think this year you know the savings rate in the u.s is is at a a maybe not a record high but it's it's dramatically higher than it was we're making money and we have nothing to spend it on so our burn rate has come down collectively as households i guarantee that's going to start to go up over the next few months as things reopen but the key is to as you head into a job search to understand your past and your future and how urgent it is to make a move and how selective you can afford to be if you've got a lot of cash reserves maybe you're a second income in your household then you can afford to be a bit more selective your bar can be a bit higher but for many that people that's not the case right half of this country doesn't have a month's worth of cash in the bank you can't afford to be quite as selective okay so let's talk about finding N/A your next role let's talk about where to target and where to focus your energy and the very simple tool that i use with individuals with candidates as i kind of talk about this has three circles and we're looking for the bullseye in the middle the first question is what are you eight in the top five percent at now i call a rock star someone that is in the top five percent of the market or of the talent available and i'm an optimist and i think all of us have the ability to be a rock star at something the problem is many of us never find out what that is we don't discover maybe we weren't encouraged enough as a child but the time is never too late to find your top five percent skill you will earn meaningfully more money have way more fun and be in far more demand once you discover your top five percent if you're fuzzy on what it is and it's not a laundry list of eight things right it's one or two things uh ask people that know you ask people that have worked with you ask your spouse ask your professors they will give you keen insights as to what you're better than 95 of the market at and so that's the first circle the second is what do you love right it's very hard to stay engaged and do great work if you're not doing something you love for some people that's developing a brand for some people that's writing for some people that's coding it's super important to know what you love and the third is what is a way that you can create value right so i may love uh you know something like a hobby like watching netflix but no one's gonna pay me to do it right so clearly we have to find the intersection of these three but these are the three questions that you should be asking yourself regularly maybe even quarterly what are you best at what do you love doing and what are people going to pay you for how do you create value and if you need a hint on that last one there's two big ways there's a lot of ways but there's two big ones one is driving the top line how are you going to increase sales and revenue at your business and the second is how are you going to reduce expenses at your business operational efficiency and the like right those are the two kind of key drivers to think about sounds pretty obvious but most categories fall into those i find that for many people if you can N/A find your target in that venn diagram in three categories you're going to have the most success and i'll slow down and kind of go through them the first is what i call makers the second is shakers and finally takers makers are people who create the product at a company they deliver the service right these are product managers these are software developers these are uh amazon delivery guys right these are people that without whom there would be no product or service the second category are shakers right so they sell it whatever it is it might be sales people but there's a whole bunch of other roles that are tied to that so what if you're a a great demand gen marketer or head of growth marketing who fills the funnel for the sales reps you are very much a shaker and there's other roles in there as well um and then takers right people that collect the cash that ring the bell that keep the money coming in and and driving oxygen which is the fuel of any business so the point of this is to say that even in a tight job market such as the one we're in the closer you can align yourself to maker shaker or taker the more success you're probably going to have this is not a time when companies are hiring generalists this is not a time when companies are hiring lux uh you know luxury hires or extra hires optional hires it's not happening what is happening are if we can't make the product and deliver it and we can't sell it and we can't make money then there's no company so they haven't stopped on those three so once you figure out your bullseye now you're ready to kind of start your plan and this is a little bit of go slow to go fast it's some self-reflection um i encourage you to do it over over wine N/A because that's where you'll really start to get the juices flowing once you've done that exercise then the next step again knowing yourself and being honest with yourself is to understand what i call your mvp your minimum viable position what job are you willing to take now that sounds really bad because who wants to take a job that you're willing to take what i mean is that we all have a bar and that bar goes up and down at different points in our life and it ties back to what we discussed on your company's burn rate and your personal financial burn rate and that's going to adjust your bar as well but it's super important to know where your bar is and write it down and have your criteria and have your priorities because when the right job comes along you want to be able to quickly identify it and say i'm going to take this job if i get the offer remember that if you pass you may be waiting three months six months 12 months to find the next one so you want to think about that ahead of time you don't want to be thinking about that the night before the offer expires i would encourage you to think about things like this a stable company meaning cash in the bank and in a sector that is stable or growing so when we did this webinar last year and diana hosted it you know at the time i strongly encouraged people to steer away from hospitality now if you just look at where we are in the cycle hospitality over the next six months looks like it's going to be growing pretty quickly and that doesn't mean you work at a hotel company necessarily but there's a whole ecosystem around travel around hospitality around dining etc so that now create creates opportunity again it means kind of staying open to and aware as to where sectors are in their cycle very much like you do when you invest thinking about the balance sheet and the cash runway of the business and not being afraid to ask uh as you do due diligence on a company especially a private company so that you know what you're dealing with right it's important to be realistic no job is perfect it might be the right job but the wrong title where it might be the right company but it's the wrong level or it may be the cash isn't quite what you want but the equity is very good there's all trade-offs there's no right or wrong but again knowing these things ahead of time so that you can set that bar and then take the first thing that clears that bar is is is what i recommend it's the same advice i give to my clients when they're hiring right we develop a score card and this is kind of in the book that i've written and we we set the bar and then we hire the first person that clears that bar now we keep the bar super high right but we're not going to risk losing someone or passing and then waiting six months now i'll give you some other good news which is as you're having this self-reflection on your bar and your mvp you have the greatest hall pass of all time i've been recruiting now for 25 27 years and i've never seen uh as many resumes or linkedin profiles that i would describe as choppy as there are now so many people have been displaced sadly laid off downsized right-sized outsourced offshored had to take multiple jobs and so you have air cover no matter what your situation is no matter how bad you think uh the past 12 months has has been to you and i know it has you have this great hall pass you have air cover employers my clients who are employers are more open than they have ever been to an imperfect resume or to a linkedin profile that's not quite tight or to someone that's been on the beach for three months and so use that to your advantage but don't wait the worst thing you can do is be the last one back into the pool right you want to get a jump start on this and i think now is the time to do that so as we start to think about the industries of where you want to focus your time so we figured out what you want to do and then we figured out kind of how urgent the need is and how quickly N/A you want to find something now the next question is well where do you want to look what industry and it comes right back to psychology it comes right back to maslow's needs right because if you think about the past 12 months many jobs many companies many services uh disappeared at the top of this pyramid but we still needed air and water and food and shelter and sleep we still needed security and health and property right and love and belonging certainly to get through the past year and so if you're conservative you want to stay towards the bottom of the triangle the bottom of the pyramid and focus on sectors that are largely not going to go away they may not be exploding but they're not going to go away whereas other more uh sexy or optional sectors can come and go right based on financial cycles as we've seen over the past 12 months so let me give you now some sectors that i see booming right now and again this is being recorded so you don't have to scramble to write it all down but we'll go through some of these and i'm just going to randomly kind of pick some legal is booming there's a lot of lawsuits right now for a whole lot of reasons and so that creates a lot of opportunity unfortunately in in not just the law firms but the surrounding sectors and there's a lot of changes happening in the law industry same with the medical industry uh telemedicine has 10xed over the past year that's not about to change um social networks surprisingly are still doing very very well as is the mortgage business as people move from cities to suburbs as they move from california to austin all these very meaningful changes that you read about again create business opportunities which then create employment opportunities e-learning right i've got two kids in school many of you do as well and it's not like e-learning is going to go away anytime soon right it's been turbocharged by 10 years and that's not about to change the cannabis industry we could do a whole webinar on that but i've got a number of clients in and around that sector and it's booming so you know i'm not going to go through all of these but the point is that anyone that tells you that there's not opportunity right now isn't looking very hard uh and that's not to mention recreation travel hospitality they are about to explode you have a coiled spring this pent-up demand of you know 300 million americans who have been trapped at home for a year and are eager to get out and spend money and that creates opportunity so i encourage you to be creative and i encourage you to not believe the headlines uh and really think about the sectors that you want to place your bets on right where do you want to focus uh where do you want to do that is the next question geographically so right so we've got our skill we know what we want to do now we've picked our industry or industries maybe we where we work or maybe not now we got to talk about where do we want to do it and what i have observed recently is that it's still pretty difficult to secure a job at a distance long distance unless that company's plan is to remain 100 virtual or remote even after the vaccine takes hold so what i'm saying is that if you are in chicago it is my recommendation to focus a disproportionate amount of your efforts either on chicago area companies or companies throughout the us or the world that are planning to stay virtual a lot of companies are nervous right now about hiring people remotely if they're planning to go back to the office because they feel like they're going to have some folks stragglers kind of hanging out there and then what are they going to have to do and you're at risk of uh of being separated and it being a pretty short journey so i'd encourage you to double down on these two areas at least for now probably not going to be the last job of your life but you're likely to have more success locally and 100 virtual and for some people that's not an option they don't want to work virtually in which case i would double down in your in your market okay so now we know where we're going to focus geographically let's talk about how do we actually find it that's the tricky part isn't it and i see most people get this entirely backwards each day i get you know countless emails uh who do you know or i'm looking for a job can you forward this to someone and it's just very haphazard and random uh we're taking uh our role and then we try to you know throw it out there into the world to see what happens not a great way to go about it what does work and works almost every time is to take your existing network and activate your network to identify your next role i call this purposeful networking not random networking i'm not talking about going to cocktail parties on thursday nights back when we could go to cocktail parties that's not statistically how you're going to find it but this is how it is done if your strategy is to sit home and wait for a headhunter to call with your next job your odds are you're going to fail headhunters collectively place about four percent of the job moves out there if your strategy is to you know click on apply on job boards all day uh which there's actually software that'll do it for you by the way you don't even have to burn the calorie anymore to press the button um you're gonna fail because job boards collectively result in less than 10 of the movements 80 plus percent of professional level jobs are found through personal introductions that is just how it's done now some of that is employee referrals some of that is activating your network but that's how you're going to find this next job if i was a betting man and you said how am i going to find it i would bet you're going to find it even if you consider yourself to be a lousy networker and you use the strategy that i'm about to go through uh i suspect you'll be successful so let's go to it so everyone has a network um hopefully you you are digging your well before you're thirsty but even if you're not a great networker N/A and you say i'm really bad at staying in touch with people i'm i'm shocked when people really stop and think about all the people that they know all the people in your life that if you made it easy for them would help you in some way and that takes some soul-searching it also takes a bit of humility where you think about all the managers that you've had over the years and you write them down all your mentors so maybe they were a senior level manager maybe your boss's boss who took a liking to you for whatever reason or you did a great job on a project and you write them down as well all your peers right so you were head of marketing and you had a head of sales next to you had a finance next to you ahead of ops next to you you write them down as well your investors and your board members hopefully the company did well uh maybe if it was a private company and you write them down all the customers think about all the customers that you interacted with even if they weren't necessarily your customers right if you worked in sales but even if you worked in marketing you got to know a lot of customers you write them down as well vendors so thinking on the back end of your company all the businesses that do business with you that kind of owe you one right because you've paid them along the way as your vendor so we're already making this list and i can assure you that it's far longer than you think on top of that we add people from kellogg right so our professors our classmates our mentors spouses of our friends and classmates are first degree connections in linkedin right so what i often find when i go through this exercise with people is i say i want you to work on this and send me the list and they think it's going to be i'll ask them and they're like oh it's probably 30 40 people they send me a list of 500 to a thousand people some people are in the thousands and so now the issue is your network is too big right you've actually got too big a network and so now the question is well how do you prioritize all that because we came up with a ton of people that we want to activate we don't want to ask them to do anything yet but we'll get to that but we got to prioritize that and so to do that i kind of uh set it up in excel or google docs and uh google sheets and kind of ask yourself three questions for each person this takes an hour this exercise uh does the person know you really well or just kind of know you right or would they just kind of recognize your name and that's kind of three two one on the first column do they think really highly of me uh again three two one so maybe i crushed a project and i tripled revenue and the ceo you know thought i was just the king that's a three uh someone who thought i was a good writer maybe that was a one right but we we add that to that column and then is the person in a position to hire me or introduce me to people uh who could hire me so that's often level related right it might be a headhunter it might be a private equity investor it could be a ceo uh versus you know say a uh you know a software developer or an office manager who's maybe not a position to hire me or refer me and so that's three two one as well you add it up or you multiply it develop your own great methodology and you're now going to take this list which is 500 to 5000 people and we've prioritized it now we have something that's actually actionable right we can actually do something with this and again the odds are you're going to find your next role from this list we don't know who it is we don't know how and it may be luck i heard about one this morning where i introduced someone for a job opportunity they wound up hiring the brother of this individual i didn't even know this but again it was through a network okay so how do we activate this N/A what most people do which is entirely backwards is they send mass outreach mass mail mass emails mass texts to this whole list and they'll send their resume as an attachment with a far too long cover letter and they'll say uh who do you know or are you hiring and they're pushing the work onto this person which also put by the way puts the pressure on this person um and that strategy rarely works because while i said people will do stuff for you they'll help you they're busy especially right now and they'll do it if you make it super easy for them don't delegate this to your network leverage or activate your network so the way to do that is to create a list and this list includes 30 companies i call this your focus 30 list there's no magic in the number 30 but what i found is 30 is enough companies to fill that pipeline that i talked about earlier and the odds are you will wind up with some marbles coming out the bottom if you start with two or three companies it's just not enough and if you start with 500 companies you can't get enough headway you can't build enough momentum with that many companies so 30 just works really well and these companies again should be local companies or virtual we talked about that and they should be in sectors that are either stable or growing right so a sector that's probably not would be traditional automobiles right i don't see a lot of growth there over the next 10 years ev electric vehicles absolutely traditional suvs probably not so much right so be strategic about where you want to invest your time pick those 30 like you're picking a portfolio of 30 stocks now how do you pick those 30 companies the there these are companies where you have an unfair advantage maybe you know that business inside and out maybe you have some in-depth information about their business this happens a lot when someone moves from a company to one of their customers or one of their vendors right you've seen it from the other side you're incredibly valuable because you have this in-depth understanding maybe you have a group of former co-workers right that left one company and eventually seven of them wound up at another company that would be another example of a company that might be on your focus list so i would think about customers i would think about vendors partners versus starting with random companies but the point is you're developing this target list of 30 companies and by the way this is a rolling list so when one company gives you a dead end and says we don't want you here we've got nothing we're not hiring forget about it you you replace them on the list with another uh company okay so it's a rolling list now the step that most people don't do and i would encourage you to do it is to research these 30 companies like your life depends on it invest the time to understand these businesses inside and out there's no excuse anymore thanks to the internet to understand these businesses even if they're private uh thoroughly i mean you know your the business when you go into the meeting the interview and you tell the interviewer things that they didn't even know about their company that's researching a company now once you've got your list of companies N/A we then have to say okay are they hiring and so one way to do that of course is the job section or careers section of that company's website but another is to set up daily email job alerts so you go to alerts.google.com and you list those 30 companies and now you're getting daily alerts not just on job opportunities but on news and headlines investment ideas etc related to your focus 30 list we're also tracking and all this is distracted google sheets or excel we're also tracking job openings and you're setting up daily job alerts from indeed from zip recruiter from linkedin all the big guys have them and it'll email you every time a new job becomes available at a target company it's totally free and it's going to email this to you every day it's great you wake up and you got jobs in your email box here's the mistake whatever you do don't click apply do not apply online N/A don't click that button that says apply here use these job alerts as information as leads you're a sales rep they are leads for you but the last thing you want to do is click apply why is that you are going to wind up in a stack of this many applications that are typically screened by some computer first and then screened by some very very junior hr person or administrative person who knows nothing about the job or the role or you or anything instead use your research because you've been doing all that research to identify the hiring manager it's not that hard not hr but the person who's actually making the decision if it's a marketing role at least go to the vp of marketing if it's a sales role the vp of sales etc track down their email address there are infinite tools online these are four of them to track down people's email address and ask them sorry ask these search engines the name and it'll give you their email address it's great okay so now we have our target list N/A you're gonna conduct a marketing campaign to these folks and it is based on research it is based on them not you think like a marketer they are your customer what does your customer need solved and what is the problem that you can solve back to the three circles that we talked about a campaign is best done on email still i have seen some people prior to covet having success with physical mail or fedex but that's not working anymore because so many people working at home so we're back to email when you identify that vp of marketing or that vp of sales or that ceo or that private equity investor you're going to email them four times now i know that sounds like a lot but you'll be shocked and i've done these tests found that 25 of the time the response comes on that fourth send so if it's just like a sales rep if you make only one attempt they have found that in sales you need to make nine attempts to land a deal uh same thing here right at least four emails space them out right well maybe every other day or every third day again you're tracking like a crm uh every person that you're reaching out to i love sending evenings and weekends evenings and weekends people's in their inbox is not filling up during the day and so you're much higher likelihood of getting your response now what do you what are you right right that's really the mystery isn't it um what you don't do let's start with that right what you don't do which which is what most people do is have a cover letter a five paragraph super dense cover letter just like we learned in school with your resume attached i can tell you that that will wind up in uh if not in the spam box because it has an attachment um and most companies are screening it for attachments from strange email addresses it's not going to get read right you're maybe going to get five seconds and five seconds i can't read that what they can read is a super short teaser of a message that's focused on their number one problem but how do i know their number one problem you know it because you've done all that research right we talked about that and that was the whole point of doing the research methodical research about the industry the company their problems their competitors what's happening with their stock if they're public and if you don't know what their problem is in your email you can ask them what's your biggest problem and then you come back with the solution the reason this works is there's a bit of a shock factor it is so different than most other job seekers who do it the old-fashioned way right long cover letter copy and paste attach their resume it doesn't work no one cares about your aspirations dreams or goals right save that for your roommate or your spouse or your partner this is an opportunity to solve someone's problem if they're the head of marketing maybe they need more leads if they're the head of sales maybe they're always missing the number if it's the cto maybe she's got a security issue whatever it is you know from your research and you craft a five sentence email five sentences it is super short uh there there's a famous author who i can't remember right now who said you know you you edit and you edit and you edit and revise and revise until you can't simplify it anymore that's when you know you've got it and that's what you should do this is not copy and paste 30 people get 30 different emails now you start to see why this takes time but this is how it's done this is what actually works now in this campaign your email campaign your subject line is the number one thing if it doesn't get opened they're not going to read it so it has to get attention i actually track all my subject lines and i track their software that i track open rates if you're into that you can do it but you'll know from your response rates which subject lines are working so don't blast all 30 start with five and see which response rates work and start to iterate the last thing you want to write in the subject line is anything that smells like looking for a job or um uh you know kellogg alumni like no one cares but if it's my number one problem and there's a tease that tells me you may have the answer i'm going to open that email the call to action is equally important in email or any communication and i find that the action that works the call to action to be a 15 minute zoom video call the reason it works really well is just like this you know ninety percent of communication is visual so it's far better than a phone call it's far better than an email exchange and over the past year people have gotten pretty used to it so it's a lot less intrusive perhaps than it used to be so that is the ask right i have an idea for your business i think i can solve one of your biggest problems i'd love to hop on a zoom video call for 15 minutes to share the research that i've uncovered if this is a consumer packaged goods company you've gone to the grocery store you've bought every food in the aisle you've done a taste test you've dissected it you've studied the nutrition and you've cracked the code on why their market share is slipping and you write that email to say i'd like to get on a call because i think i've figured out why your 16 ounce size of this cereal ain't working that head of marketing is going to be pretty interested but if you start with i'm looking for a job they won't be now once you're on the zoom video call of course you know now you're going to engage in a great conversation that's going to lead to the job and the reason that works is once you get the yes you're going to prepare for that meeting like your life depends on it i'm talking about 5 or 10 hours which i know sounds insane but i can tell you from the 30 000 people that i've interviewed candidates that 99 are so ill prepared for the conversation that you will distinguish yourself you'll actually convince a hiring manager to create a role for you if you can demonstrate that you're that kind of person that understands the issues that can frame business problems and that can solve it for them but you have to do that work you have to do that legwork there's just there's just no no way around it the spam or copy and paste is not going to work okay we've got about 10 minutes left we're definitely going to finish on time i want to touch on that zoom session that video interview because this year we've cut we've all come a long way maybe too far in zoom um but i still see candidates that are struggling with it sometimes and i know it can be awkward um there are some obvious things right logging in early making sure everything's working reboot your computer before you start i'm not going to bore you with those things but what i will say is that eye contact and engagement are crucial so what i typically recommend is to have your your notes or your questions or your thoughts kind of positioned in a window right next to the camera on your screen just below it like right now i have my presentation right below the camera so i can look at the camera i can have eye contact that is what engages people but every day i i talk to a candidate for a role and their camera's positioned and they talk to me like this because their their camera is down here they should be looking up here right you shouldn't just be looking at yourself no one needs to do that you want to be looking at your audience which i know is hard because it's that tiny little glass lens but that makes all the difference um also energy so hand motions and energy that's emphatic not going crazy but you cannot make that kind of impression an impact if you're kind of you know talking like this and and there's no movement and it's all monotone and you'll put that person to sleep before the 15 minutes is over it's just really boring they'll be gone if they even stay awake or they'll be checking their email which is even worse but if you're like using their name and you're like paula i i've tried all these foods i understand what's the problem and she'll she'll be wrapped in attention okay so if you if you're not confident even after a year of zoom uh calls and i understand that do a mock interview with someone you trust right someone that can record it and you look at yourself and i know it's hard to do that but video interviewing is a very very different skill than in-person interviewing and i don't think video interviewing is going to go away anytime soon so you might as well get used to it um after you've had that meeting remember that we never sent our resume did we we just sent a link to our linkedin profile and included that in the five sentence email and that's what got the meeting after the meeting we want to follow up with something what do you follow up with that is the time to follow up with a N/A more comprehensive resume or maybe even a bio the great news is you can take your learnings from the call and you can create what i call a mirror resume a mirror resume is just a document that mirrors that hiring manager's biggest challenge a lot of times that's written in a job description but let's say there was no job description let's say you found this on your own and you got the vp of marketing to take a call but you identified that that she's got three big problems in her business and you talked about them for 15 minutes now you take your resume and you spend time customizing it no one says you can't do this right we all had one version at kellogg but you can have infinite versions and you customize it to match that particular company and role you delete stuff that's not relevant you add stuff that is you bring stuff to the top that's especially relevant you make sure your headline nails exactly their biggest problem so when you send that and you're able to explain how you'll create value the reader will say oh my god this person was dropped on my lap and was created for this role it's all optics but it works because you're gonna have done the legwork and the research you had a great conversation you follow up with this document that somehow was perfectly suited for the job you're kind of halfway home again you can't do this for a hundred companies there's just not enough time in the day especially if you've got a full-time job so again your focus 30 list is the way to go uh we're almost done and then we'll open it up for questions there's a couple of documents you want to also have ready at your disposal as you engage into this search one i talk a lot about which is your sars that sounds like sars so i guess i need to change that but it stands for situation action and result so in every job you've ever had in every role you've ever had at every company you had a situation that you stepped into right you inherited something in the business then you took a series of actions and then there were results and these are hard to remember and so you want to refresh yourself i actually keep a list of all mine right in a spreadsheet what did i step into was it a turnaround was it a startup was it a new product launch what specific things did i do and i don't mean a laundry list but what were the big two or three action steps that we identified and took action and then what were the results right we took share we grew revenue 30 we quantify those these are super important for your resume for your linkedin and for your discussion with people and then your references obviously having those put together ahead of time can make the difference when a candidate struggles to come up with references a lot of my clients get really nervous because they worry that this person is not referencable and so my recommendation is have that ready before you go remember your resume is going to look like this if you click apply so avoid all that go through this process now the linkedin profile is equally important so let me just touch on that N/A for a moment before we go to q a your linkedin profile you only get one right you can't customize it now you can't change it over time but everyone's going to see the same one your linkedin profile is a job it's an advertisement for you it's not your life story it's not your resume it is a an advertisement for you and you get six seconds the studies show that on average you get six seconds so how do you use every piece of those six seconds to your advantage it is not about job descriptions right if you're a product manager if you're a cfo if you're a sales rep the reader knows what that is right they know what it is don't say hired to do this that and the other talk about your quantifiable achievements how you took market share increased revenue hired 17 people increased retention whatever it was how did you create value also maximize those two photos i say two because there's the small face shot photo right but then there's your big banner photo and if and you should be maximizing uh both of those um and then finally when in doubt leave it out so most people try to cram 10 pounds of crap into a 5 pound bag and you wind up with a mishmash and again you only get 6 seconds so if you're if it's not going to make the difference for you if no one's going to hire you or take a meeting for that leave it out just get rid of it because it's not going to make the difference that will let everything else come to the surface i do want to mention real quick before we open it up i've got a linkedin makeover service i'm not going to spend much time on it now but if you're interested i work with people one-on-one and we're going to nail your profile and really tell the story in six seconds so you can learn about that on the website just go to recruitrockstars.com linkedin so with that i'm happy to open it up i'm