Proactive Job Search: Making LinkedIn Your Weapon
By Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter
Everyone wants recruiters contacting them, but that isn’t always realistic. Many times, you were applying for jobs and applying for jobs and applying for jobs. There is a better way. My guest, Mike Podesto of Find My Profession, and I discuss tactics that will help you get much better results.
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Jeff Altman 00:06
So my guest today is Mike Podesta. Mike is the founder and CEO of find my profession. His career advice has been featured on sites like Forbes, Times, Fast Company and Zety. And when he is not working, you can find Mike hiking, climbing or biking one of Colorado’s gorgeous mountains. How cvan we find you there. The mountains are huge! Mike, welcome. Thanks for making time today. Appreciate it.
Mike Podesto 00:36
Thanks so much for having me, Jeff. It’s an honor to be on the show.
Jeff Altman 00:39
Thank you. So how would you suggest someone position themselves in order to be proactive in their job search and get results?
Mike Podesto 00:50
Yeah, sure. So I like the word proactive. I’m a big believer in being active in your job search versus just hoping that recruiters and hiring managers are going to come to you and offer you positions. Usually, that’s not how it works. So a lot of people think that the best approach to being proactive in a job search is going on job boards, finding these jobs and then filling out applications. But the problem is everybody’s doing that and that really doesn’t do much to set you apart. So here I kind of want to share a little bit of like, how you can go about job searching and doing things different than the average person does.
Jeff Altman 01:33
So what should they do?
Mike Podesto 01:34
I’m a big fan of LinkedIn. So at my company, find my profession, we have a fully managed job search service where we will do all the work for our clients to find them jobs. We find the jobs, apply to the jobs, network for them, do interview prep, everything. And a big focus that we have is on using LinkedIn to network for the jobs that you want. So after you filled out the application and found the job that you’re looking for, and applied, a lot of people just stop right there and wonder “Why? I filled out 50 applications. And I’ve just got a bunch of automatic rejections where I haven’t got one callback for an interview!” And they wonder why that is. The solution to that and the way that you can get way more interviews callbacks, is by networking, and particularly using LinkedIn to do that networking. I like LinkedIn, because it’s a pretty much free tool. You can pay for the paid plan, but you can do a whole lot with just the free service to find a job. So what I recommend that everybody does is after applying to a job online, they need to find out who the decision makers are at the company. And LinkedIn is the best tool to do that. It’s essentially a huge org chart for companies publicly available at your fingertips to discover exactly who the hiring managers for the role, some of your peers would be for the role, and then reach out to them via messages on LinkedIn, letting them know that you’re interested in the position and ask him to schedule a time to speak
Jeff Altman 03:05
How do you find the specific one for the specific role. And folks, we’re not talking about HR here, we’re talking about the hiring manager.
Mike Podesto 03:14
Exactly, yeah, good point. So there’s so many recruiters and many people getting pitched all the time, and they’re kind of tired of it, you don’t really want to reach out to these people. We’re trying to bypass them and go straight to the source. The hiring managers or peers. So the best way to figure it out is look at the job description. Usually in the job description, maybe about 10% of the time, it’ll say who it’s reporting to. That’s rare. And you’re lucky if it tells you the exact title or name of the person who it’s reports to. That’s an easy one. You can reach out to them. Usually, it’s not going to tell you exactly who to reach out to though. So it takes a little digging. So you’re just going to read the job description, try to understand what team you’re working on. So the larger the company, the harder it is. If it’s a 100 person company, and it’s a marketing manager position, you can assume it’s going to report to a marketing director or a marketing VP, whoever is right above that role in the kind of order of hierarchy. For a big company like Amazon, it can be hard to figure out who the hiring manager is, especially if it’s a vague title like a product manager. So what you’ll want to do is look into detail in the job description, and figure out if it identifies what team you’re working on. So it might say this is a project manager position on the Alexa AI team. Now you can use those keywords when you’re searching in LinkedIn. You search by Amazon employees, you’re gonna see 300,000 results or whatever it is, and then you search Alexa AI now that narrowed the 300,000 down to 300. Okay, my Alexa is communicating right now because she hears me saying her name but. From there you now have 300 results, which is still a lot, right? So this this is a project manager position. You can assume that it’s going to report to either a senior Project Manager, a project director or something. So you just start playing with those additional keywords that are hierarchy keywords. So a manager usually reports to a director or a director to a VP or VP to SVP or a C level person. And once you do a little bit of digging on LinkedIn, you can kind of see how their hierarchy is, and figure out what those titles are.
Jeff Altman 05:22
Up to here just to deal with the mechanics. And the mechanics might be go to the search box on your LinkedIn homepage. Enter the title for the role that you think it might report to. Do I have that right? Do
Mike Podesto 05:42
You do
Jeff Altman 05:43
Okay, and then from there are you going to, and again, filters, you get better filters with one of the paid versions of LinkedIn. But on the free one, you got some basic filters you can work with. So you have the company filters, you got the geography filters, I believe, I don’t remember the others because I’m a paid user. But, I think the idea is you’re working your way up the food chain, to identify someone who might have that specific title for the role as a way of reaching out to them.
Mike Podesto 06:19
Yeah, so it really depends. I’d normally the first looking for jobs to apply to because rather than just cold outreach, these are warm positions. You know, the hiring manager has a need for this position. So you get the best results, by reaching out to a hiring manager that has a position open right now, than just no position. So let’s say you just went on LinkedIn, you go to the Jobs tab, and you applied to one of the jobs. I see Floor and Decor is looking for a Chief Executive Merchant in training. Right. So from there, I can click on Floor and Decor, the link that LinkedIn provides, and then I can click View All Employees. There’s 4230 listed. From there, if I know that that position is going to be in Denver, and I’m assuming that it’s not a remote role. I read that it’s not a remote role, I know my manager’s likely to be in Denver as well. I can filter by location, Denver, Colorado, just brought the it was 3900 results down to 36 results. So I already have a really nice shortlist of people that could potentially be my manager for that role. Now since I know this was a chief executive merchant in training role, really, I’d take a deeper dive into the job description, to kind of see what I can learn about it and try to find keywords that I can search LinkedIn for. But I would probably be looking for the word merchant in here. And out of those 36 results, only three of them have the word merchant, and one of them’s title is Chief Executive, Merchant, Women in Leadership. And the sense, this is a chief executive merchant in training role, good chance that this chief executive merchant either knows who the hiring manager is, or is the hiring manager. But either way, it’s somebody that I want to talk to. So I can reach out to Ashley, who’s the Chief Executive merchant and say, ‘Hey, Ashley, I’m super interested in this position. I just applied to it. I’d love to schedule a time to chat and learn a little bit more about the role and tell you why I’d be a good fit.’ Now, whether she’s the hiring manager or not, Ashley should take a little bit of time and possibly will to speak with me and either tell me about the role, which could be useful information for an interview, because I’ll get some inside knowledge into what the position is about if she’s a peer. Or if she’s the manager, I’m talking directly to the source and can try to sell myself on why I’m a good fit for this position. And LinkedIn is great, because it’s really the only place that you can do a search like this and get a full list of almost every employee at the company, their titles that relate to the job that you’re interested in applying to.
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Jeff Altman 08:49
And sometimes I know, you can use some text in order to filter. So for example, if you’re not finding the right titles, for whatever the reason, you might pull some text from the job description and see if you can identify the person that way. Because in their description about their work, they may be using the same way in which
Mike Podesto 09:15
Exactly, yeah, in the description, in the hiring manager’s job description section on LinkedIn, sometimes there’ll be saying stuff. Yeah, exactly.
Jeff Altman 09:25
That one’s so much fun. It’s kind of like when you, if you’re trying to find where a job is that recruiters looking for, sometimes they’re a little lazy, and they don’t make enough changes to the job description. So they just do a copy and paste when they post and thus you can find the original organization because they’re running the same ad.
Mike Podesto 09:48
Yeah, I’ve done that countless times. Yeah, you’re saying you copy and paste a job description from a recruiting agency that’s hiring for some unknown company. You paste it into Google and you can find it on the company’s website, exactly word for word. Yeah, we do that all the time as well because again, you’re getting to the source versus a recruiting agency. A company’s probably more likely to hire you and they don’t have to pay some 30% recruiting placement fee attached to it when you’re the same person.
Jeff Altman 10:17
And folks, if you’re listening to this is a podcast, as we’ve been talking, Mike has been having this huge smile on his face, because he’s really enjoying talking about what it’s like to do this and how to go about doing it. So he obviously enjoys this. He’s good at it. And we’re going to talk about more ways you could be proactive, perhaps using LinkedIn, maybe using Google whatever. So, so far, we’ve been talking about how to suss out (I love that phrase, suss out) the hiring manager on LinkedIn. What else can people be doing to be proactive with searching?
Mike Podesto 10:52
Yeah, so before moving on from LinkedIn, there’s the same process of what you’re doing but reaching out to peers is great as well. So we like to do outreach for our clients to peer type roles, as well as hiring managers. Slightly different message for each you know. The hiring manager you want to speak to so that you can try to pitch yourself and get an interview . A peer, it’s more of a discovery call. ‘Hey, notice that you’re in such and such position I recently applied to. It looks like an amazing role. I’d love to hear your experiences at so and so company in this position. More often than not, people when they think you’re not trying to pitch them on something, just interested in learning about their company or their role. They’re happy to speak to you and tell you what they think about the role. And usually the ones that aren’t happy to speak to you and tell you about the role don’t love their job that much. And maybe you shouldn’t be applying to that job in the first place. But usually people who are passionate about the job and what they do, are pretty happy to get on a phone call with you and tell you about it. So that’s a great way to prepare yourself for the actual conversation with the hiring manager. Because you can say, ‘Yeah, I spoke to Jeff over at Cisco. I know he’s in the same role, he told me that he really loves it. He told me X, Y and Z about the role. So you already have a basic understanding of what the role’s like. I have already talked to somebody at the company to kind of name drop when you’re speaking to the hiring manager. There’s a ton of value in that as well.
Jeff Altman 12:15
And I’m wondering, you know, I’ve always said, the dirty little secret of LinkedIn, is that unless someone’s looking for a job, they’re not always on the platform, and they’re not always responding. What do you run into in your work doing what I believe is called reverse recruiting– that is trying to help represent someone, not an employer, but represent an individual and, and direct them through the process.
Mike Podesto 12:44
Yeah, I think more and more people are using LinkedIn, usually, there’s some indicators on their profile, if they’re gonna respond to you and be active or not. So when I go to a profile of somebody, I want to reach out to like a hiring manager. And they only have 13 connections on LinkedIn and their profile looks like it just hasn’t been updated. You know, they have no description of what they do, it’s 1997 to present for their last job. And it’s just very little information– no endorsements, no recommendations– good chance that they’re not just ignoring you when you reach out to them. It’s probably more likely that they just don’t go on LinkedIn ever. That’s somebody that I would probably go out and use a tool like Hunter to go find their email address, and then send them an email.
Jeff Altman 13:30
Hunter is a Chrome extension, as I recall?
Mike Podesto 13:32
it is yeah, you can use it as a Chrome extension, or just the desktop application.
Jeff Altman 13:37
And, thuis, what that’s able to do is to find an email address for someone. Am I correct?
Mike Podesto 13:41
Yeah, Hunter.io. sometimes there’s some guessing or sometimes you have to connect with somebody else with a company to get the email sequence and understand if it’s first initial last name at company name.com. But same exact message you’re sending on LinkedIn, you can do via email. LinkedIn is my go to preference because they can see your face. They can read basically your resume on LinkedIn right away before they even respond. So it’s very little pressure for them. And they can kind of see what they’re getting into before they respond. Email can seem a little more pitchy cold outreach email, while LinkedIn seems more personalized. But for those people who don’t use LinkedIn at all, and are only going to be using email, they’re probably a little bit more okay with with getting an email. So
Jeff Altman 14:24
I’ll just remind you, folks, you know they’re online on LinkedIn, when messaging, you see a little green dot that lets you know they’re online. Doesn’t mean they’re actually at their computer. Doesn’t mean anything more than they’re online on LinkedIn. And when they walk back to their desk, or kitchen table, as the case might be, they’ll see that someone sent them a message.
Mike Podesto 14:49
And not everybody has that feature turned on either, right? So just because you don’t see the green dot also doesn’t mean they’re not on LinkedIn right now. It could be
Jeff Altman 14:57
interesting. I didn’t know you could turn that off.
Mike Podesto 15:00
Oh, yeah.
Jeff Altman 15:02
I shouldn’t be surprised about that. So what else can people do proactively to reach out, find work, be aggressive?
Mike Podesto 15:14
So a big thing I like to do as well for applying to jobs because if you’re gonna do all this work job searching properly, which is doing this networking I’m talking about, you might as well make sure it’s for jobs that are actively available. So I look at the date that the job was posted pretty frequently. And I always use the filter, when I’m searching to do like seven to 14 days max for a job, they will default usually to 30+ days, so you can see things from a month ago. At the time the company is about to take that down, because they’re already done, and they just haven’t gotten to it. So you take the time to fill out an application and it was just wasted. 30 minutes of your time for nothing, or they already have a shortlist they’re interviewing, but they’re keeping the job open just in case they need to filter through more applicants later. But then they ended up hiring somebody and you essentially wasted your time applying. So I will look for jobs as fresh as possible. Usually seven days. If I’m actively job searching, it’ll be seven days. If I’m starting a job search, I might do 14, 20 days to start to see if there’s anything out there. But if I’m searching weekly, every week for jobs, I only need to do a seven day filter, if I’m searching weekly, because I’ll be catching everything new that pops up. So yeah, that’s a big one.
Jeff Altman 16:34
So if someone is in the habit of using indeed to find jobs, they can circle back to LinkedIn and do the exact same thing, right? They can find the hiring manager, they can do the outreach there. They don’t have to apply on indeed.
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Mike Podesto 16:49
Not if they are on LinkedIn. Yeah, no, they don’t. But we use every job search site that is at our fingertips, depending on the client. So if there’s a very niche client, you know, USAjobs or federaljobs, they’re not going to be on LinkedIn at all. It’s all going to be through USA Jobs. You hop on LinkedIn after do the networking. Same with special niche sites– you know, remote sites, virtual vocations, engineering sites that have engineering specific jobs, we’ll use all those job search sites to find the positions that are available, but then we’re going to hop back over to LinkedIn as the one tool that you really should be using no matter what job search site you’re on to find the org chart and the hierarchy for those companies and reach out to people.
Jeff Altman 17:34
You have mentioned USA Jobs, the federal job site. And in that particular case, it’s one of the few times I tell people to apply. Because you do actually have to apply. you can’t do an end around the system to begin the application process. You do have to do it in that formal way. And then you can do the end around afterwards, right?
Mike Podesto 17:58
Yeah, they’re very strict on federal jobs. Actually, the whole networking strategy on LinkedIn is still effective, but much less effective for federal jobs, because a lot of those jobs are so by the book, they can’t respond to you and schedule a discovery call just to be nice with you like they could for some corporate position, because they have very strict rules to follow to make sure everything’s fair and uniform. So it’s still better than not doing it on federal jobs. But we tell our federal clients that if they are going to use services, expect that it will be a little bit less effective and take a little longer on average than a non federal job search
Mike Podesto 18:02
The difference between non federal and federal in terms of time, what would you say?
Mike Podesto 18:45
I mean, we’ve had federal applications that take four hours to fill out an application because they’re just so extensive. Sometimes they require additional documents, like certain narratives, ECQs MPQ?, Anyway.
Jeff Altman 19:02
What’s ECQ? Just so I know,
Mike Podesto 19:05
Executive core qualifications, and they’re, they just have acronyms for everything, but they’re extremely detailed, basically, five one page documents describing how you have certain skills basically, and putting your career into . . . we provide ECQ writing services for clients, but we have, you know, very specialized dedicated writers on staff for that. 99% of resume writers and those professionals cannot and do not write federal resumes or ECQs. It’s very specialized.
Jeff Altman 19:41
Gotcha. So getting off the federal stuff, and just be circling back to LinkedIn and other non-government work, what other things can people do to be more proactive? What other tools should they employ? What are the techniques should they engage in? Tell us everything! Please tell us everything.
Mike Podesto 20:02
Yeah. So I mean, of course, your profiles got to be up to par if you’re going to be utilizing LinkedIn to do a lot of this networking, right. So that kind of goes without saying, but I’ll touch on that. Like, you need to have an updated nice looking LinkedIn profile. So that means your most recent positions, probably a nice background photo, a nice professional looking photo, some relevant skills on your profile, I mean, just fill it out. LinkedIn pretty much walks you through how to have a complete profile, there are professional companies out there that you can hire to write your LinkedIn for you. But a better LinkedIn is going to do wonders in the outreach, because a lot of people will look at your profile first, if you’re pitching a hiring manager, and then see if they think you’re even a relatively good fit for the position, before responding to you to say, ‘Yeah, sure, let’s get on a phone call.’ And if you’re applying to a Director of Operations job, and your last three job titles are, you know, sales manager and marketing manager, they’re gonna look at your profile and say, This person is not a fit at all,’ and probably not even going to respond. So just making sure it’s up to date is a big one. Another thing is, the jobs that you’re applying to, you can do everything that I’m talking about. But if you’re not applying to the right jobs, you’re probably not going to have a lot of success. People aren’t going to want to schedule calls, like I said, if you’re not a good fit for the position.
Jeff Altman 21:27
So in terms of profile, I always tell people, your profile and your resume have to be somewhat congruent. They don’t have to be identical. But if someone were reading your resume, and then go into your profile, as is the habit that most organizations have, they’re gonna see something that gives them the idea that yuo’re telling them the truth in the resume, and that you actually have the expertise you profess to have in the resume.
Mike Podesto 21:57
Yeah, that’s true. Because LinkedIn is very public, you can’t really be lying on there. Because you can . . . past employers or people that you worked with looking at your profile and saying, ‘wait a second, you weren’t that title. And you didn’t do that.’ You could maybe make some stuff up on your resume. But on your LinkedIn, you’d be getting called out potentially by people if you were just publicly lying. And yeah, they are consistent. The main difference would be you know, on your LinkedIn, it can be a little less formal. You could probably use, like, I statements, you statements, things like that, while on your resume, you may pick out some some things like I, you know, I did this, I did this. But yeah, they’re pretty much gonna have almost identical content so that somebody doesn’t look at it and say, ‘this is confusing. You said you did this on your resume, but this on your LinkedIn. I’m trying to connect the dots here, and I don’t understand.’ And if there’s ever any confusion with a recruiter or hiring manager, they usually don’t take the time to get the clarification from you. They just move on right away.
Jeff Altman 22:56
So, if you’re watching on video, you saw my finger go down, that was the buzzer for the trapdoor to send the chair backward, and you went to the moat?
Mike Podesto 23:05
Yeah, I’m not gonna take any time to try to understand the confusion here and get to get to know you better. It’s very quick, there’s hundreds of applicants for every job. And if it’s not fairly clear from the beginning, chances are they’re moving on.
Jeff Altman 23:19
And once you’re doing the update to your LinkedIn profile, I’m going to remind everyone that LinkedIn does sell a product to recruiting firms and corporations, that allows them to search the entire database. And thus, this is the notion of being the passive job hunter that I know I was involved in creating this myth many years ago. It’s the notion that people who are not actively looking for work are superior to the ones who are actively looking for work. And the concept is, you want to attract people to you. And thus, if they find you, and you’re not applying, that’s a good thing to them. They think they’re not actively looking for work, even though you may have the same resume on 27 job boards. You may have posted in lots of different places, and you are being aggressive. So the things that you do to draw people to you and your profile, your profile is like a resume. So do things so that your resume will get attention and also do things that draw recruiters, corporate and third party, to you as well.
Mike Podesto 24:34
Yeah, definitely um, LinkedIn has a feature I believe where you can say that you’re open to opportunities and what kind of opportunities you’re looking for so that you know recruiters and such can more easily find you as well.
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Jeff Altman 24:47
That’s the open to work little ring around your picture that shows up. That’s again, I think, a filter that the they have on LinkedIn Recruiter, so they can first screen those people and then go to others.
Mike Podesto 25:05
Yeah, yeah, I mean, in an ideal world, yeah, you could not be super actively applying and be getting people reaching out to you for jobs. But more often than not, it doesn’t happen unless you’re in a super niche field and somebody searching you know, I don’t know aerospace mechanic engineer in, you know, some small town in the middle of nowhere and you’re the one person on LinkedIn who pops up, and they reach out to you. But more often than not, as the world becomes smaller, there are hundreds of people with the same search terms or same skill set, as you or anybody searching for a job. And it’s hard for recruiters or headhunters to just find inactive job seekers, try to pitch them, believe their company, and all of those things. So yeah, it’d be ideal, but doesn’t always happen. So the proactive approach,
Jeff Altman 26:00
Proactive, passive, you got to do both, as someone said, so, so well, many years ago, sending your resume out is for when you want to be the hunter and having your profile attracting to you is for when you want to be hunted. You want both to be going on concurrently. You want to be aggressive. You want to be passive. You want to do the things that are going to make you attractive to firms. And what else can they do? Come on, you got other things!
Mike Podesto 26:33
Yeah, I mean, we break our job search for our clients down into weekly, basically things that we do. So every Friday we go and we look for jobs for our clients.
So that’s just job searching. So we kind of touched on making sure you’re finding jobs that are going to be a good relevant fit for you. Um, a lot of people think, ‘Oh, this is a great job, I’m even overqualified for it.’ And they think those are worth applying to. More often than not, they aren’t. Usually being overqualified does not mean you’re going to get the job. I know people struggle and wonder ‘why man, I applied to these 10 jobs. And if anything, I’m overqualified, they’d be lucky to get me for that dollar amount, and with the amount of years I have,’ and then they don’t get calls,. And they’re sad, and they wonder why. And it’s just the way it is, You’re probably more likely to get a job, that you’re underqualified for, trying to move up a little bit than a job that you’re overqualified for trying to move back. Companies think you’re going to be dissatisfied long term, that you’re just too big or too expensive. Yeah, you’re either too expensive, but you might not be. You might say no, no, no, I believe worked for that amount. I’m not too expensive,’ but then they have kind of insecurities, where they think, ‘Oh, he’s gonna want to leave, or she’s gonna want to leave or, you know, this, once she gets a higher paying opportunity more like what she should be at, she’s going to leave. And, you know, if you’re a company that provides a good lifestyle, they should not be insecure about things like that, because people will take pay cuts to go work for a better employer or a better company, have better freedom or lifestyle, and things like that. So applying to relevant jobs that you meet the criteria for, not that you’re overqualified, or super under qualified for is key. So Friday, we find jobs for our clients. Monday, we apply to the jobs. One thing we haven’t touched on is when we’re applying to jobs for clients, we do spend maybe 10, 15 minutes extra, customizing the resume slightly for each of the applications we submit on their behalf. So this is slight, slight changes. So maybe reorganizing bullet points to emphasize things that are more fitting in the job description, higher up in the list and lower, or just altogether, removing some bullet points, not because they didn’t happen, but because they’re just not relevant to that role. No reason to share irrelevant information. So a resume doesn’t need to be everything you’ve ever done. It should be everything you’ve done as it relates to the position you’re applying for. So that’s, that’s something big that we do for our clients is customize the resume or then we usually have a little headline or heading section on the top of every resume. And we’ll match the exact job title with that headline. So if it’s, you know, Vice President of Marketing or Chief Marketing Officer, we’re not saying what their title is, we’re saying what their desired title is up at the top of that resume. So we’ll put the exact job title of the job we’re applying to. Oftentimes, we’ll even save the resume file with that job title. So it’s Mike Podesto, CMO, Mike Podesto, VP marketing, and then use those customized versions of the resume.
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Jeff Altman 29:39
And the cool thing about doing that is if you are applying through an applicant tracking system, that’s a search term that’s being positioned relatively early in the document that allows the system to believe he’s got the right title. She’s got the right time. Let’s go further. And in fact, it just helps with getting through the system. Because the systems are often trained to believe the earlier in the document, the term exists, the more likely it is you’ve actually done that.
Mike Podesto 30:14
Yeah, so it’s great for applicant tracking systems. It’s also great just for humans, because they work the exact same way. If you send a resume to somebody, and it has a totally random title at the top, chances are, they’re not going to keep reading to try to discover how you are Chief Marketing Officer. If they see it right at the top, like you said, they’re going to read it and say, ‘Okay, I’ll read a little bit more. Let’s read this summary statement. And then let’s read their first job title, and go from there.’ So if you can keep them interested by staying relevant throughout. That’s a big help.
Jeff Altman 30:46
Six seconds or less. I know when I did recruiting, I had it down to four and a half. On occasion, I went over five, unless you have to catch their eye early. Otherwise, for me, I went one page down on occasion and went two. So you can page down. Not there. Page down. Not there. Delete.
Mike Podesto 31:09
Yeah. Five seconds. Yeah. Now a lot of people think that’s brutal or unfair that they don’t . . .
Jeff Altman 31:16
So, what!
Mike Podesto 31:17
Yeah, you know, the reality is, we just posted a job for a reverse recruiter, which is somebody who provides the services that I’m talking about here. Within four hours of that job being posted, we had 450 applicants to go through. There’s no way that we can go through 450 applicants every four hours. It would require a 10 person team. I mean, do the math on how many applicants we’re basically able to look at, even in a full full week of somebody full time working. It’s ridiculous. And since it’s been posted, every week that we repost, it’s getting that many applicants in that period of hours. It’s ridiculous. So people want to complain about six seconds, but it’s just you know, you need to market yourself knowing that that’s the reality.
Jeff Altman 32:02
When I did my second show, Job Search Radio, the first episode was an interview where I opened to talking to my guest and I said, ‘On a typical Monday morning, I walk into about 200/225 resumes. Of those resumes, how many do you think might be vaguely qualified? And the answer was two. And that was just vaguely qualified. I wasn’t going to finite. This is the perfect person. They had some of the terms, it looked like it was fairly recent.
Mike Podesto 32:37
3 percent, maybe.
Mike Podesto 32:37
I just asked our hiring manager for this position exactly that . How many qualified from that out of the 450 in those four hours. She said that 14 And she said this was much higher than normal. She said she was surprised to see that 14 of the 450 looked decent. That’s 1%. Right? Am I doing that math, right? Or is that tempers one, I don’t even know. 14 of the 450, a very small percent were even remotely qualified. And that’s before speaking to them about salary requirements, seen when they could start, that’s before knowing anything of them. Just reviewing their resume– 14 of 450. And that’s on a good day. So
Two Final Interview Mistakes That Will Blow the Offer
Mike Podesto 32:43
3%.
Mike Podesto 32:46
So what haven’t we covered yet that we really should.
Mike Podesto 33:29
So I walked through Friday, Monday, Tuesday through Thursday, as our networking days. We spend a lot of time networking. So we have one day of the week dedicated towards applying to jobs, and the three for networking. So if I haven’t emphasized the importance of using LinkedIn, and networking, those numbers should say something. One day is used for finding the jobs. One day is used for applying to the jobs. And the three, the other three days of the week are used for networking for those jobs. So reaching out to people on LinkedIn and finding their emails. So 60% of our week is filled with being on LinkedIn, networking for our clients, trying to get them phone calls with peers, hiring managers. We’ll still reach out to the recruiters and HR people as well, just because that’s another person that we can touch on. But those are the kind of the types of people we’re reaching out to recruiters and HR peers, and hiring managers. So big emphasis on networking.
Jeff Altman 34:22
And folks, I’ll just simply say you should be doing this every day. Do networking every day, because you’re not running a business like he is where he’s representing a number of people and his team is representing a number of people concurrently. You’re representing you. You’re not applying to or finding 450 jobs and applying to all of those, tailoring your resume and sending them out on Monday morning. You’re applying to a handful …two handfuls. It doesn’t take all day every day to do that. You could be networking on those days that you’re submitting resumes.
Mike Podesto 35:02
So, yep. Another thing a lot of people don’t realize is that when you’re connected with somebody on LinkedIn, you more often than not have access to their contact info. But you have to be a first degree connection. So you have to get that connection. And then there’s a section in their profile that says contact info. So if I go to your profile, now, I can almost certainly find your email address. Because we’re first degree connections. Contact info, I won’t read it out loud here, but I see your website, I see your phone number, I see your email, I see your birthday. I mean, I have a lot of information by being a first degree connection with you. So sometimes part of your strategy will be spend a day sending invites to everyone you want to connect with. Go back the next day, and look and see who’s accepted your invite, and then message them or get their contact info. Add in a note, when you send that invite is another big tip that’s just generally good to do. It helps you stand out in the list of invitations. But you don’t want to pitch yourself in that note, either, because we found that people are less likely to accept your invite when you’re trying to sell something in that note. So a quick note that just says, ‘Hey, Jeff, would love to connect here on LinkedIn.’ ‘Hey, Jeff, would love to get connected, something super casual. It’s gonna make you stand out, but also not say anything that’s like, ‘Oh, this guy’s going to be annoying.’ And then you get connected, and then he can be annoying.’ Not really, but you have their email, you have their phone number, you can reach out to them in a few different ways. And until they respond and and yeah, get in front of them.
Jeff Altman 36:38
This has been fun, Mike. How can people find out more about you the work that you do everything.
Mike Podesto 36:45
So I’m on LinkedIn, pretty active on there, feel free to message me or get connected. My name is Mike Podesta. I think I’m pretty much the only one on there. So you can find me that way. FindMyProfession.com is our website if you like what you hear about the reverse recruiting services in the Managed Job Search. We also do resume writing, LinkedIn profile development, and so much more. But that’s pretty much it. LinkedIn and my website is where I’m going to be.
Jeff Altman 37:12
Super Mike. Thank you. And folks, we’ll be back soon with more. I’m Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter. Hope you enjoyed today’s interview. If you did and you’re watching on YouTube, share it, leave a comment, give it a like, do something that lets people know it’s worthwhile. Same thing with the podcast– share it, leave a comment, click the like button do something please. It does help with the algorithms. It does help with discovery.
Jeff Altman 37:37
I also want to mention visit my website, TheBigGameHunter.us where there is a ton in the blog that you can watch, listen to or read, that’ll help you. Plus, you can find out about my courses that you could rent or buy. You can find out about my books and guides. There’s just a lot of great information there to help you. Plus, you can schedule time for a free discovery call scheduled time for coaching. Like I said a lot there.
Jeff Altman 38:02
Lastly, connect with me on Linkedin at linkedin.com/in/TheBigGameHunter. Have a terrific day and most importantly, be great. Take care.
[svp]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txDDyR58HGE[/svp]
ABOUT JEFF ALTMAN, THE BIG GAME HUNTER
Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter is a coach who worked as a recruiter for what seems like one hundred years. His work involves career coaching, as well as executive job search coaching, job coaching, and interview coaching. He is the host of “No BS Job Search Advice Radio,” the #1 podcast in iTunes for job search with over 2400 episodes.
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