Dave shares his insights on how to maximize your chances of getting the job you are looking for.
2:30 Research the current landscape
Indeed
https://www.indeed.com/
LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/
5:00 Train the job sites to find more of the results you are looking for
6:20 Leverage your network for referrals, recommendations, and maybe find out who the hiring manager is
9:15 Re-write your LinkedIn profile and resume
12:10 What is Behavioral Based Interviewing?
13:50 STAR = Situation, Task, Action, Result
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Welcome to unleash the awesome with Dave Gambrill. All of us have unique skills, talents, and abilities that aren't being used to their full potential. Our mission is to share the people, tools, apps, and other resources that will help you unleash your awesome
So I know some of you are thinking, Dave, come on, bro. You're an entrepreneur. You don't want anything to do with going back into corporate America. Why are you qualified to give me advice and information on this topic? Well, let me tell you, I, when I worked in corporate America,
I worked for a number of large companies. I worked for professional sports teams. I worked for a couple of fortune 100 huge corporations. I worked for a couple of mom and pop shops and for all, but one example that I can think of. I got every job I interviewed for, but there were just one promotion internally at one of those companies that I didn't get.
And I honestly think they already had a lead candidate. So I have a little bit of my own success doing this, but also I worked for a large company that does applicant tracking systems. So they help people post their hope, help organizations post their jobs online, and then they handle the resume submission process, stuff like that. So I worked for a large software company that did that.
And while I was there, I taught people in that organization, how to interview based on something called behavioral based interviewing, which we'll talk about towards the end of the podcast. So in my corporate development and corporate training time, I trained on the stuff. I taught people how to interview interviewed and hired plenty of my own people at some of the places I was at.
And so I do have some experience doing this. And I thought, especially now with the situation we find ourselves in where lots of people have lost their jobs. There's been some downsizing and some cuts. I'm pretty sure there's a lot of people looking. And I've also been inspired to do this for my son, although he already has a job, he just graduated college and he already has a job.
I know a lot of his peers and classmates are still looking and having a little bit of a challenge with this. So this was actually a podcast that's done by request. And so I thought I'd share some of this information with you. So if I was looking for a job right now, here's what I would do. The first one is I would do research.
I would go on indeed.com. That is my favorite by far, but also LinkedIn jobs is pretty good. And I would research the positions that I'm interested in for a number of reasons. One, sometimes the words that you use to describe something and the words that corporate America or corporate, wherever you are in the world, the HR professionals use to describe something could be entirely different.
Sometimes I feel like HR professionals are, they have nothing better to do sometimes to just come up with different names for things so that they can just divide different bands and grading or whatever. I said, that's ridiculous. Some of the names they come up with, but I'll give you an example. So I was looking for jobs in corporate training and I was like,
okay, I want to get a job as a corporate trainer, blah, blah, blah. And I'm looking at all these things. And I noticed they were using terms that I weren't part of my regular vocabulary, but apparently they were big in industry at the time they're using terms like talent management, talent development, things like that, resource management, allocation,
talent resource management, like all these weird things. So I needed to learn some new language. So do your research find out the job. You're interested in, look at some of the differences some of the companies use to explain or describe these jobs and the roles and the different things that you have to do the requirements of these jobs. So take note of those things,
write them down somewhere, put them in an Evernote file or Trello or whatever using free organization and see what those things are. You may also want to go to a career or industry specific job hiring boards. So in the talent development space, there is an organization called the association for talent development. They also have a job board. So I went on there and I was looking at the different things and the positions that were open,
I was like, Oh, this, they use different words. Here are different ways to describe this or they're looking for this or that or whatever. So the first thing I would do is just do my research and homework, indeed.com, LinkedIn jobs, even Google jobs will give you some good research. There's lots of other job boards out there, but I find that those tend to be some of the better ones.
And because indeed does some, uh, what's the word I'm looking for curating from other sites that kind of have other posts from other sites on there as well. It tends to work pretty well. So that would be the first thing I would do. And in the process of doing that, if you find jobs that you like, make sure that you use whatever functionality that website has to save that job,
or maybe apply to that job, or maybe share with a friend, use that functionality, because what you will start doing is training that search engine, that job site to find you other matches that are similar. So don't be too specific at this point, if something's a little too far away for you, like geographically speaking have to be too far of a drive,
or maybe the job isn't quite a match, or maybe it's at the next level above what you were looking at, go ahead and like it anyway, or save it or whatever function they have on that website, because it will again start training that site to look for things that are similar. So you don't want to rule out too many things here. You're basically in the process of trying to rule everything in,
right. Let's see what's inbounds right here. So go ahead and use that functionality. And if it has a setup where they can send you notifications or whatever, you're going to want to do that because some of these windows to submit your resume are kind of short or small. They're like seven days. So you want to be notified when things are available.
So if that's a function, you could turn on, do that as well. Okay. So the first step for me would be research. I would go and do all that research. I might take a couple of days doing that. I might go around the different websites and see what's going on and just write down all these terms and stuff, because they'll come into play here in a little bit.
I'll tell you why. Okay. Number two, I would leverage my network. So as you're on LinkedIn, you're probably gonna see these notifications on there that says, Hey, Joe Smith works at this company. We're interested in, would you like to get a recommendation or a referral? You'll see a lot of stuff like that going on. So pay attention to those things.
And if there is somebody that, you know, a little bit, at least I wouldn't do like totally strangers or people that you just connected with on LinkedIn, but you don't actually know them. That's a little risky, but if you actually know somebody reach out to them and say, Hey, I'm interested in this role. That's open at your company.
And if you can provide them with the information or the link or the job requisition number or whatever they're using to track that job, it would be super helpful. And what I would ask people is one, do you happen to know who the hiring manager is? A lot of companies do not want to share that information and they certainly don't want you as a job applicant to get it.
But if you can get it, that's helpful because you can do a little bit of homework on the hiring manager, which is kind of neat. And if you are going to look at the hiring managers, a profile on LinkedIn, make sure you turn off the function that says, let people know that I'm looking at their profile, right? You can go into like a privacy mode.
If you're going to go do that kind of research, make sure you turn on that, that privacy setting. Uh, but even you find out the hiring manager, but also see if they have an internal referral or reward program. A lot of companies, if the job applicant is submitted, if the resume is submitted internally, then the employee that submitted it.
If you end up getting hired, sometimes they get like 500 or a thousand dollars or extra vacation days or whatever. And so there might be an incentive for them to refer. Additionally, what I know from working for a huge applicant tracking system company, there is some data that says referred candidates tend to do much better in interviews and actually getting the job.
And a lot of that just has to do with the idea that they're going to take your recommendation as an employee seriously. So if you can get an internal referral or recommendation, I would most certainly do that. If you could find the hiring manager, that's super helpful. And then the other thing you can do is post on social media that, Hey,
you know what, I'm looking for a new opportunity in this particular industry, doing these particular things. If you know of anybody or anything comes to mind, please let me know. And you can do that on Facebook or Twitter, or even on Instagram and your Facebook stories, whatever, put it out there. Because sometimes there are people that are looking where sometimes I actually saw a situation where a friend of mine got hired because they posted that on Facebook and somebody that is friends with them,
knew the hiring manager for this other company. And they just opened a spot and they were having a really hard time finding a person like this. And so they actually got the job through Facebook essentially because somebody made that recommendation. So use the social media tools you have to your advantage. Okay. So the first thing is research. The second one is leverage your network.
See what's already out there and see what's going on. The third one is now rewrite your LinkedIn profile and your resume based on some of the research that you discovered. So if there's new terms, if there's outdated words that you're using, make sure you update those words. If you can weave in pay attention to this, if you can weave in some of the words that these companies are using in their job description,
in the job traits, or I forget what they call it, the requirements, job requirements, uh, if they have certain values or standards or mantras or things they live by, if you can find a way to weave them in to your LinkedIn profile, into your resume and go ahead and do that. I'm not telling you to lie. I'm not telling you to embellish you most certainly should not do those things,
but if you can find ways to take those relevant terms and use them, that's great. What you shouldn't do is something called a keyword stuffing. This is something people used to do back in the day before these applicant tracking systems are smarter than they are now. They used to put keywords in white font down in the footer section of resumes that you submitted electronically with the idea that those ATS systems would,
uh, would be able to scan that information, then score you higher in the candidate pool, which all the ones I'm aware of will actually score you poorly. If you do that these days, right? They kind of rank you lower because of that. So if you can work the words in seamlessly, great, and that's part of the reason why you did your research ahead of time.
Um, additionally, because of these applicant tracking systems, you want to try to score as high as you can. And so if your words are matching, if your background is matching, if the things that you're doing in the past are matching, you're going to score a little bit higher. And the chances of you coming across the hiring managers, uh,
computer screen, or, uh, the recruiters screen, you're going to have a better shot. The higher your score is okay, but that's also why I recommended that you find somebody internally to help you basically get your resume on the top of the pile, right? That's a way to kind of work around these things or at least give you a better shop.
And in a lot of cases, all you want to do is get a shot. You know, in a lot, a lot of these bigger companies, the best person for the job actually never gets interviewed because they can't get through the first process here. And that's why I'm sharing these very specific things with you about researching rewriting, using some of the words,
trying to find an internal person to help champion your cause. Right? All of these things will actually help you get your resume to the top of the pile. Now, once you get that, that the next thing is up to you. If you get an interview, you have to win that interview yourself. And I'm going to share some stuff with you on that in a second.
All right. So those are the top three things research, do the research, train the search engines. Uh, the second one is leverage your network. The third one is rewrite your LinkedIn profile and resume using these key terms. And then when you get your interview opportunity, I'm going to tell you how to be a star in the interview process. And star is all capitalized on purpose in the title.
Um, one of the things many large companies will do is they'll use a hiring framework called behavioral based interviewing. There's a number of companies that teach this. There's a number of companies that will certify people in this methodology. When I worked for this large software company, that's what I did. I trained all of the managers that are all the hiring managers in how to do behavioral based interviewing the reason why they do it is they believe that it will help better predict what things you will actually do as an employee.
What behaviors you will actually show as an employee. But I think one of the big reasons is it's a legally defensible the mechanism so that if there was ever a lawsuit on discrimination and they followed this to a T, it has been proven time and time again in the court of law, that it is a solid, legal way to interview. And so that's what a lot of companies will do the hide behind that.
And that's just the reality of the situation. So if you find yourself in a situation where you're in an interview and there's going to be a couple of people interviewing you, at least it's usually at least two, maybe three, and you start hearing questions, like tell me about a time when you were a member of a team and the project failed miserably.
Or tell me about a time when you were a part of a team or you are the leader of a team and the project went great. Right? So they'll ask all these questions. Tell me about a time. Tell me about a time. And what they're looking for is very specific information. And one of the companies who does behavioral based interview training,
they teach people to look for stars. Okay? Stars, a star stands for situation, task action and result situation, task action result. That will give you an example. If somebody said, Hey, tell me about a time you were a member of a team and you had to roll out some information that wasn't a super great about your product to your customers or whatever.
Tell me about that. And what did you do? Okay. And so what they're looking for is for you to say, okay, here's the situation, the task that I did, or the thing that I carried out, the role that I specifically did, they don't want to hear teamwork, or we hear, they want to hear what you did.
What I did was this, uh, so the situation was this, the task that had to be covered was this, the action that I took was I did this very specific action. I went out to all of them, are, I looked at the customer list that we had, and I did an 80 20 analysis. And I discovered the 20% of our customers that are bringing 80% of the business and my geography.
And I redid my routing to go communicate with those people first. So they could hear the information directly for me and not get it second hand, something like that case. That's the specific action. And as a result, one of the things that happened was for that quarter or that sales cycle or whatever, I actually had the largest sales growth out of anybody in the district.
And my sales went up by 22% or whatever, looking for very specific answers there for the result. Okay. So they're not looking for theoreticals. They're not looking for when you worked in a group, they're looking for very specific things. So even if you're a new employee, right, you're coming out of college or something like that, you can use things like for your volunteer organizations that you're part of for your fraternities or sororities,
uh, for the summer jobs that you had or the internships you can use examples from that. I wouldn't use all examples from all the same things, right? So don't give all fraternity or sorority examples, try to mix it up a little bit, but give very specific answers. And if you want to practice this, just, you can answer the questions in this way,
star situation, task action result. Okay. The situation was the task that needed to be handled was this, the action that I took was this, and the result was this. And if you just get in the habit of answering that way, the interviewers are trained and on the worksheets that they'll have in front of them, they're looking for those answers.
So if you give them very specific answers based on that, you're going to score highly. And they're going to be like, wow, this person knows what they're doing. They're answering the questions all the right way, and it can only help you in the interview process. It can only help you if you were giving vague answers, if you're not answering in that format and they have to do followup questions and kind of beg you to get more specific,
you're not going to score well on that interview and it's going to work against you. So just give them the stars. What I told my son, when he went to go interview for a large company up in Boston, which I assumed they were going to do this because they're, again, a pretty large company, you'd all be familiar, familiar with.
Uh, I said, just be an all star, right? Answer everything with stars. If it's not your name or, you know, just some fun fact about you or whatever, you know, icebreaker questions they ask at the beginning. Every other question should be answered with a star, be an all star situation, task action result. And when it came back from the interview,
I picked him up at the airport. I said, how'd it go? He goes, dad, all they did was ask you those questions. And I said, and how'd you do? He's like, I answered them. Just like you thought. I thought it did pretty well. And it turns out he got the job. It was highly competitive.
There was like 30, some people that interviewed for, I dunno, eight spots or something. And he got one. So was it all because of the interview process? I don't know it could have been, but if he wasn't prepared going in, he would have been up against it and trying to flail about in that interview. So just know that that will happen.
Now, if you go and you get interviewed and they don't use that process, then it's still fine to answer that way. Right? There's plenty of companies that are not going to have their employees trained in behavioral based interviewing. And so they might not ask him that way. But if you use the answers this way, they're going to love it because you provide them the situation,
the task, the action, and the result as specific as possible with those results. And that way you'll have a much better chance. All right. So let me review everything we talked about in job search secrets and how to be a star in the interview. If you're looking for a new job, if I were looking for a new job, here's what I'd be doing.
And I recommend this is what you'll be doing. Number one, go do your research. LinkedIn, indeed.com. Find out the different terms and situations that are used to describe the job that you're looking for and train the search engines while you're doing it. Make sure you like and share, or maybe even apply to some of those jobs. If, if you don't even think you're going to get them right.
Just send, send whatever message you need to, to that search engine. So that will start tracking other similar things for you. Number two, leverage your network, find out who might already be working for that company, or maybe somebody that worked for that company. Maybe they know the hiring manager. Try to find that out. Uh, number three,
rewrite your LinkedIn profile and resume using some of the information that you learned. And the number four, when you go for the interview process, work on answering questions with the star methodology situation, task action result. All right, that's it for this episode of unleashed, the awesome. I bet there's somebody, you know, that could use this though. So feel free to share with them.
Maybe you have a college student in your life that needs to hear this. Maybe have somebody that just got downsized or laid off or furloughed from their company. And they're looking somewhere else, share this episode with them. It doesn't cost you anything that wherever you're listening to this podcast, there's a share mechanism for you to share it to social media, to share it in your email,
to share it in a direct message through wherever you want to share it with people, but share it, get it out there so that people are properly equipped to win this job search that they're looking for so that your friends, your family, the people you care about can go and get the jobs that they love. And then they can find out ways to unleash their own awesome inside those organizations.
All right. So until next time go unleash your awesome on the world. See you. Thanks for listening to unleash the awesome. Please be sure to subscribe, rate and review wherever you listen to your podcasts and please share us on your favorite social media platforms using hashtag unleash. Awesome.