5-Steps to Changing Your Career
As professionals, we all have three things in common:
1.) A Resume — Our personal one-pager, breaking down all of our experience into a list of accomplishments.
2.) A Cover Letter — A brief statement of our purpose for applying, providing a brief glimpse of the human behind the text.
3.) A Score from an Applicant Tracking System — A computers assessment of how good of a fit we would be for the role in question, based upon our resume.
If the third item on that list doesn’t make you shudder a little bit, then I recommend you stop reading now. On the other hand, if you’re like me and you’ve felt disenfranchised, disempowered, and devalued by the endless cycle of applying for jobs then read on.
According to every major study, companies emphasize a short list of qualities that they look for in entry-level to mid-career candidates: Motivation to Learn/Grow; Adaptability; and An Ability to Work Amongst a Team. Each of these characteristics are soft-skills — traits that plain text and key word algorithms will never fully communicate. Yet, throughout the job hunt we actively rely upon resumes and cover letters to tell our story. For me, this is like trying to be sarcastic over text; it just doesn’t work. So, why do we continue to rely on a piece of paper to get us in the door? Because tradition has told us that this is the way we get jobs.
Now before we go any further, I will stop and say that I don’t believe we should get rid of resumes and cover letters. They are necessary and will forever have their place in the hiring process — what I do believe, is that we’ve bastardized their purpose through the use of technology. What I mean by this, is that through the use of LinkedIn, Indeed, Monster, Glassdoor, The Ladders, and every other place that aggregates job postings, we’ve created a system that incentivizes individuals to quickly apply to every job that is remotely applicable to their skillset.
Don’t believe me? On average, a single job-posting will receive upwards of 250 applicants. For larger organizations, this can reach the thousands. We’ve inundated recruiters with an unreasonable amount of applications to work through on their own — enter the Applicant Tracking System. Now, instead of evaluating the individual, we evaluate the key words. We find trends in an algorithm that score a piece of paper to provide an estimated fit for the job description. The intrinsically human elements that are required to make a “good hire” have been stripped from the process.
The result of all of this, is that less than 2% of all applicants will receive an opportunity to interview. Taking things a step further, LinkedIn found that those who don’t perform any networking functions prior to applying, have less than a 0.5% chance of getting an interview.
Why? Because people don’t hire you based upon the skills you bring, they hire you based upon who you are — and if you want people to know who you are, you have to create a conversation. For me, this is the key that has unlocked every door throughout my career. It’s what my process as a career coach is built around, and how I’ve helped countless people find the careers they have been searching for.
Curious about what this process looks like? It’s listed below…
My Five Steps:
1.) Put Down Your Resume and Stop Applying
Recruiters spend about 6 seconds reviewing a resume before making a judgement on the applicant. Within those 6 seconds, there is just enough time to see a semblance of who someone is. Going a layer deeper, I argue that the three to four hours spent interviewing someone isn’t enough either. The complexities of how someone fits within a team, stretches beyond what a few formalized conversations can tell you — and employers seem to feel the same.
According to LinkedIn, 85% of jobs are filled through the use of networking of some kind — all done prior to actually applying for the role. Let that sink in for a second…
So instead of blasting your resume across every job board, start by looking inward. Eventually you’re going to be asked the age old question, “Why do you want to work here?”. If you haven’t done your due diligence and taken the time to understand your underlying motivations, your answer will fall flat. This doesn’t mean you have to go and do a full-blown dissertation on each company that you want to work for. Rather, it’s the realization that employers don’t want to hire someone who is indifferent to the role they’re offering.
This is why I think that everyone should start with a short list of 10 companies that they want to work for. To begin building the list, start with questions like these:
What experiences do I have (professional and personal), that contribute to my candidacy for a role?
What am I skilled at? Both hard AND soft skills.
What do I love about my current company/role?
What would I change about my current company/role?
Am I pursuing a specific industry? If yes, which industries?
Do I want to work for a large organization or a small one?
Questions like these will begin to shape your perception of the value you bring to a business, as well as, better understand the direction you want to take yourself.
2.) Design Your Ideal Career
Break out the colored markers and the note pads, you’re going to need them. Once you’ve begun the process of understanding yourself and the direction you want to take your career, you can begin to design what your next career looks like. By no means will this exercise be perfect on the first pass — this exercise of design and redesign will happen continuously, forever honing in on the end state of your career.
One thing I like to note, is that it doesn’t matter if you work-to-live or live-to-work. We all have priorities that extend beyond our careers, and neglecting to realize these other influences, will lead us down a path of unhappiness. Designing your career will enable you to have a roadmap for making decisions on where you want to work and what jobs you want to take. This focus is critical and as you begin to research what fits your design, you’ll have a guide for all of your decisions — the less ambiguity the better.
3.) Research What Fits Your Design
With a design in mind, researching your next career becomes that more tangible. Coming back to the short list of 10 companies that I mentioned in Step 1, you’re going to be targeting your search on businesses — not jobs. Indeed, LinkedIn, Monster, and every other job board are saturated with vague job descriptions. They tell you very little about the company and the value they bring to their customers.
Let’s take the following job description:
- Drive adoption of ABC among companies offering software products and services to businesses and business users
- Be the primary point of contact for app partners both pre and post launch
- Work with product, engineering, and other colleagues to grow the ABC B2B ecosystem
- Understand and communicate market opportunities, needs and partner feedback to cross-functional team to inform product roadmap and prioritization
- Develop mutually-beneficial and trusting relationships with partners from large enterprise companies- make ABC a favored company with which to partner
- Define partnerships strategies and execute on go-to-market plans
Based upon this job description, ask yourself: What do I actually know about this company? The short answer, nothing.
This is why you need to do your research and truly understand the companies you want to work for. What if they have a terrible culture? Tons of turnover across the business? Are making an acquisition or emerging into another market? What challenges did they face last year? How will everything you bring to the table, fit within their teams?
4.) Build Your Confidence
Learning how to articulate your value is critical. Your resume and cover letter will say a lot about your achievements, but how you present yourself during an interview will provide the lasting impression they take away.
And chances are, you bring a lot more to the table than just your resume describes. The key is knowing how to sell your experience and create a cohesive story for WHY you deserve the job. Confidence and authenticity are your best friends when telling this story, and convincing them you’re the one for the job. I recommend creating a 90 second value statement for yourself. Write it down, rehearse it, and embody it throughout all of your conversations.
5.) Create The Conversation
Informational interviews aren’t a new concept. Every career coach worth their weight will tell you, that you should be reaching out to the people who are working within the roles you’re applying to. What’s often missed about this approach, is that when you reach out is important.
Under the veil of “networking”, people are reaching out for referrals into jobs that are already posted. Unless this person is already a close contact, and can articulate the value you bring to the hiring manager, this “referral” is relatively useless. It’s like blindly applying, but with a side of laziness. What should be done instead, is true networking — engaging people in discussion, without an “ask”. Why is this valuable? Because rapport doesn’t get built during a structured interview process.
Setting yourself apart from the rest of the candidates begins by creating conversations with stakeholders across the business and building your own network of champions — people who can articulate your value in the same ways you can.
Connect with me on LinkedIn if you’d like to stay in touch & check out how I’ve helped others with their career search on my website!
