Hearts at Work: Jumpstarting Your Career - Episode 2

Career coach Adam Najberg offers a radically different way of looking at your job search process or your journey to find new, meaningful work. He offers tips & tricks to defeat LinkedIn's AI bots and win at the game of being noticed, memorable, invited to interviews and getting your dream job. His approach is adjective-, skill- and achievement-based, the base on which you craft a standout CV and a rich professional narrative you use in your quest for a better or more-fulfilling job.

You’ve been listening to “Hearts at Work,” a P-Cubed production. P-cubed, short for “the power of positive psychology,” is an agency that focuses on career and life coaching to bring out the best possible performance in people through positive psychology. Thank you for listening and tune in again!

Transcript

 Hearts at work episode 2

Sat, Apr 06, 2024 9:52PM • 32:11

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

cv, job, skills, put, anecdote, employers, adjectives, achievements, interview, ai bots, seconds, linkedin profile, memorable, write, day, bit, talking, story, cvs, year

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Welcome to the hearts at work podcast. Episode Two, I met him naturally, I'm going to start by talking about my favorite subject me very briefly, and they get right into jumpstarting your career. So first of all, I'm living in Singapore. I am a former journalist, I work in public relations. And I've been organically career coaching and mentoring people since 1997. It was always a sideline, still as a sideline. But it's one that I take quite seriously and passionately, began by helping people who are looking to get into journalism. And then it expanded out to journalists who are looking to get a leg up. And then it went from that to to journalists who are looking to transition into other careers, and also people in public relations or content, who are looking to get a step up as well. And now I've added a few more arrows to the quiver. During COVID, I took a life coaching course, which made me a little bit less vocational and a little bit more existential in speaking with clients. I also discovered a couple of other things that basically, a lot of people hit a certain stage of their career, and they have not had a chance to interview or redo their CV in many, many years. So we have a lot of first timers entering the job sector who don't really know how to communicate with employers. And we have or would be employers, at least we have people who are in mid career who are used to communicating with would be employers. And that kind of outmoded fashion, everything was very, very fast. And one of the reasons why I went to upskill and get more existential about this is because it used to be a fairly straightforward process to apply for a job, you would see a help wanted out, you'd put in an application might get a polite rejection letter, you might get a call it an interview, but it was very straightforward. And then came the digital days, and digital days, as we are now living in right now move very, very fast. And as I'll explain, they get more and more complicated pretty much every month every year. So all of a sudden, jobs are online, and you can apply for jobs online. And of course, instead of having 10 people applying for jobs, now you have 100 or 1000 people applying for jobs, some of them are obviously not paying attention to where the job is located. That used to actually matter. And these days, because so many things can be done remotely. Well, you have 1000s of people applying for jobs that are 1000s of miles away from them. In addition, employers are getting very, very selective about who and how and when they are in contact with people who are applying for jobs. Because these digital job listings have led to so many people who are out there applying for the jobs, you cannot have one person sift through 1000 applications is just not humanly possible. And you don't really want to have an entire team doing that, especially for low level to mid level jobs. So what we have, and what I'm talking about is artificial intelligence. And artificial intelligence is what prompted me to write my book last year jumpstarting your career. It's just not me telling my book, this is me trying to explain to you how to help break through the frustration because you're right, if you feel frustrated, you're right, if you think that the the whole market is stacked against you, it's interesting to me, this is not a rant against links against LinkedIn. But it sort of is because LinkedIn takes our money if we want to be premier members of LinkedIn. And they also take a lot more money from employers. And basically, they're playing both sides. And since the employers tend to pay more, guess who gets favored in the process. And what that means is, LinkedIn is investing a lot of money in artificial intelligence to make it a lot easier for employers to get rid of your application really fast without a human being ever touching it or seeing it. So enter my discovery, where I started to apply for a bunch of different jobs that I didn't want under fictitious names, and discovered, even though I was qualified, or overqualified, or more qualified, you know, then then the the job listing would indicate that I was rejected pretty much from over 99% of these jobs. I really did this scientifically. And when I looked at it, I went back and started to do it again a few months later, and I started to do things like add in keywords that were in the job ad, I did things like changing my location. I also scaled back on my job experience for lower level jobs, I scaled back on my education for some of the jobs and actually found myself getting it went from 99 point something percent failure rate to about a 90% failure rate. And I did it one more time before I decided to write the book. And I got it down to about 85%. And I realized something that if I and for those of you who are listening, you know that you're qualified for a lot of the jobs that you're applying for, and yet you never hear back from anyone. You never even get a polite, thank you but will keep your CV on file, maybe next time. And a lot of that is because because there's some kind of algorithm going on that the employer has popped in all the search criteria into AI bots that they themselves are using, or they're using tools from LinkedIn, and LinkedIn algorithm and its process of weeding out job seekers. So how do you get past this? I don't have an easy answer. But I think it starts with a few different things. We'll get back to AI bots in a minute, I wrote the book because of the AI bots. And I saw that just by massaging, how you describe yourself that you can pass the AI bots fairly easily compared to if you just use a standard CV that you have not purpose prepared to get past AI bots. But if your base materials not strong, and as I mentioned earlier, a lot of people were getting to the job market haven't been in the job market for a very long time looking for jobs, or maybe you're just starting so the premise of jump starting your career and that is not just the title of a book. It's it's how I position how I coach people put it to you this way, the free me is Kia now talking to you, and sharing what I know what I've experienced what I've gone through with multiple clients, I've helped over 150 people since 1997, including 23. In the last year as I picked up the pace of my coaching, I would say that it is very important for you to bear in mind that getting your story straight, your CV straight, having your base materials straight, that is probably the most important thing that you could ever do. And it starts with three things and I want to just quickly run you through them before we go to a question and answer session. So those three three things are your adjectives, your skills, and your achievements. Your adjectives. What am I talking about? What I'm talking about is how do you describe yourself? Are you tenacious? Are you garrulous? Are you a go getter? I guess a go getter is not really an adjective. It's more of a noun. But are you getting? How would you describe yourself, but it's not enough to just do that because you interact with people were social animals. Therefore, it's important for you to know how other people perceive you and what they think your adjectives are. So go ask your husband or wife, go ask your friends, go ask your parents, ask your children even create a word cloud for yourself. Look at what intersects. Now, it's totally fine for you. I want you to pick three adjectives for yourself. And only three, one of them can be unique to you, then I mean, that's the one that you think that really describes you best. But I highly suggest that you ask your colleagues, listen to your colleagues, your friends, your family, and draw your other two adjectives from those intersection points with what people repeatedly say about you. Oh, you're garrulous. Oh, you're actually methodical, you're tenacious, whatever it is. And write down those three adjectives because those are going to play a very important role in how you recraft your CV. Next thing is your skills. Now, there are two kinds of skills there are hard skills and soft skills, hard skills and things like languages. You either speak French or you don't speak French. Now, there are different levels of proficiency. But you can't really fake it, and you can't fake those levels of proficiency. You have a college degree you studied political science, that is a hard skill, you have a degree you have a college degree, it means that you have tertiary education.

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You have other things like certifications that you get you become an Apple certified developer or something like that. There are soft skills, soft skills are things like your ability to collaborate. You're empathetic listening is a skill. You're strangely enough, this is not one that I definitely use in a CV, but your Punctuality is a soft skill. Both of these matter and you want to like the adjectives have a blend. So what you'd like to do ideally, is when you're applying for a job, you're gonna want to have three skills noted down on your CV, and have at least one hard skill. Ideally, two, if the job is like technically or oriented or high level. But I think it's also quite important to tout the things that are kind of your superpower your skill that make you you are the professional you you. Things like punctuality, as I mentioned are not something that an employer is going to hire you for it unless it's something that requires, you know, microseconds of precision. You know, some of us have worked At wire services before and you know that one of the skills is beating, Reuters is beating Bloomberg by seconds because that's how it's counted. So punctuality, there matters. It's all in context. And the third thing and the most important thing that you can put on your CV is achievements. So there's a saying that doers go home, people who do doers go home, and achievers get the jobs. So this is really important to remember, because the biggest mistake that I see on CVS from people is that they treat their CV, like a list. And for those of you who watch American Idol, for those of you who have watched all the shows, and you've ever the ones that Simon Cowell is a judge on Simon's biggest complaint about people is that they're not memorable. He says, You have to make yourself memorable. They have to make themselves miserable on a three minute performance, the skill and the trick on your CV is to do it in six seconds, because that's all you've got if a reviewer is if you do pass the AI bot test, and a human being is going through your CV, they've gone, they're going to be going through a couple 100 CVS, and at the end of the day, they are bleary eyed, they're tired, they're fallible, and if your CV looks just like everybody else's CV, and there's nothing that jumps off the page at them in six seconds, you're gone. They don't have time, they gotta get through the stack. And eventually someone will get the job, but it probably won't be you if you're not memorable. So the achievements are the things that help you stand out. All of these things actually help you stand out. But the achievements are the things that when they get when you get past the six seconds, that is how you're going to be judged as an achiever a standout. Let me give you an example. What is an achievement. So here, here's what a doer would say, a doer would say, I worked at IBM, and I was a data entry person. And I entered data from you know, for eight hours every day to ensure the the efficient operations of the company or something, it's quite a banal made up statement. But generally I see a lot of this on CVS, and achiever would say, for example, it has to be true, it has to be authentic, but you would say something like, started as a data entry employee, or staff member found flaws and holes in the efficiency, introduce changes that improved the entire units productivity by 30%. Now, there are things about your job that you do every day you answer phones, you show up, you get your coffee, you talk to people, you have meetings, nobody cares. And your job description is also not an achievement, it's what you are supposed to be doing. It's part of what I'm going to get to now is as we wrap together your adjectives, your skills, and your achievements, suddenly a narrative is going to emerge from this if what you have to do and I come from a storytelling background, and I think everybody here has to become their own best storyteller. And what you do is you take your CV, and I would not do a patch job on your CV, I would rethink and redo your CV. As long as you're rethinking your career prospects, you don't just want another coat of white paint over what you've done before. So here's where we're going with this first thing is, how can you stand out among a sea of CVS that look exactly like yours. One way is to make yours not look like the others. And I'm not talking about making yours pink or green, or having a beautiful photo of yourself in the climbing Mount Everest or whatever it is. What you do here is and this is a little bit controversial, but I want to suggest to you that you put an about section on your CV. Now, you have one on your LinkedIn profile. And what I want to do here is I want to make you understand the relationship between your CV and your LinkedIn profile. Your CV, the space is precious, the time is precious that people are going to be reading it that has to be tight. It's a blueprint of its digital breadcrumbs and how great you are professionally, it teases and tantalize is it makes you memorable. The LinkedIn profile is where you can lengthen the whole thing because you're renting someone else's space and people who are looking for you. Well, they're going to land on your page. They're not necessarily as pressed for time as they are when they're looking at your CV because you've definitely applied for a job. You want people to graze on your profile. So give them a little bit more but don't give them the whole story. Give them if you're doing on your CV about you know 15% of your story, give them about 25% on your LinkedIn profile and the other 75% they gotta get your butt in the chair for an interview to hear how great you are personally. So let's go back to rethinking your Your CV because it starts with that, and then your LinkedIn profile will come. And it'll, it'll get longer. Now normally, as a former journalist, I write things long, and then I edit them down. And usually I get copy from when I was an editor, I could copy from reporters and edit it down, I want you to think about this the other way around, write short first, and then don't forget what you've cut what you've left out. But you do want to add it in later, you just want to be very selective about what you add. And so on your CV have an about section, no more than three sentences. And I don't mean a very long block of text. But what you want to do is you want to describe yourself, you want to slip in at least one of the adjectives, one of the skills, the most important adjective, the most important skill, and you want to summarize all of your achievements. And what that means is you have to step back and look at the commonality of that. So your achievements are generally the result of your skills, your adjectives, and just a lot of work that you put in to get to the achievement. So, what you want to do is you want to make it clear, if you are a person, you know, for example, for me, I am tenacious, I do not take no for an answer. I can rub people wrong, sometimes just the wrong way, they are not at all happy to deal with me sometimes. And you know, for those of you who are listening in who know me pretty well, you know, that is actually the case, I don't want you to come across as being perceived from the negative side of your adjective, because for every positive view, someone who is not like you may see the trait that you think highlights you the most is actually a negative thing. We tend to hire people who are like us, or who we used to be like, or who we think could become like us. It's very rare that someone is looking for someone who's completely different from them, you're lucky if you get that kind of opportunity. My father used to hire people, at least one person in every office who would contradict him because they just saw the world very differently. But you don't want an office of people who are not pulling together with you. So anyway, back to the CV and your about section and in your about section, what you want to do is you want to use your adjective and your skill and your achievement summary. To paint yourself and portray yourself as a humble hero or heroine who against all odds, using this amazing skill that you have. And this treat that you have your adjective are able to achieve. results beyond expectations, that's a position that you want to put yourself in. You're a humble hero, heroine who against all odds has succeeded achieve. That's the kind of person that they want working for that. I also want you to have one personal thing about yourself. This is a professional CV. It's a registry of a narrative of your professional career, but you're also a person. So make it something that you know will be a conversation point, if

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you get in for an interview. This is not going to satisfy the AI bots. For example, I play bluegrass and jazz fiddle, you better believe that I put that on there. You know, I know other people who are comedy writers, for example, have created their own comedy shows that should be on there. If that is who you are, if that's how you want to be memorable, be memorable. Make it not crazy, like you know, if you're a pole dancer for money. I don't think you want that on there. But I do think you would probably want to note on your CV, you know that you have your pole dancing skills, for example. Without getting into details, especially if you're a guy, that would be a very interesting conversation to have, however, do make it something that you know that people are going to want to talk about, you know, achievements that you've had, if you've run marathons, for example, put that on there. Why not? You don't want to lard up your about section with more than one sack in one sentence. But I do think devote one short sentence to who you are something that shows your personality. It can also be something that is very personal to you. Cancer Survivor, for example. That is something that will get people's attention to arouse some sympathy. And while some of you may think this is tasteless, I think this is a game where you're trying to win the game. And the way you win the game is you get the interview, you get noticed you get the interview, you get the job, you win. So whatever it takes to do this, as long as you're not lying, as long as you're being authentic and true to yourself. They go for it. Okay, next thing, what is the biggest issue at CVS? I tell you when I look at CVS, here's what I see. See company name, Title, Location, dates, job description, and then a bunch of sentences about what you did on your job. That is not how you write a CV. That is not how you stand out and get noticed. Now we're gonna come back to as you guessed it, your adjectives, your skills, your achievements. So what I want you to think about what your CV is, as I mentioned earlier, digital breadcrumbs, you're dropping them, you're trying to intrigue a very busy, overworked recruiter, or if you're in for an interview, and they're holding the CV in front of them, you want them to ask you the questions that you already know, they're going to ask you, because they generally are interviewing five or six people, they have not spent days preparing for you, or even hours preparing for you. They're going to use your CV to kind of come up with brilliant questions, and I put brilliance in air quotes there. Because, again, if you do your CV, right, they're going to ask you to things that you want them to ask you, because you've teased and tantalize them. So how do you do this? How do you do this? A bullet point is one line, maybe one and a half lines, never more than a total of two lines. If it is then you're writing sentences you want bullets on air and a bullet should reflect. Yes, here we go. Again, adjectives skill achievement, you want to have for your latest job entries, most recent job entries, three of those, and each one of those is going to have an anecdote attached to it. And that anecdote is going to be 60 seconds or less. How do you get there? So for example, this is an example from my book. Someone had to arrange investment banks annual investors conference, however, they had to do it on a budget that was 30% less than the year before. And the boss had said KPI there have they wanted 20 20% more people to attend clients to attend, it was the place where they would get clients to basically feel great about themselves, get drunk, eat amazing food, and then sign on for another year. It's part of the deal, you show up there, have a great time, you know, schmooze with the people who advise you and then signed on for 12 more months. So 30% last. And the other tricky part of the dimension is that every year they put this in, in a movie, like in a movie, movie lot inside a giant hangar, you know, one of the places where they would shoot scenes inside interiors, and they would empty it out, fill it with food, and then fill it with performers. Famous people one year was Sir Tom Jones, you know, usually sort of millennial or Gen X type in some baby boomer type, x and so on. And, you know, you would get Christina Aguilera, for example. And you know, this person has 30% less to attract. So anyway, cutting to the chase, the entry that this person shared with me was that they brought in an A level performer. And then during the interview, they mentioned who it was, who normally charges over a million dollars for a personal appearance, to show up and perform not just a regular set, but an encore set. For 1/3 of the price of their normal asking. The entire event was done in a budget of less less than 70% of what was done the previous year, and achieved 30% rise in number of attendees, I maybe didn't put that together, when you read it, it looks a lot more cohesive and coherent than what I just explained to you. But the point is they they blew past every expectation, they got a big star to show up. And they're therefore always remembered after that as the Celine Dion woman. So you know, that is a way to be memorable. That is a way to show that you achieve and what you want to do is you want to go into the interview and you want the interviewer to say So who's this performer and how much you know that you want them to ask you for the details. Bam. They're asking you for the color. So you tell your anecdote. Now how do you get to the anecdote, that anecdote, I'll get to that in one second, you want to have three of those bullet points, three stories that show how great you are and how much you overachieved for your most like the last and the previous job that you had before that you want to go back and you want to have 82. For the older ones, like the older we get, the less we really need to sort of brag about old jobs. And then I would say for the very old ones have one bullet point. And you might think of just cutting some stuff off from your CV or having no bullet points just sort of list what you did, especially if you're getting older and you don't want people to see how old you are and start counting the years and the number of jobs that you had. You know, the older ones can drop off and make sure you actually look or feel and younger to them. While they're supposed to be no age discrimination. We all know exactly how that works. It works the same way that you know, AI bots are just there to help the employers not you know, they're not really there to screen you out because you're too old or you're not experienced enough or whatever the hell it is. Okay, but the anecdotes now, this is hard. This is really hard. I don't know if any of you have ever done ENIAC. De. But what you have to do is you have to create a persona for yourself. You know, Daniel Day Lewis would immerse himself for six months in a role like when he played Lincoln, I'm not saying you need to do that. But in a strange way, what will happen is your persona will become your person, because once you've done this a few times, had the job interviews, you'll go through your professional career realizing, Oh, shit, I should have portrayed myself this way. And I would have emerged better in the political war. So you know, you have to have sort of a an office game face on when you're living your professional life, but especially when you're putting together your CV, especially when you're putting together your persona and your narrative here. So what you do is you tell the entire story and write it down, write the whole story down and read it out loud. And it's gonna be five to 10 minutes long. And it's way too long. But what are you going to do is you're going to go through, you're going to be your own best editor, and you're going to chop it in half, be ruthless, get it down to two and a half minutes. What's this down to two and a half minutes, I want you to tell it to your mother, your father, your kids, your spouse, colleagues who, you know, you feel are discreet enough to not let it be known that you're looking for another job if you still have a job. But what you want to do is you want to look and read them for expressions. When you say something that's kind of funny today laugh or smile, when you say something that's tough about how you overcame the cancer diagnosis. And you know, you were in the midst of chemotherapy, but you still showed up and, and, you know, produce that earnings report for your company, you know, and had a highly successful investor relations meeting with with your, the top investors in your company, like those are the things that you want to see are people like looking, sympathetic, empathetic, compassionate, whatever it is. And then you want to go back and knock it down further, like cut out all of the fat, okay, and when you get it down to about, let's say like 80 or 90 seconds, what you want to do is you want to tell that story to yourself in the mirror, real literally, look yourself in the mirror and tell that story yourself. And I want you to do something weird, which is animate yourself. Like the way I'm talking to you right now. If I talk to you the way I normally talk, which is kind of like this, it'd be a lot more subdued. And you probably would not off to sleep. It's eight o'clock, you probably had dinner on the east coast, the United States and you're falling asleep. But what you do is you punch it of it, you punch it up about 15%. Because you're not your person, your your persona, when you tell that story, you got to be memorable to people, they have to think it's the first time you ever told the damn story. You got to make them laugh. It's so hard comedians do this every night, they go up on stage at US same material, and they still get a laugh, because you know what you may have heard it 1000 times and told that 1000 times, but damn it.

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And the reason that you have three of these anecdotes, by the way for each of your job entries is because if you end up having the same person show up at your next interview, you never want to be using the same material. So you go to anecdote number two, right door number three, or you switch to another job. And these things come up in the context of so tell me about a experience you had with a difficult boss, you want to be able to that's like one of those big red flashing alarm lights, you know, oh, my God, you know, how do I get out of this one and be prepared for it. You have an anecdote that talks about how you get into dealing with difficult boss making it clear that maybe he wasn't or she wasn't so difficult. It was it was it's a perception issue. You know, everybody has something that motivates them, and that resonates with them and your job when you work with other people, regardless of boss, Thali, someone knows who's a subordinate is to understand what motivates them and activates them and get them excited about what you have to say, get them interested in what you have to say. So your anecdote, very, very important that once you get it down to 62, or sorry, 80 to 90 seconds, they are able to deliver it with confidence, as if it's the first time you ever told that story. And what you'll find is you'll become your own best editor one last time, you'll get it down to about 60 seconds. And that's pretty much all you have time for. In any case, I think what matters here is that your CV will turn from being a list of of what you did, to a blueprint of your accomplishments and achievements. And that is how you want people to remember you because this is a beauty pageant in one way or another and the beauty is not how you look. The beauty is how you present yourself and how you tell your story. I would say have a section down in your CV if you have honors. To three honors is enough to create a section if you were Phi Beta Kappa in college. If you were a lead tuba in the in marching band, say that put in there, you know, whatever it is that you've been professionally recognized or have it on. And then also include some of the hard skills at the bottom as well to make it very clear like language proficiencies that are kind of outside of your educational qualifications. But you know, like, your degrees would be in the education section at the bottom to receive you, you'd have this award section and you'd have a section that is called professional skills or additional professional skills and and just list them out and let them know to what degree you you know, you're you're proficient in Hungarian Magyar, or whatever it is, that language that you speak, were the the apple certification that you got as developer, that kind of thing. So that's how you rethink your CV, your narratives come from rethinking your CV, it all starts with that, and then you go over to your LinkedIn profile, and you can expand a bit on that you can add another 10 percentage points from the 15%, to the 25%. To make yourself longer, more interesting, but you always want to leave them wanting more from you. Don't give them everything, don't sell them the entire cow, just give them some of the milk to start. There are a lot of people out there who are looking for things and I just have not had enough hours in the day. And I'm hoping for those who are looking for kind of basic level service and looking for basic level answers that this will not just cut some time off of my backlog. Because I don't mean to be impolite to anybody. But also will short circuit things for them and make them go a little bit quicker. So that they can achieve their goals. Dreams are next job and whatever it is. And anyway, I want to thank for those of you who are listening in for the hearts at work podcast. Thank you for listening. Have a great day, afternoon, evening, whatever it is night and I'll talk to or see you again. For hearts at work. This is Adam Najberg