Because you're attended and you see the trends are you seeing the trend going towards job Seekers now or you still feel there is more demand than the supply it's nobody's job just to network for 8 to 10 hours a day like everybody has lives you know they're doing other things so we want that time to be meaningful when you were telling on the stage that even employers have hard time finding Talent like oh he's from CMU or He's from Cornell I'm definitely going to interview this person so for some jobs I know this is true
even like for the same position if there are different hiring managers those hiring managers might want to see different things when you read a job description as a job Seeker it's three pages long it has you know four paragraphs about the company how great the company is and maybe some stuff about your day-to-day a lot of that 90% of it doesn't actually matter And indeed like we're really actively trying to find out what the real requirements are does this mean uh that job Seekers should look at multiple platform because it's not always necessary that a
job opening will be only in one platform who do you get from referrals from is that also important before we dive into all the strategies and stories that we're going to discuss in this podcast let me ask you this do you have a clear job hunting Strategy to get an internship or full-time job most people don't and it's costing them opportunities I've helped over 11 00 students with their strategies through my ultimate job hunting course and trust me I'm not even kidding I could see so many recruiters viewing my profile and it's been the best
investment I've ever made the content is incredibly practical filled with tips and strategies that make you stand out to recruiters uh it was one of The best courses that I have done till this this course covers everything that you need to stand out you will get ultimate resume course you will get ultimate LinkedIn course networking strategy access to 1100 plus job Seekers for support and personal support from me through WhatsApp group I will walk you through every single step that you need with real examples and the tools that will give you an edge I don't
want you to miss any other opportunity to land Your next job or an internship so check the link in the description and now I will let you enjoy the podcast all right let's start with intro uh super quick intro for people who don't know you you're very popular now my name is John McMahon I am a product director I work at indeed.com the job website have to clarify that sometimes yes I've worked at indeed for about six years six and a half years now um I Started at indeed in the incubator building new products zero
to one one of those products was a video interviewing product and then the scope and popularity of that grew pretty quickly and eventually became end to end scheduling and conducting interviews nice so you know overall scope of my work now nice love it I'm assuming this your your role has now evolved from more of a strategy Perspective and then also you have like team of product managers under you is that yeah so when I started um I was the product manager that was my title yeah well when I started started that indeed I was an
associate product manager when I started the interview product I was a product manager um and then while I've been in the interview space um I went through senior and then director now nice so I had my own little cross functional pod you know as a product Manager had team of um engineering manager software Engineers ux um and then now I have uh multiple teams that I work with so I have a partner who's a director of software engineering and then we have several teams within the interviews umbrella that are each their own product engineering ux
pods yeah that is so cool um I am going to split I'm going to bring you back uh like I told you before to talk about Products specifically uh today we're going to focus on job hunting aspects of it and then I know majority of my audience or I would say like a lot of my audience is also interested in product uh so we will do like a separate thing on product one question I'll ask you before we move on to job hunting is you do not have a formal degree in product management I know
this answer but I think people would like to know this as well is like people think that they have To have something and so how like is that true like did you have Masters in product management or Bachelors in product management or something like that I don't even know if that exists transparently it doesn't yeah yeah but my background is um I went to Purdue University in 2005 yeah I went there for engineering like that was my dream at the time I wanted to be a materials engineer so I went to Purdue and I did
engineering for a year and a half um I switched to biomedical engineering during that year and a half then I decided I didn't want to do in at all so I switched out to accounting and that was um sorry Purdue that was boring accounting was not for me and then I had uh well that was like two and a half or three years in I was like okay I can't do this anymore it's time to get out of here so I switched to Finance which is still like money adjacent but me is more enjoyable than
journal entries and ledgers so I stuck with Finance for the last year year and a half and graduated and then you started as a product or you you started as finance jobs and then pivoted into product that was the height of the credit crisis in the United States and that's when the enormous investment Banks Layman brothers be Sterns imploded And then there were tens of thousands of super experienced you know Finance people investment bankers looking for a job that I was now competing with so I did not get a job so was this 2008 uh
that was in 2009 oh right okay um and then my first job that I could get was knocking door Todo and selling Windows and Home Improvement Services wow so that was my first job out of college interesting okay and then did when did you now I'm Like I know we were going to talk about job hunting but but now I'm more Curious how did you pervert that into tech product management role it's a strange road and it may seem atypical but I've met lots of product managers who have atypical um educational backgrounds and work histories
it's like mine went from um you know door too in Texas which is super hot and miserable as you can imagine yes but in That experience I learned how to talk to people how to convince them in 10 seconds how to take no for an answer um how to build a team I built two teams of college kids we run around in minivans every afternoon from 4 P p.m. to 8:00 p.m. to knock on doors for four hours um I mean it was a miserable job but I sure sa learned a lot and then I
decided I wanted to pursue uh one of my hobbies as a job I wanted to be a game Designer and then the only job I could get in that industry was customer service so I went customer service to Quality Assurance to game design over like two years and then the studio shut down so I was like back to square one again right yeah but in my time there I got to interface with the producer and the producer in gaming is the person who is like a product manager right in software and Hardware like we Know
today and that's when I realized I wanted his job I wanted to be that producer person and the closest thing I could find was an assistant product manager at a company called offers.com which is an online coupon code discount website yeah um they got bought out a couple years after I joined that was my first experience of like being on a startup that got Purchased um and now the company that owns them owns like Retail Me Not they own PC mag IGN like a bunch of huge consumer websites nice I went from there to indeed
that was kind of my path from you know really weird jobs into product and then going from my first product opportunity to indeed yeah uh it resonates with me uh not I did not do door too but uh but I wish I did because I would learn a lot of sales skill and Knocking on the doors of CEOs and CTO and asking them to approve my product ideas but but I learned from your session so for people who don't know um I John and I met at Purdue University we were at the conference together and
John you had a session on how to pitch product ideas uh to stakeholders essentially and get it approved and and funded and I learned a lot in that and but I'm assuming lot of your skills were transferable like you mentioned like Team building communication selling all of those seems like a product skills and again I know we're going to do like a whole new video on product but I'm I'm just passionate about product uh where I was going with this is I did computer science um try wanting to become a software engineer but then I
realized I'm not someone who can just sit in the front of computer and code for eight hours I'm a people person I love people so I need to uh bridge the gap between Technology and Engineers Engineers don't know how to talk to product people product don't know I mean business don't know how to talk to Engineers so I can be the bridge between both of them and that's how I got into I started as a pro project manager TPM I was an engineering manager at a team of software Engineers as well and then pted into
product and U yeah and I love I love what I do so I'm excited uh but I'm assuming you and I both have done hiring we've talked about This when we were there and that's where I want to pick your brain I asked my audience that I'm going to interview you and they sent me bunch of questions so I am ready to ask you it's and be it it's like not pun inted you are also in the job of getting people jobs so hopefully this will um that's my job that is your job yes so
hopefully it sounds like it feels like job hunting is such a blackbox from a job seeker's perspective what was Interesting to me uh when you were telling on the stage that even employe buyers have hard time finding talent and I'm like how is that possible because there's so much talent available and uh Talent say like we don't know why we are not getting response why are we getting ghosted why is our resume not working out so the goal from now until like you know next 30 40 minutes is to hopefully unbox and make black box
to white box so we can give some clarity again cave Adding out this is your and M experience so we this not like a Playbook that this is going to work y this is a data point take our testimony as data points and not as gospel right love it what you're going to watch is an amazing story but before you watch that I just want to quickly say that all of these story I compile the key insights from these stories and all the podcast that I do and I put this in my free exclusive newsletter
Community every week more Than 16,000 people receive my newsletter and they love it and here are some of the examples you can see this was a podcast on George Mason universities and you can see how to network and 10% cold emailing powerful LinkedIn techniques and so and so forth so if you're interested in becoming part of this exclusive newsletter Community absolutely free link is in the description or you can go to udj docomo um I'm going to split the Conversation two half first is getting the interview uh and then second is cracking the interview uh
and I'm assuming at this point you have done both uh like you have given people the how to do an interview I mean you've interviewed bunch of people but you've also selected who to interview so let's start with the first part which is getting the interview and first of all like this is very common question does University brand matter when it comes to Getting an interview call so do you look at in your case I'm I'm just going to ask you uh Purdue University is like you see a resume and it's like oh it's for
Purdue like I'm definitely going to interview is that ever happened or is like oh he's from CMU or he's from Cornell I'm definitely gonna interview this person so for some jobs I know this is true because I've had this conversation With some people um in like the strategy consultant um go to market kind of world they do look upon some of those brand names favorably in my experience for product I don't care at all yeah and I could easily take that further you probably have questions about rums too I am actively trying to get rid
of resumés in the hiring process oh interesting so H like when you say that what do you mean like how Would you then select a candidate for an interview what is the goal of a resume you know the and that's a really hard question to answer yeah like for the job Seeker it's trying to put the most compelling initial foot forward yeah so that somebody sees something on your resume and says I should talk to this person but what is that thing what is the thing the employer is looking for exactly that that's the really
hard part so what job Seekers do is they just put Everything on the resume because they don't know what the employer's looking for and that's why resumés are a mess and it's the wild west yeah and now we're getting into this new era where AI is writing resumés right and this other side of the marketplace on the employer side where um at some point AI is going to be looking at résumés and maybe even evaluating résumés so now you have ai tools evaluating AI tools and we just Entered like you know the dead internet Theory
where everything is produced by Ai and then yeah I don't want to live in that world right so one of the things I want to do is really nail down from an employer what exactly do they need to see before they'll have that you know 15 30 minute conversation with the candidate yeah and oftentimes it's very simple it's not a page yes it's like three bullets yes like if these three Three things exist like I want to talk about those three things and it's going to vary that's the hard part it's not a rule yes
every even like for the same position if there are different hiring managers those hiring managers might want to see different things yeah piggy backing on that um I let's say I'm my team uh for my product I'm on a marketing Tech side I am I'm resonating and I'm agreeing with you uh because I am looking for someone who has A knowledge of contact center platform because that is one of the product people I'm looking for or CRM because he has that person he or she has to interact with CRM and we have an in-house CRM
that is all I care you're right so that is what I I want that person to have this knowledge and if they do and if they have experience I have found I want to talk to that person rest all is noise I 100% agree would you say in your Case is also similar yes it's very very true but the problem is when you read a job description as a job Seeker it's three pages long yeah it has you know four paragraphs about the company how great the company is and maybe some stuff about your day
to-day and then there's 10 bullets of you know requirements and another 10 bullets of skills and competencies that you should have a lot of that 90% of it doesn't Actually matter and at indeed like we're really actively trying to find out what the real requirements are and then distill down to that as much as possible because it's so hard as a job Seeker to need to read a three-page long job description for every job and try to figure out is this for me or not yeah yeah yeah and then what now because of aoom uh
what everyone is doing is like here is the job description here's my resume make my Resume according to job description so which is what you kind of mentioned and then at some point the tools are going to be here's the resume uh make sure that this matches my job description and then only we select the candidate so AI is matching AI so yeah I want to take a step back and for people who don't like I've lived in the world of hiring so I know but maybe for audience who don't know how the hiring process
work um let's assume you Are hiring what how does it like start that why do you why do people like why do company even hire in first place how do you the money get approved and then how do you think of a job description and then from there I'm assuming it goes to recruiter but we'll get to the recruiter part later it's uh it could range from a very long and complicated answer to very short depending on like your company size and what workflows and processes Already exist I can talk about um kind of like
two lifetimes at indeed is how work yeah there was like three years ago when interest rates were close to 0% in the US and everybody was ing for everything yeah yeah um in that time frame you basically just said hey I need help with my project and adid was like cool here you go here's budget go figure it out and like oftentimes hiring managers would need to Source themselves like actively go and create a job source On LinkedIn Source on different websites like oh interesting hunt for themselves because there were hundreds of positions that were
open and not nearly enough recruiters to do all that work so like if you really wanted to urgently hire you had to go do your own thing and then there's today's world where interest rates are significantly higher and for a lot of software businesses times have changed like that's the simple way to put it yeah Almost every big tech company has done layoffs in the last three years and they're all about like efficiency and simplicity now so now if you want to hire somebody as a hiring manager you need to write a business case about
like what exactly do you need this person for what are they going to do what key results are they going to impact for the business you know they're trying to figure out if this is going to Be a positive Roi thing or not um there's a lot more of the traditional hiring process involved now like you can get the recruiter involved and Sorcerers the entire like Talent attraction pipeline Yep they're all available now because we aren't hiring for hundreds of people at the same time it's just like dozens it's more like normal times quote unquote
yeah not like Boom Town of three years Ago I I would say three years ago it was job Seekers market and now it's employers Market um while we are on the topic I'm sure people probably wants to know because you're attended and you see the trends uh are you seeing the trend going towards job Seekers now or you're still you still feel there is more demand than the supply for product specifically um there's definitely more job Seeker Supply so it's still an employer Market Employers can be more demanding about skill sets and experience and anything
they care about for other Industries um like healthcare Transportation Trucking specifically those are jobseeker markets and they will be probably forever now yeah yeah like there's just too many jobs that exist and not enough people to build those jobs is that true for all Tech uh in Terms of product would you say Engineers cyber security all of it is pretty much fall on the similar bucket cyber security I would say is less because I think there's just not that much talent in cyber security yet yeah yeah that's like a specific skill set kind of role
um I would say like AI is in that same type of bubble right now yeah where if you have demonstrable ai skill sets then you can command a premium even yeah yeah uh but like all Things it's a cycle and you know eventually that will come back down from its peak like everything else that's ever happened yeah yeah so if you have ai skill sets strike while the iron is hot yes H but but do you see the market changing like how how is the market driven because of the interest rate like because of the
economy uh and do you feel it's going to change post the election I'm not bringing up politics yeah I don't know how much the Election will influence anything honestly like it seems like the correlation is much more with the interest rate yeah yeah because then companies could just borrow as much money as they wanted and you know there's no downside side because when you pay it back you're paying back like a very very small interest rate on top yeah so if you're looking to accelerate your growth that was easy access to money um and I
know anecdotally you know From two three years ago um people were just getting hired at some companies to just like staff up there weren't actual projects need for headcount yeah but companies were like oh well while we can we're just going to hire a bunch of people and then we'll figure out what to do with them and then that was kind of a catalyst for the eventual layoffs that happened yeah because you had a ton of People who weren't in you know positive Roi positions not their fault it's these companies that made poor decisions yeah
yeah yeah wow I did not plan the conversation to go this way but I love it so um going back to hiring so job description you need help with a project there's a need um in the team that okay we are like stretched at 120% of our capacity or more and we need to bring in addition person um this is what I believe if I'm A hiring manager I want this person to do this thing and now it goes to recruiting team uh and that's where the recruiters like meet with hiring manager is my guess
in I will tell you this is what happens with me you tell me if it's different but I would tell recruiter saying that here are the things that I'm looking for here is the range for salary this is my Max this is my minimum and um yeah and then like there are must haves like red flags definitely don't and so There's like this 30 minute or like in 1 hour recruiter interviewing me uh what I want for the candidate yeah the intake yes yeah so and then they take all of that and create the job
description is that the same process for you similar so at indeed in my experience at least the hiring manager is empowered to create the entire job description themselves oh interesting okay there is like boilerplate stuff That goes into every Indeed job description like Ed indeed the world's number one job website like all that stuff is templated yeah but you get to specify all of the like the meat and potatoes of the job description which is good like that's what you want because you're trying to identify or help the job Seeker identify like am I the
person for this job um and that's practically only somewhat helpful Because what actually happens is that thousands of people apply to every open job and only a small handful of them actually meet like the bullet you know requirements that you laid out yeah yeah so the job description is you know it's a suggestion at best for job Seekers yeah yeah and so so if you are the hiring manager who has the who is empowered to write your own description which is I like that does that mean so is the recruiter at all Involved at ended
so after the job description exists um and the budget is approved you have money and you have a description you can talk to a recruiter and say help me you know I need you to actually help me find people for this job yeah and then they will do the logistical portion of like actually creating the job in the applicant tracking system the ATS Ting that job to wherever it needs to go indeed obviously is a major source Of candidates yeah but if we want to recruit anywhere else like if you're hiring for a specific Niche
position or skill set maybe there's a specific job board or other website you want this job to appear on they do all of that work and then now the job exists it's on the internet and people can find it nice when you are applying as a job Seeker your application goes to that same recruiter the hiring manager never sees It yeah okaying manager only sees it after the recruiter served as like the first line of defense yeah and the recruiter has like done their recruiter thing yeah and they looked at the resume and they look
at what you told them was important and then if those two things align they will schedule that recruiter screen is what they call it that's the 30 minute phone call yeah you have is the first step yep yeah yeah okay uh so many more questions now Uh first question um uh advertising the job it's it's sounds funny for job Seekers is like like you know why do you need to advertise because it's not necessarily the SE job Seekers are looking at only one like or they they might not be even looking at that platform at
all so that's why you need to uh provide does this mean uh that job Seekers should look at multiple platform because it's not always necessary that a job opening Will be only in one platform uh or it might not be at all on some platform because that's where they've been looking at the job and now they never looked at inded for example and because inded is maybe cheaper to advertise over that I'm not saying it is but I'm I'm example that it is cheaper to for me to do inded and now I as a job
Seeker never look at inded as a platform to look for jobs which would not be the case but if that was the case then I missed out not Going to hurt my feelings it's okay no no we will get to that feelings party but but is that true like they should have multiple job boards in their Arsenal that to look at not just rely on one job board so indeed's original Vision was to be one place all jobs and that's how indeed really created its competitive Advantage they said we're going to be the source where
a jobseeker can go to and you can Find any job in the world on indeed.com whether or not that's actually true today I don't know yeah but indeed does have a boatload of jobs yes yeah so for any job that you know our audience is probably looking for it's probably on indeed and several other websites as well because there are so many mechanisms around job sharing syndication um aggregation scraping like all of that stuff is table Stakes Now so indeed probably has the job that you're interested in right but it will also probably be on
half a dozen other websites right but if people are not looking at inded thinking that I can find jobs at LinkedIn I hope it's okay if I'm using that uh but let's say because that's where most people spend time J job speakers spend their time there thinking anything that LinkedIn is going to show me that's where I'm going to apply and Never look at you know indate jobs so that means they missed out on because it is going to cost as an employer to advertise my job on LinkedIn on indeed whatever all these other platforms
so would that so again back to the same question would you agree that they should have multiple job boards yeah I mean for the job Seeker I would Advocate you use any weapon at your disposal to improve your chances at getting a [Music] job yeah yeah like the game is already incredibly hard to play right like so use every tool in your toolbox every arrow in your quiver that you can to get a job yeah um yeah I'm going to get to time management part but what next I want to talk about you mentioned ATS
um I think people are really scared of it and there is so much noise about this ATS that it Auto rejects resume how true is this like how true is that you apply and it rejects resume completely and that's why there's so much goes on into uh retuning your like rewriting job description in your resume so that that way ATS will match 100% and that's when you recruiters will look at it I am not the ATS expert there are hundreds of ats's yeah that exist um there are a small fraction that dominate The Marketplace like
isims workday Etc um indeed has its own version of an ATS that when you indeed apply so when you apply through indeed.com you never leave indeed to complete that application process process that's an indeed apply when you do that it goes to the employers indeed.com website okay got it yeah and indeed does not automatically reject any application ever yeah and part of that is for legal and compliance Reasons but part of that is also because unless you're 100% confident that somebody is not going to get that job then how can you possibly take as definitive
in action is like throwing their resume away you know yeah like that's such a difficult thing to be able to say like I trust this machine algorithm to make the decision that this person's application needs to be thrown away yeah yeah you can't be 99.999% sure that's not good enough right yeah yeah and that's what my recruiters have said that to me as well that they we we don't use I mean we use indeed but we don't have we also use ADP which is another ATS system right and uh it does not Auto reject resume
what it does autoject is the questions that are asked in the application so if the question is do you require sponsorship and if they say yes now at this point we know we Don't sponsor Visa so we are going to put them in a pile of Auto auto reject you know to put it in a way because we don't sponsor visas um XYZ so those are that is the only thing that I've heard from recruiters is that how Auto reject work but they actually do spend time reviewing resumés and then giving them the rejects uh
in your experience is that similar or yeah if there are fundamental misalignments between the job seeker and the requirements of the Job like sponsorship or um you know you're not 18 you're not eligible to work you know this job then yes you get put in a bucket of you know quote unquote unqualified applicants yeah but the employer still has to action them through either setting up automation rules like you said yep you know people in this bucket Auto reject after three days yeah something like that yeah or they still need to manually go through and
and reject Them but for at least in the US there are a lot of like protections around job search and application submission and stuff like the the apply has to go through and the employer will then set up whatever mechanisms they feel are appropriate to deal with that right yep okay moving on to resume I am like I looked at the job description I feel like I'm a good candidate for this I applied to indeed apply and now uh there's a one person who may or may not Understand product management uh but I know that
I can do the job uh that John wants so how do you tackle this this recruiters who I don't know if they know this enough that my profile is a good match um is it possible like that they may make a decision that it's like not correct because you are totally qualified and is it first come first serve is it last come first serve what how do you like how do they make that Decision do you have any insights I have some insights okay um I can say that when we talk about like the term
qualified applicant yeah most of the time what a hiring manager recruiter is looking for is relevant work experience yeah that's what they mean when they say qualified candidate does this person have relevant work experience so when the job description says you know X years of experience in ABC system or framework or technology whatever the thing is like that's really the thing they want to see like the best way to know if somebody can do a job is if they've already done that job before yes yeah so that's what you really want to index on as
a job Seeker like showing with proof if you can like tangible outcomes and results I have done this job before and I succeeded at it and now I want to do that job for [Music] You and what if talking for the audience who does not have work experience can they show projects assignments which are relevant to the pro the job description that's still a flavor of work experience in my mind like it might not be at uh you know 10,000 person Corporation but the nature of the work you know in product at least is still
going through all the things that a product manager needs to do to be Successful it doesn't really matter where you did it that's another part of my own biases against brand names and resumés yeah I don't care if you worked at a thing before yeah I actually don't even try to look at the resume before I speak to you the recruiter did that the recruiter looked at your resume they asked you the basic questions they do in that intro phone call and they said you know you should go talk to John I'm going to go
Have that conversation and go into that with zero bias so I'll know your name that's it I love that okay and um again piggybacking on this is like helpful for resume people um because there's lot of again advises on resume does that so you said relevant work experience is the most important what lot of people do is they see bunch of keywords now there are so many tools out which analyzes the job description Creat that oh these are the 15 top like keywords available they take those keywords and they put it in the skills section
how valuable is that I don't think I as a hiring manager when I'm look I don't even look at that skill because it it's made up like I don't know how have you implemented that skills so unless you have used those skills in the experience bullet points that is when I'm like okay maybe you know this but putting in the skill Section like do you put any weightage zero yeah it's the same as you like I want to hear your story about your relevant work experience like I want to hear about the people you worked
with and the problems you solved and the results you generated that's all the stuff I want to hear about yeah and the things like the skills you use to get those things that'll surface in those conversations Right but if you just have 10 bullets um or like certifications is another one yeah in product I don't care about certifications and one of my first products at indeed was called indeed certifications where I got to learn about the entire world of certifications licenses and degrees most of them don't mean anything they serve to make money for the
people who created this brand name Of the certification like that's the real point of the certification yeah yeah nice so projects work experience and Capstone projects like assignments um would you say teaching assistant jobs like the jobs on campus which are still like Building Products maybe project management what like they would still tell a story of who you are and the skills they have built yeah I mean I would ask you like tell me about The biggest problem that you identified working as a TA and then we'll talk about you know how you identified that
and who you had to work with to get it recognized as a problem where any resources you had to you know win from other departments or whatever yeah yeah all of that it's everything's a product at the end of the day yeah you just gotta think about it that way right yeah yeah yeah okay um so moving to Recruiters may may not select but emphasizing on relevant work experience because I agree with that as well um I think another debate we should also like maybe address it is education the format oh my gosh like format
I forgot about the format how important is the format uh especially when I say format I mean should education first come first should relevant work experience come first should skills come first should because People think that if you put education and skills those are the most keywords and that's why your resume will get ranked higher and that's why you'll get calls this is I'm telling you what my audience thinks so yeah I I know the answer but I want you to like I think will be helpful for to see what you think so if you
think of your resume as a product and you think about you know the goal of the resume and you interview your users you know who's going to see The resume it's the recruiter what are they looking for relevant work experience that should probably be the very first thing on your resume that would be my hypothesis yeah you know if relevant work experience is the most important thing to a recruiter and I put that at the top of my resume then I'll be more likely to get a job yep and that's what I've seen be successful
you know in in the workplace not like your objective summary I've seen that Too where there's like two paragraphs of yeah something I I don't know what it is but it's not important um bullets of skills bullets of competencies I just want to know like can you do this job have you done it before um any interesting problems or conflicts or wins um the more that's measurable the better because that lends legitimacy to all your claims rather than just like I um helped soand so create XYZ like that's an output yeah you know the next
question is so what yes yeah yeah so relevant work experience put that at the top yeah blow your name your name and contact info so if I like what you have to say about your work experience I know exactly what my next step is yes yeah yeah yeah and the only caveat again I don't know if you agree through this is to this education experience I agree either education and Experience or experience uh first is if the role is specifically for early grad because that is when they want to see when are you graduating because
you do fit in that category or it's an intern role or something like that I don't know if you agree with this or not but this is something my recruiter told me that if the role explicitly says intership or early grad or a co-op we want to make sure they are studying right now and they are graduating when we expect them To graduate Etc yeah if that's a hard requirement for the role then you want to make sure that's easily found on your resume yeah but that still should be a very small relative portion of
your resume yeah that that's not going to get you the job right that are students it's still the relevant work experience or the relevant you know projects that you mentioned whatever the thing is that's relevant that's proving you can do this Job yeah that's the whole point of the resume yes what's the how important is having website portfolio website uh play like is it like a golden star because you have it or is it like H it's good I don't I don't give yeah what's like bonus points is if they're 's an actual live product
that's being used by real customers today and you say check this out you know it's a link to an app description page or a product page on a website somewhere and You can see you know clear's day it's real and it's solving people's problems right now yeah so you know already right off the bat there's some legitimacy to what this person is saying they've uh in theory you know assuming their claims are true they've worked on this product and it's a product that exists and it's actively solving problems yes yes okay awesome love it um
I agree I I say this to a lot of data analysts they put so Much of like I use this I did this data five millions of data and know it's like okay did you create dashboard it's like yeah yeah I created dashboard I was like can you host that dashboard so people can see it and then it's like that's where it adds a lot more credibility it's not just your words but I have the dashboard live you can play around with it yeah show me yeah tell right yeah love it okay uh next question
is um I know this is a Hack which I think a lot of people now use it because there a blackbox of we don't know what recruiters might look at and there's thousands of people to hand out they want to cut the line and reach out to hiring manager if they are able to figure out who the hiring manager is let's assume in this case I'm like I think John is hiring for this role and I found him on LinkedIn I'm able to message him directly How annoyed would you be or how like happy would
you be that oh my job is easy someone actually reached out I'm going to pass them to recruiter saying like hey I want to talk to this person so first is like would you be annoyed or would you be like not annoyed um the easy answer is it depends on where you're at in the hiring process so for example if we've already spoken and your next step is to go talk to somebody else you know that's on the Team or have a panel interview or whatever but for some reason somebody dropped the ball that's not
getting scheduled please reach out to me like absolutely yes tell me because that's a bad candidate experience and I want to fix that for you that's the the easy answer like you're you've been validated already now let's say it's the other end of the spectrum and I've never heard of you in my life I don't even know you apply to This job yeah and then you reach out to me um my next step assuming this is like lower volume if I'm getting a 100 messages a day about people who appli to this job I can't
possibly talk to everybody yeah if it's you know one or two a day then I'll talk to the recruiter I'll say hey so and so sent me a message through Linkedin I look at the resume and I would like to talk to them or I don't want to talk to them send them a Rejection so it could backfire it could backfire yeah but if you were going to get rejected by the recruiter anyway then stes were fairly low yeah yeah but then again like this if it's a hack everybody's using and then there's this huge
volume of messages going out all the time then nobody's going to get anything from it because it'll just be an overwhelming amount of volume right how important is it so let's say you someone from your team um It's one of your product manager um you are hiring for your product team and it's one of your product manager I am friends with them not friends sorry I'm a complete stranger to that person but I found out when I was doing the research because you put it in the description that oh it's for the interviews team I
found out did some my magic talking skills in LinkedIn and figured it out okay I found this person I'm going to reach out to Them like hey I am interested in this position I would love to just chat and learn more about indeed and the culture and what projects you guys are working on and this person is in your team he has responded back he's like happy to check that now I'm on a call with this person trying to basically understand what the projects are working on and at this this time he has made a
decision that he likes me and I'm like would you mind Connecting me with the hiring manager or a recruiter and if he does that it is that something you're going to put uh importance I love my team yeah I have a ton of faith in them and and their judgment M so if one of them came up to me and said I had a random conversation with this person that reached out to me and I think they might actually be a good fit for this role I would definitely take that but I would like to
rewind 30 Seconds that hypothetical message you talked about of like this job Seeker messaging the PM on my team if you send messages like hey this looked interesting you know I think I could do this job you want to talk for 30 minutes no way like I don't have time for that yeah but if you give me like two hard-hitting points of like why exactly we need to have this conversation back to the relevant work experience thing like I saw this and my experience Perfectly aligns with this because I delivered XYZ and generated ABC revenue
or conversion or whatever the success metric is I'm like oh that's compelling like this person has done it they have results sure I'll go talk to this person for 15 minutes amazing I love it I mean you kind of stole my next question but I was going to ask you what message would you respond to but you already kind of answered it yeah so uh keep it specific To what you're like what what is it don't make it vague because I think copy pasting over here is not going to work and then how is your
experience relevant to the job and have you done anything and that is why it is important for them to get on a call with you yep and I think this goes back to one of our earlier conversations about distilling the essence of the resume into what really matters into just 50 words yeah yeah if you send me your resume like hey I saw this job um here's my resume you know I'm not going to do anything with that yeah yeah because then you're making me do a bunch of extra steps and a bunch of extra
work yeah the worst one is I get this a lot hey I'm the student and I'm looking for a job is your team hiring or is your company hiring I'm like now you have given me task to go and find if my company's hiring to see if you are good fit or not I'm like no I'm not gonna respond to that that's um I'm not dub Tails right into one of the best pieces of advice I've received as a product manager don't ask somebody how can I help you tell them how you can help love
it and then all they have to do is say yes they don't have to think about any of the work they now have to do you've created for them like all you're saying here's exactly how I can help you here's Exactly why I'm qualified for this job just say yes and then we'll talk nice love it amazing um so referrals do play some importance if it's coming from your team but what if it's like an adjacent team it's an engineer it's an engineer like how important is that and who do you get from referrals from
is that also important when I say referral I don't mean here's my referral link apply because I don't think that I mean yes it Does work maybe a little bit but I when I say referral I mean this person has an influence over a hiding manager or at least knows the hiding manager can vouch for me and say like hey I know this person and you should talk to him he's like I've worked with him in the past or whatever XYZ if the referer is willing to go to bat for this person and that refer
is also legitimate like if they have You know their own you know resume they have this list of things that they've done you're like oh wow this person knows what they're talking about clearly like they've accomplished a lot they've had a dramatic effect on employers and job Seekers you know in the context of indeed I trust their judgment enough to have a short conversation um and that works like for me too I don't just refer people if I don't know you I'm not going to refer You yeah I like with everybody really you have um
a limited amount of trust currency yes love that trust currency if you spend your currency everywhere all the time then it's inflation and becomes useless but if you're very strict about how you hand out that trust currency when you spend it somebody will listen and then it becomes worth a lot yeah yeah love that okay yeah um I want to dive into more of networking a little Bit before we get into interviewing and we might have to split this I it's already an hour so we might do yeah yeah I love it uh okay so
networking because this is how we connected we met and we we connected we wiped and now we are talking here and you know who knows where the future is but uh uh let's assume there's no job postings available right now at indeed um and Like one of the good advice I heard don't Network when you're in the need of job Network when you don't need a job because then your network will actually come in handy but I think the problem is nobody knows how to so that's why I want to break it down at this
point you are a stranger to me I saw I saw saw this podcast and I'm like hey John I see you on ud's podcast i' would love to connect um what like what why would you connect With some stranger if they are reaching out to you online um like because I think at this point they they don't have any intention of like getting a job they just genuinely want to build a professional Network I value transparency a lot so I would want to know you know why do you want talk to me I'm just a
guy you know just a guy with a job I'm a dad you know why do you want to talk to me is it because you know you've been Working on something really cool and you know just want to show me for 10 minutes or maybe something that's relevant to the world of job seeking and this is again back to like volume of requests yeah like if a 100 people a day are messaging saying hey do you have 10 minutes no that's a thousand minutes of time that people want a day yeah yeah so when you're
thinking about like why you want to network like what is the value the other Person will get out of this too and if it's a symbiotic relationship that's even better like you're both getting something from the conversation it's nobody's job just to network for a to 10 hours a day like everybody has lives you know they're doing other things yeah yeah so we want that time to be meaningful so cool and uh I will warn you you will get hundreds of requests even though we try to do any kind of Disclaimer uh so please all
the audience please be mindful and John I am sorry if this is going to happen I know this what'll be interesting is if anybody you know does listen to this and they think through the conversation we had and something does bubble up to the top as interesting and beneficial yeah yeah yeah and I want to create another scenario that because I listen to the Conversation really well maybe I'm giving out to people how to reach out to you but let's let's play with the scenario I listen to the conversation really well and like okay John
is working on he mentioned something about video inw like removing the resume piece completely I resonate with this I have worked something similar project now when I reach out to John like hey John heard you on ud's podcast and I love the idea about resume and here's some Similar project that I worked on I would love to like chat more uh and see if I can help you with your project what please people don't do this like I know these people will like just steal this and they they will just do this but would you
uh accept this request that is a great question um honestly depends on the message again if it sounds like a sales message yeah and you're trying to get me to buy Something um full transparency I don't make purchase decisions oh yeah there are people's jobs procurement it's their job to buy things I don't buy anything yeah I get tons of them yeah um but if it's empathetic self-deprecating um you have some data in there I love [Music] data um and like even better there's Something I can go and see like if you have a like
a screenshot or a demo hosted somewhere whatever like the thing is you want to talk about like that helps me a lot because then that's expectation setting too then I will feel like I understand the entire context and request of the message and if I don't have that I'm not going to take it because I don't want to be ambushed you know in a conversation of like I thought we were talking about this and you are Actually trying to sell me something right right yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah okay cool um I know we
are running out of time um so I'll pause this conversation here because I want to Deep dive in networking and it I won't do justice if if you're are rushing so um I want to I mean of course we're going to talk next week so we'll continue this conversation because networking and then potentially now I've gotten an interview call what how to cck the interview call So we'll bring you back this way people can also subscribe and they don't run away perfect yeah yeah and then to all yes and then I know we will be
talking about product as well which is which is I'm also very curious about but again John thank you so much this is this has been like a master class you you should you know how to how people need to get jobs so so flattering thank you thank you for me yeah thank you again um I can't wait to bring you back any other Tips final words of wisdom for job Seekers who are students I know we talked about a lot of dos and don'ts you know over the course of this but I'm always going to
Advocate on the side of the job Seeker so whatever you feel like is going to get you that job take advantage do it you know within like legal lines and all of that stuff obviously but yeah get the job like send messages you know even though you're not Going to get a response to 99% of them I can't remember what like you miss 100% of the shots you don't take yes Michael Jordan Michael Scott that whole line of voting yeah yeah I mean you gotta try so just keep trying I definitely feel for you yeah
it's always tough out there yeah yeah awesome love it this was great and I can't wait to have you back
