[0:00] importance of networkingHello, the guest today is Lisa Rangel, a class of 92, and she is an expert in finding work and having good resumes. Hi, hi. Hi, Lisa. What are the hello? To be here. What are the steps of finding a job? You know, finding a job in today's climate is difficult, but what we're seeing is networking really being the key, which is, you know, the work that you're doing. And bringing Cornelians together is just such a great way for that to happen for so many people, especially if networking is a little hard for them. But I would say every way of getting hired can fall into 3 buckets. First bucket being networking. It's about maybe like how 6570% of hires happen. And networking can be really loosely defined, right? It can be corporate alumni, college alumni, National Association, for instance, networking on LinkedIn with people you know, people you don't know. I mean, I can go on and on and on, neighbors, friends, that sort of thing. And then about 20% ish 2025% of hires happen through job postings, which is getting harder and harder to really breakthrough, but it's still definitely a way that people get hired. And then the third bucket is through third party or, or fee based recruiters. And by fee based, I mean the company is paying the recruiter. A candidate should never pay to be placed. That's typically a model for scam. So when I say fee based, it's just that you're getting placed by a third party recruiter who will be compensated by that company for identifying you as the client. And that that's about 10 to 15% of hires. So, you know, I, I just suggest allocate your time accordingly, spend most of your time networking because that's really how the lion's share of most good hires happen. And sometimes you'll even stumble upon a job that maybe wasn't posted, but then we'll get designed around you because you met somebody and they see what value brings. What's the example of how networking would find a job? Like just recently went to, you know, PCCW this weekend, right, A Cornell women's group networking event. Essentially it's, it's meant to the group support some higher education initiatives by women and female professors. So, you know, associate professors and, and graduate students. But there's networking that happens. There's people who were there looking, you know, whether they're currently working and looking for a job or not working and looking for a job. And there's people who are helping each other, vowing to talk after the session. You know, if you're being proactive, there's often a list of who's coming to these events and even other conferences now do this. They tell you who's coming once you've registered. And you can reach out to people proactively and and set up meetings. So set up meetings before and after the event. And then, you know, sometimes people say, look, I can't afford to go to conferences. Well, you can also reach out to people saying I'm not able to come. I would love to chat. I saw you post about the event on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on Instagram, on TikTok. I'm sure you had some great experiences. I wasn't able to attend for whatever reason. I would love to chat with you anyway, right. So like, I actually did that with a few people because I was like, hey, are you going before the event? I was like, hey, are you going? They're like, no, I can't. I'm like, girl, let's jump on a chat. So just, you know, you can, I would say no matter what you're going through or whatever the event is, look at it. They look at it as a way of how can you make it work versus like the fifty ways it won't because there's always a way it won't work. But if you're unable to attend an event, look and see who's posting about it and ask for a chat. You can also I always tell people the question, a question I always ask is if you have, you know, like 1520 thousand, whatever amount of LinkedIn connections and people are like, I don't know how to network on everybody to talk to. I'm like, all right, you have 500 connections, You have 5000 connections, whatever the number is. What was the last time you reached out to each of your connections to just say, hey, we've been connected for a while. We haven't chatted. Would you be open for a check or you know, hey, we worked together three years ago. We haven't talked. Are you up for a chat asking people to chat without leading with Hey, I'm looking for a job. You know, do that before you need to look for a job. And if you're in the, if you're in throws now of looking for a job and that's your reason for reaching out, just reach out anyway when about mentioning that and don't lead with that when the conversation happens. Let them get to that. Odds are they may be in the same boat and that's why they said yes, right? So but just don't complicate it and just reach out to people.

[4:17] how to schedule your weekIf you're looking for a job right now, what should the typical week look like? But I would break out your time if you're looking for a job. If you're currently working and looking for a job, admittedly you may not have 40 hours a week to look for a job. So if you're able to spend 5 hours looking for a job, or a day on the weekend looking for a job, or an hour each day before after work looking for a job. Whatever your time allocation is for looking for a job, I would break it up by those percentages I gave you. And if you're going to make a mistake on your allocation of time side of networking more than submitting to job postings or hoping a third party recruiter is going to place you. So I would spend most of your time reaching out to people and networking. And if you're going to apply to job postings, I would make sure you're applying to the job posting, but then reach out to people at the company, whether it's at the company or people tangentially related to the company and not just the recruiters. You know, if you're a controller, reach out to the CFO, right? Or the BP of finance. If you're a CHRO, you know, reach out to a fellow person that would be on the executive committee with you or even the CEO. You know, if you're a staff accountant, reach out to the accounting manager. Like reach out to the people that would you might report to in addition to who the hiring people are because the hiring people are getting inundated. So you may have to try some different ways to try to get notice. But the key to remember is a job search is a sale sales process. The product you're selling is you. So, you know, I often tell salespeople or marketing people, you wouldn't sit around and wait for somebody to find you. You know, you wouldn't just submit RF PS all day and hoping to get sales you, you'd be out networking. You'd be out networking before the RFP was issued to understand what's happening at the company. You know, you wouldn't play the lottery for your retirement plan, right? So it's the same thing. You have to do small actions consistently in reaching out to people to start nurturing and building a network that you can either use now if you're looking or to be able to use later when you might be looking in the future. But allocate your time accordingly. And if you're not working, your job is to look for a job, you know, and you have the benefit of having more time to look. And you know, that may be, it may sound a little strange for people to say the benefit, but listen, if you're currently working, the benefit is it's easier sometimes to find a job when you have a job. But the downside is you may only have like 3-4, five hours a week to do your search if you're not working. Obviously there's some downsides to that on many levels, but the upside is you have more time to look and more time to go to these events. So you always got to look at what the positive is of your particular situation. You always have to look at how you can make it work versus like the five ways it won't work because there's always a way it's not going to work. I don't say this lightly, but the attitude of possibility really in the mindset, the job landing mindset is really important to help you find opportunity in this chaos versus like always looking for the way it's not going to work. In sales, there's like a sales funnel, right? Yeah, like lead and qualify lead, like is there a similar kind of funnel you build up to? I mean, you know, I mean, we design a specific plan for clients based on their time allocation for, you know, I could say again, if they have 5 hours or they have 40 hours to look do for a search. But you know, if you're currently working, I would say even if you reach out to two people a day, you know, obviously if you can do more, great. But like I would say, you really are not going to get any traction if you're not reaching out to at least two people a day. And in the spirit of networking, you can be very strategic about it. If you're trying to do a career change, pick the people you might report to in an industry that you're targeting, you know, and do two people a day. And it's simple as like, you know, in the spirit of networking, I'm reaching out, you know, simply just for a conversation, you know, would you be open for a chat? No agenda. And these are things that I write. No agenda, no sales pitch. That's what I write. And, or, and that might be somebody who's a second or third degree connection in an industry that you want to get into. Or if you want to do the suggestion I made earlier that, you know, you have 2000 connections and you realize you don't talk to people very often. You can be like, hey, you know, if you go to somebody's contact information, it'll have the anniversary date that you connected, you might say, and if you don't even go to the connection date, you can still pull this off without, with producing steps of, of finding that information. But you might say, hey, looks, we've been connected for a while, but we've never chatted. Would you be open for a chat? You know, or we've been connected since October 2023 and we've never spoken. You know, would you be open to a networking chat? No agenda, you know, no pressure. I even say consider it an open invite because then if people are not active on LinkedIn, but they stumble upon your message, say two months from now, they'll still take you up on the chat. Not feeling bad that they, you know, didn't answer you right away or something like so it's so I'll say no agenda, no pitch open invite. You let me know whenever it works. That's it. And just put it to the universe. Don't worry if they don't get back to you. Just put, keep putting out stuff knowing that there's always going to be a percentage that we'll get back to you. So if you're putting out ten of those and they're cold, you're having a great day. If you get one or two responses, if they're people you know and you put out ten of those, you're having a great day. If you get maybe 3-4 or five responses, don't worry about the 567 that didn't respond or the 8910, you know, the eight or nine that didn't respond. Focus on the ones that respond and then don't worry about the ones that didn't and go find another 10 and just keep it consistently moving, focusing on the attention you get. There's 100 reasons why people may not respond in the moment, you know, of which I am not going to get back to. Tony is probably not one of them. You know, they may think you're looking for a job and they don't have anything. So they feel a little bad and don't respond. They may be super busy, they may be away, they may be dealing with an illness. They may, right. I mean, they may have had a meeting that may, you know, the LinkedIn inbox is a little bit of a mess. They may have just missed it and they don't even realize it. There's 100 reasons why, so just focus on the ones that reply and don't worry about the ones that don't and just rinse repeat tomorrow. That makes sense after you have a conversation with them, like what kind of personal branding do you try to build up with them over time? Like what do you want them to remember about? You know, some of the old school recommendations would have been like, you know, mail them an article, cut it out and mail them an article. Well, the good news now is you can do that via message with a link, right? So like, if you see in an article that makes you think of someone, you can say, hey, I enjoyed our chat a couple weeks ago. Just saw this article based on what we were talking about. Just wanted to share it with you. That's it. You don't even have to ask for anything. I mean, sometimes it's just a matter of saying you're thinking about somebody, sometimes even just reaching out, but they don't get back to you. It's not that, it's not that they didn't like talking to you or you didn't offer value, but like, I believe even if you drop a note and they don't reply back for all the reasons I mentioned earlier, right? It could be 100 reasons why they don't get back to you. I, I think the odds are they saw it and it registers, right? And why do I think this is the case? I wish I had money and time to like prove this. But you know, we all belong to different social media channels and some variation, you know, and we can see that people, you know, we can see where they, you know, where their kids went to school, you know what they ate for dinner, you know, where they went on vacation, God forbid who passed away. Like you find out all this stuff about people, but you've never talked to them or you haven't talked to them in years. So I firmly believe if you send an e-mail or LinkedIn message, odds are they're seeing it too and they don't have time. So you could, you know, if this is if you had a conversation and they said they would do something for you and they don't or they forgot, you know, even if you 3-4 weeks later say, you know, I really enjoyed our conversation. I just wanted to stay on your rate radar. If you get a minute to, you know, do the intro to X, or maybe you've changed your mind and it's not suitable anymore, that's fine. But just staying on your radar, reiterating my interest in the thing we talked about. I know you'll get back to me when you can. That's it. And don't expect a response because now you've not built in an expectation that somebody's going to possibly disappoint you on Right. So mentally you feel a little free from it. But then they may actually respond because now to be a hero, the only thing they have to do is respond. Yeah. You know, so you've sets the expectations low enough that they may actually respond and feel good that they made you feel good. But when you build in the expectation that they can't meet, then people go, they go, they ghost, you know, they don't respond typically because nobody likes to say I can't do that anymore or Oh my God, I forgot. I'm sorry. Like nobody, everybody's heavy right now for various reasons. And don't be another piece of heaviness If you build no expectation into it. Now they can be a hero or they can actually let it go without feeling guilt. So that's how I suggest for people to stay on top of of conversations, stay on the people, use that phrase. I'm just staying on your radar. Get back to me when you when it's suitable. And then again, your responsibility is to just have more in the pipeline, right? Whatever that may look like for you. I'd say at the minimum, you got to do this 10 a week or two a day. You know, if you're doing five days a week, the more you can do the better, right? Like again, this is a sales process. So the more you do outreach, the better off you're going to increase your odds of landing conversations which are going to lead to the jobs. But at the minimum, do the minimum, you know, but I don't. I'd say if you can do 10A day that would be great, but some people may not be able to do that and I'd rather you do one or two than nothing. Like God, there's a lot of these

[13:39] 1-1 conversationspeople. They talk to like 10 people a day as well. Like how do you stand out in their mind? Great. That's a really great question. You know, be curious, ask them questions about their life versus their work. You know, ask different questions, you know, don't there's like, I'm an introvert that plays well with extroverts and nobody ever believes that when I say it. But when I started, you know, needing, realizing I needed to do this for myself when I was about 27, you know, this is, you know, almost 30 years later now, but I realized I was terrible at having like small talk and just having conversations that weren't just like, let's get things done. Like everybody, every conversation isn't about getting things done. You just need to talk to people sometimes, right? And there was a book called The Art of Small Talk by Deborah Fine that I still have and I still reference. And it's not a book that you can sit down with. I mean, you could, but I didn't do it this way. It's not a book that you have to sit down and be cover to cover to learn the art of small talk. It's literally a book that you can like open it up and it'll probably give you questions you can pull out, like pull out one or two questions that you're going to do or ask before you're going on a conversation with somebody. A way to use AI is, you know, I'm about to have a networking chat with XYZ person. Here's their LinkedIn profile, here's their bio or whatever you can find about them. You know, what would be some non work related questions that I can ask just to spark conversation? That's the way to use AI to help you, right? Without necessarily buying a book. Although I think Deborah's book is great and still relevant to this day. You know, if you're not a great small talker, train yourself on it. Whether you're reading, whether you're using AI to do it, whether you hire a coach to do it. I think that's really the way to build a Moat around ourselves in this market with AI and you know, all the things. I think you being a good conversationalist and making people feel connected with you is, is a superpower. And that's what your ability to influence people, your ability to rally people, your ability to lift people up. Well then you know, that's never going to, in my opinion, be able to take over by AI. And if you can do that in a conversation, they will start to remember you for the thing that you know how to do when it becomes available in their organization. Like initially you first contact them and over the years you've maintained that relationship. Yeah, maintenance of relationships over decades. You know, absolutely. I mean, I quite when I recruited, you know, I recruited for 13 years before I started my company community resumes and I still have people that I've placed and I recruited calling me now. I mean, as my company started in 2009. So I still have people now calling me going you placed me in blah, blah, blah. Or, or they've hired us two or three times in this in my current company and it started because I was a recruiter with them a bazillion years ago. You know, I think, you know, even if, you know, like just some other things, like I had a networking event I went to the other night and I reached out to people going, hey, are you going? They're like, yeah, I'm going. And then I went, I didn't see them there. And two days later I was like, hey, is everything OK? No guilt for not going, but like, I just want to make sure you're not sick. Everything all right? That's a touch point that makes people feel like you remembered and you missed them and and then, you know, they tell you why they missed it and if they're sick, you wish them well. If they're like, oh, I had work to do, you're like, oh, what's going on and how can I help? And it just again, just be human with people. It's not always like I'm looking for a job, I'm looking for a job, I'm looking for a job, you know, like just be human and interested and ask simple questions that just get people talking about themselves. It's not easy, but it's not complicated. I think a lot of times we complicate things out of fear, which I get, but it's all very doable even for those of us that it doesn't come intuitively too. How about the career trajectory like when you first graduate to like less about networking, more about job applications, but over time, as you grow higher in the hierarchy, do you go more more on the networking side and less on job? What's? You know, that's a really good

[17:47] networking at beginning of careerquestion. I have found the stats I gave earlier to be applicable at almost any level. You know, my, my one child landed a job by networking when she was initially rejected by the job submission, her first job at school. So and, and my, my son's the same way. He really didn't do the submission thing very often. He just went and walked in, you know, and talked to people or network through a school alumni, that type of thing. It doesn't mean that going through a job postings not fruitful. It absolutely is fruitful and it absolutely should not be something that's ignored. You know, systems are not perfect, you know, and and sometimes you might get rejected one way and sometimes you get in another way. That also includes networking. You might have somebody who doesn't think you're right, but you submit and through another channel you get through. The key is to view. You know, the same way sales, right, There's not one way to sell. There's not one way to get hired. Yes, every higher way of hiring hire goes into one of those buckets I mentioned earlier. But that doesn't mean there's only three ways of getting hired. There's hundreds of ways of getting hired. I once got an interview because I commented on a blog post, you know, and they're like, I love your position. Would you like to talk about the job we have here? And I'm like, yeah, sure. You know, like, so it's again, being interesting, interested and curious and putting yourself out there, being willing to be ignored or, or rejected and realize it's not personal, you know, and then you just rinse, repeat, you know? I guess over the years too, as you build up your network it's easier to reach out to warm connections over time. Yeah, and then you're getting rejected less because you start having more people you need to just simply know and reach out to, right? Like in the beginning, you may only have like, you know, 100 people you know, And once you go through those in a week, you got to start reaching out to people you don't know. But if you get to a point where you have 5000 connections and you genuinely know most of them, well, it's going to take you some time to get through those before you really need to go to people you don't know. So yeah, that's a great. That's a yeah. How about from the other side's perspective? Like from the recruiter perspective? Well, there are things that a good recruiter could do to meet more people and recruit better talent over time.

[19:55] the recruiter's perspectiveRecruiting right now is really under a lot of pressure because. They're obviously pressured to find whether they're paid recruiters, commissioned recruiters as a third party recruiter or corporate recruiter. Pressure is similar, right? You're supposed to find the right talent and obviously that talent supposed to work out and not leave or get fired, right? Like you're supposed to do a long term match and you're supposed to do it quickly and there's an onslaught of people available. You know, that all should be treated the same way through the process. But sometimes that's just a challenge when you're dealing with, you know, 500 candidates or 2000 candidates. Like a recruiter is not going to be able to most likely review every person humanly if especially if they want a timely response right in a timely fill. And every company's different, You know, some companies will have the recruiter go through every applicant with a human eye. Others are going to depend more on, you know, the, the sorting mechanisms of the system, whether it's a Boolean search, whether it's an AI agent, whether it's, you know, some are more sophisticated than others. And then hopefully the ones that are using a lot of the systems to sort have people that are auditing and checking what's not getting selected to make sure they're doing the right job. And, you know, but again, some companies are great with governance and others aren't, right. Every company is different. There's no one way to hire. There's no one way to use these things. So, you know, anyone that's involved with sort of software or system purchases knows that every company that makes an investment in a software or system or something, there's customizations and there's, you know, adaptations that are made to that particular company's process and culture. So there's no one way to really do anything. That's why people need to really be open and realize this is a sales process that you need to try different ways. You may need to try different ways because to get back to your, what are things that recruiter can do is, you know, I mean, I was, there's a recruiter I follow on LinkedIn and many, many of them for that matter. But when I just had a brief exchange on a post yesterday was like, we're committed to giving people feedback or the way it used to be. And that's not going to be feasible in a lot of companies. But I commend them, right? Because I think that's important. But I also as someone who coaches job seekers, I coach them for the sake of their mental health and for the sake of their ability to keep moving forward. I said don't expect it, you know, don't expect it and be positive, be pleasantly surprised if you get it because if you're devastated every time you don't get feedback, you're not going to be able to get up in the morning to go look for the job the next day. So I'm not being negative, just being realistic. But I love that recruiters are trying to give feedback and realize that there's a user experience even when you're rejected, especially if you've been through the process. You know, like if you've been through a process 3-4 times, you should get some, you should get a call that you're not chosen. And I think there's a lot of recruiters that are trying to work back towards that, which I think is admirable.

[22:44] how managers find the best talentHow about like a manager within a company and they want to hire someone good for their team, But what's the best way to do? Does the manager go through recruiters? Now where does the the manager go? Through their own existing network? All of it them going through a third party recruiters going to be a dependent on their company organization that they work for, allowing that to be budgeted for. But you know, if it's not allowed, then they are dependent on the recruiting team, the internal recruiting team to find them candidates. But you know what, they should be actively recruiting. I always say that executives are now and not so much now, but even we've been writing resumes this way for over a decade. But executives particularly are also being evaluated on how they can bring top talent to come work for them. And so if as a manager, right, or supervisor at a staff level, if you can start doing that and demonstrating that you have that skill to get good people to work for you by posting, by networking, by mentoring, you know, people just starting out in your industry or looking at multi generational people that maybe want to start making career changes. Or, you know, because this isn't about just networking and mentoring people, you know, younger people starting out, like some people are doing career changes. And if you can show that you can have a multidisciplinary right, if you're a CFO, you should be networking with marketing, HR, operations people. And if you're a mid level manager, you should have people in your network who are younger than you and older than you and a multi generational network. If you can show that you have a multi discipline, multi generational, multi industry network, you're going to be more likely to be considered for a job because now you will help reduce recruiting costs and time knowing that people want to work for you because you've put out a reputation that people are nurtured and developed by you. So it's going to make it easier for them to get people to want want to work for you. All right? So having the ability to attract and bring in top talent and move them through a career trajectory that you know, you're developing people, that happens no matter what your job is, right? Everyone should be doing that. And that will make you a more attractive leader, regardless of what your discipline is. But most people don't realize that. But being viewed as a leader that people want to work for is is a trait that is very, very desired by companies. And is that built through networking as well? Yeah, built through networking, being invested in people, mentoring, giving back. You know, then people come, the talent come, wants to come talk to you. And then when you talk to them, you say, hey, this person might be good for my department. And that only happens because you're networking and giving back and putting yourself out there and treating the people who work for you well, fairly and well, right? So, and by well, I don't mean, you know, it's only giving them a ton of money and only giving them, you know, foosball tables and, you know, coffee breaks. It's like giving people the ability to live their life, giving them the support that they need outside of work, you know, just making sure you understand their goals so you can give them work projects that help them develop skills to meet those goals. When you are that kind of manager, people want to work for you. You'll be able to improve the best people then. Yeah. And then the best people want to work for you because they want to advance their career and they know they can't do it on their own. They need a good manager to help them.

[26:00] importance of the resumeThat makes sense. So in this like real scheme of like recruiting, well, how does the resume fit into this whole thing? Awesome question. You know, the resume is about, if you had to put a percentage on it, about 20 to 25% of a job search, right? And yes, some people get hired without a resume, right? Because that's if you know somebody and you're networking, they're like, Oh, I already know your, your work. So just submit the resume and it doesn't matter. Like even if you send it on pink scented paper by carrier pigeon, like people aren't going to care because they know your work. But the problem with that is eventually, if it's not a slam dunk hire with that person who knows you. If you don't have a resume that is written in an achievement outcome, impact driven manner and you have a task based document that looks like a job description with your name on it. If that resume goes has to go past that person who knows you to people who don't know you or don't know you know, don't maybe hold the the refer and you know high regard. Not that it's bad, but they just don't know them that well. Or once you start resume starts going past your first degree connections. If that resume isn't selling you with achievement statements, outcomes and how you've made an impact in your work, it can fizzle. So your resume, your LinkedIn profile for that matter as well is important for you to have to market you. When you start venturing out past your sphere reputation, when you start going beyond the people who know you, you need documents that sell you or they're going to be like, I don't know, More importantly, in this market, they're going to have four other people who are selling themselves more precisely behind you, right? So that's the key. You need documents that convey that you are a modern contemporary leader who has achievements. You don't want to lead with seniority because seniority doesn't qualify any of us for anything. And you know, I was born in 1970. Do the math. You know, how many, what was all of us 1970 have in common? You know, we all have 30 years of plus experience. So saying I have 30 years of experience doesn't qualify me for anything because sometimes people have 30 years of experience and they're amazing. And some people have 30 years of experience and kind of sucked at what they did, right? So 30 years of experience, 20 years, five years of experience. The years of experience don't qualify us for anything at any level. So the key is to lead with achievements, your outcomes, your impact that are relevant to the jobs that you are targeting. Speak to the people that you're targeting and show them those relevant achievements. Not everything you've ever done, like, you know, throw it in the kitchen sink kind of thing. Choose the achievements that you want to continue doing and make sure they're relevant to who you want to target. That's really the secret sauce of a resume. It is. It's like a achievement, like increasing by the revenue of a company or reducing cost of a company. You know, some jobs are easily, you know, I can easily come up with achievements like, you know, made money, saved money, streamlined to process. But in some places it's not as cut and dry. And you may have to look at achievements of, you know, how you built or impacted a culture, how you mitigated risk, how you set up a succession plan of people to be developed and retained. It could be even be how you compassionately let people go, right? And what was the process of that? So it depends. Everybody's a little different, you know, and some people, but the way, a simple way I and it's, you know, not always simple, but the simple way I try to get people to think about this is because people are like, I don't know, I don't have achievements, I don't have access to the numbers, I don't have the, you know, they come up with 50 reasons why they don't they can't do it this way. And I'm going to be like, how does somebody know you're good at your job, right? What does that good job look like? Or what would a crappy job look like? And how are you different from the crappy job? That's the story that where in lies your achievements, right? So how do you know you did your good job? How do you know you do a good job of what you do? What does that good job look like? Start there. You know, whether you are, you know, making smoothies or whether you're a general counsel running, you know, a $35 million legal department, right? So like of a, you know, I don't know, $500 million company or something like you. And those numbers don't necessarily fly. I'm just spitballing here, but nobody's getting hired out of sympathy. Nobody's getting hired out of charity anymore for a long time. So you are there for a job for a reason. And you know, do you make more smoothies per hour than the rest of your team? Do you get Oh my God, this is the best smoothie I ever had, you know, rating more than your team. Like are you the best upseller of, you know, getting bee pollen at for a dollar added to the smoothie and you have the best upsells, you know, so AKA making revenue like everybody has achievements. Everybody. That's how you have to come across at any level for tiny job because companies need to see how well you do something and that you value achievement because they can't teach you that. They can teach you the next job, they can train you on the next job, but they can't inherently train something within you that wants to do a good job. You have to come to the table with that and articulating how you do your job well is part of your job to convey to the next employer why they should hire you. So if you think you don't have achievements, you better start thinking why you think that. And more importantly, you probably do. So either use the the guys I just gave you saying like, how do I know I did a good job? Or what is a bad, what is a bad, good job? What does a bad job look like? And then I'm the opposite. However, you got to think about it. Think about it. Or you got to hire somebody like you know me to help you do it. So like I'm picturing like the the manager at the company, he has four resumes in front of them. They all have a lot of achievements. How does that manager choose which resume to go with? Like like which? Which achievements are like the better achievements? So if they all really truly do have achievements, that would be a lovely dilemma for most hiring managers. Because what most hiring managers are seeing now are AI written, task driven resumes. They all look like a job description with somebody's name on it and they don't know who can do the job and they don't know the context. They don't understand how well anybody is doing the job. That's what's currently commonly happening, currently commonly happening. If it is a situation where the recruiter has four well done achievement, outcome, impact driven statements on the documents for four candidates, they're going to look at who has the achievements that are pertinent most to the job and to bring them in for an interview. Nobody's getting an offer based on a resume without a discussion, right? And then depending on what the job is, if it's a marketing job, they may be looking at your following online because are you going to be helping with getting the message out? And you need to have a following. Is it, you know, a finance leadership job? And when they Google your name, they find out, you know, candidate A has been speaking in front of finance panels and candidate B has never spoke. And they want someone who's more front facing and can negotiate with different, you know, parties and has that ability. And so again, this is where your online presence could matter, right? So it just depends, right? It just depends based on the types of achievements and then the types of presence. And I don't say everybody should run out and go get an online presence either because it might be a job that is in

[33:00] cultural fitscybersecurity and they don't really want you to be out there that much. And so having a presence could actually hurt you. That's not the case with every cyber job, but there are companies who don't like it. So again, they're going to start looking at the cultural fit aspects of things and that fit. And if you get rejected, if you have achievements on your documents and you are genuinely being the best you that you can and you still don't get it, while it's disappointing, most likely, it's often because you weren't the best fit. You know, like based on some of those, you might be too much out there on social media. Not that you've done anything bad, but they don't like the privacy. You know, they want somebody who's private. And if you don't like being private on social media, you're going to be miserable at that job. It's so like sometimes it's just cultural for the for the company, what's best. And I'm just coming up with some hypotheticals here. None of this is absolute in any way, but these are just some scenarios that could exist and that I've seen. So our resume shows achievements. Does the resume also show that you'll be a good cultural fit as well? It can, right, because if you're again the marketing, if you're going for a marketing job and it's important for that marketing person to have a following, putting that stuff on the documents is going to help. If somebody is not mentioning that and then they go look and they don't have a following, they may not get the traction, right. Or if they, if it's an AI driven company and you've been really not in AI yet, or the other way around, you have companies that are not adopting AI yet. And if you're very AI ish, they may think, oh, you're going to think we're boring and you're going to feel bored by us. That wouldn't be a if, if you don't get that job, it doesn't mean you weren't qualified. If you're the AI marketing genius, that would have not been a cultural fit because they think that you would been bored, right? Or they have no interest in pursuing it yet, right? Maybe they have security concerns or, you know, things like that, and they're still doing it in a little bit of a, you know, 2022 kind of way, and it's working for them. So they're not interested in it. OK. That's not going to be a good place for somebody who's very advanced in AI marketing to go. So that would be a good reason to get rejected for both parties, right? Because that won't work. So that's why I'm saying like sometimes when you're rejected, especially if you're not getting feedback, you know, you just got to sometimes think the universe is guiding you where you're supposed to be, even though it may, you may not know why and you may have dodged a bullet, you know? So that's the only thing we can do is maintain our mindset and realize the universe probably has a place for us. We just got to keep going. So let's say the candidate got an interview. They show up at the meeting. How does the resume and the interview like? How does that connect with each other? Do they usually ask questions about the resume? Sometimes people ask about the resume, you know, the recruiters or the hiring managers, whoever's doing the interviewing, and sometimes they don't. I'd say to prepare for that interview, generally speaking, you really need to know your resume bullets cold and have stories around each one. Your resume should not be a surprise to you, you know. So even if you get help doing it, whether it's a coach or you know a writer or AI, you need to know your resume cold.

[35:53] talking about your resume during the interviewYou need to have stories to back it up, back it up. The confidence of speaking about your resume is a presence that people are looking for. So I don't say executive presence necessarily, but a competency presence because that's a, you can be staff level or mid level, not an executive. And there's a presence that conveys your competency that people are looking for. And that comes from confidently speaking about what's bulleted on your resume. You need to know it and be able to tell stories about if the you know you. I would research the interviewers and just see, have their stories a little bit from what you can see publicly just catalogued in your mind. And maybe you mentioned achievements that correlate with projects they've done in the past. Or maybe you both share a prior employer, even though you made it, you didn't know each other. Or you, you know, you both went through a certain training program, so they understand the training you had even though you didn't know each other or go through it together. So you can just start to look for ways of delivering your story in such a way that the person listening recruiter, the hiring manager can make connections with you to understand how you've been raised, so to speak, you know, developed and then what you're targeting. And that's you're looking for ways to convey your story that make that connection with the person you're chatting with. They usually ask you like more detailed questions about the achievements, like if you said you achieved something they. Will, I mean some will, you know, especially in technical roles, it's going to be a technical interview on many levels. You know, how did you do the things you're saying you did? What's the story behind it? What were the challenges in doing that achievement? What did you run up against? Did you fail a couple of times before you put down this achievement that you did? Like what's the story behind it and where the challenges? What was the resistance? So being able to talk about that conveys confidence conveys that you've been that you did it and you're not just like pulling somebody else's achievement or inflating something, right? Like the more you can talk about it in detail, it's going to convey a competency that will lend more to your credibility as a candidate and help you then appear more qualified than others that you might be competing against, which is another. To go back to your question, if they have 4 very qualified achievement driven resumes in front and they bring all four of them in, the one that's conveying it, conveying the stories in a diplomatic, vulnerable way. You know, talking about the failures, talking about the things they learned, not just making everything sound perfect. Those are the people that typically get moved forward because look, a lot of recruiters are suspect of perfect. So if you're not telling them like real stories of what you challenge, what you were challenged, what resistance you had, what how you overcame resistance, where you maybe failed. That lack of honesty, not that you're lying, but just that lack of transparency can sometimes contribute to you being secondary. If someone else is being really transparent, because somebody's being really transparent, that also sends the message that that's how you'll be on the job. So somebody knows that if something goes wrong on the job, you're going to tell them and not hide it and make everything perfect, right? So these are all subliminal ways that you can come across as a stronger candidate when all things, when all. How do you draw the line between what you put on the resume and what you say at the interview like? Well, you know, it is a marketing document, right? So the resume, the profile, they're marketing documents. So I would save the failures and the challenges and the resistance for the conversation. You know, you don't need to say like I launched 3 projects that failed before this one succeeded. Like, you don't need to do that. You know, in most cases that will not be a good resume bullet. You know, I can't say there isn't an exception now and again, but that might work. But I would say for most people, not doing that is a good thing. Generally we don't go back more than 10, 2015, 20 years. For most people, 2 pages is more than fine. I've done CEO resumes of people with 40 years of experience and it's 2 pages. So the key is to be concise. You know, the key is to be direct delete or diminish what you don't want to do anymore. Because if it is included or prominently displayed at the top and you don't want to do it anymore, you're going to get calls for it. And then you're going to be like, no, people don't get me. So especially if you're older, right, and you have more experience, the way you can make it shorter and succinct and specific is to focus on what you want to continue doing and then delete or diminish what you don't want to do anymore. If you're coming up in your career, you know, you still maybe have to do some things you don't want to do just to. Get the exposure, get the skill set build, things like that. So I wouldn't necessarily delete everything if you're, you know, entry your mid career. When you're entering mid career, people want to see that you're coachable, that you're trainable and that you are achievement minded. If they give you the tools and the training to do the job, that's what you'll ultimately want to convey when you're, you know, mid or junior level. But as you get older and you got a lot more experience, the way you diminish it is you get to 2 pages is by diminishing or outright deleting what you don't want to do anymore. And like there's like looking at your resume, there's also AI looking at your resume. Now, is there anything you do for the resume to optimize a little bit more for the AI as well? Just there's really not anything you do differently. I mean, the people may feel that that's wrong, but I'm on a board of an agentic AI company that develops agents for recruiters. And AI is just a tool. The way boolean search is a tool, right? The way databases house information that you then search in the database, That's a tool. You know, printing out resumes in a stack and going through them 1 by 1 is a tool, right? Not effective, but a tool. So good recruiters, and I've had this validated at recruiting conferences that I've gone to, particularly one by Glenn Kathy from Randstad. Good recruiters are going to use more than one tool because an AI generated list is going to have 10 candidates at the top that are going to be different than what the boolean search list is going to produce, different than what a database list might produce, and different from eyeballs looking at a stack might produce. A good recruiter is not going to rely on one tool to find the best candidate. And the good recruiter is not only going to focus on the top 10, they're going to look at the bottom of the list of any of those tools too, because just being at the bottom of a list just means your resume may not be properly optimized for that particular tool, but it doesn't mean you're not qualified. Most passive candidates don't have an updated resume or profile. And if they only paid attention to who's at the top, and if they only paid attention to one tool like LinkedIn recruiter or any of that, they are severely limiting finding great people because great people are found outside of LinkedIn recruiter, outside of AI searches. And so a good recruiter is going to look in a myriad of pockets and they're going to look at the top of the list, the middle of the list, the bottom of the list, they're going to look, those are all those tools, AI, bullion, search, LinkedIn recruiter, the databases, right printing stack, somebody's e-mail. Those are all tools and some favor more tools than others. But a good recruiter is always going to use more than one tool and never limit it to the top of the list. So always the key is just to write for people, like show how you're qualified. Don't play the keyword game because if you play the keyword game but have a bunch of tasks, that's why you're not getting in the interview. If you don't play the keyword game incredibly well and have the achievements, obviously you're still going to get an interview because you're showing how you can do the job. But the mistake I often see people make is they have terrible resumes that are very task driven and they've keyword optimized it. Either you know themselves or using a tool keyword optimizer, but if you still don't have the right achievements, you can keyword it. A human will probably read it at some point and you're still not going to get the interview. You have to show that you can do the job and do it well. That makes sense. So how did you get started on the entrepreneurship thing back

[43:34] entrepreneurship, starting a resume companyin 2000? Nine, I was a recruiter for 13 years and then in the downturn of 2009, you know, a lot of people needed resumes. I was really good at writing resumes even as a recruiter. And I saw that if the right recruiter, I saw if the right resume, if I, if I made some adjustments to a resume and sent it to my company client, they would interview the person and I was on Commission. I, the resume was a catalyst for me getting an interview and ultimately that person getting hired. When that person got hired, I made a fee. So I got really good at these things, you know, making quick switches and quick things that I found myself laid off in 2009. But I was also a little burnt out on the 13 years of recruiting I did. And I wanted to do something different. And in 2009, everybody needed a resume and was when, you know, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers collapsed and all that stuff happened. So I just started charging and I did some recruiting engagements, consulting assignments and started writing resumes. And I was just going to see what took off. And the resume thing took off. I was also, it also helped that I liked it and I really loved, I really loved doing them. And I was not burnt out on that. So that's probably why it took off too. But a couple of recruiting consulting engagements fuelled the Chameleon fire financially, and then ultimately the resume thing just took off. And, you know, now we have a team that's been with me for a very long time and they're part of every client success. We have like over 200 LinkedIn recommendations from clients who've invested in services and made a job change. And my team is a part of every one of them. So I'm honored and grateful and to be able to do this. So that's how it basically happened. Like over the years, like how did you figure out the scope of the business? Like did you expand to like board resumes as well as like other types of resumes or other cover letters as well? How did you define the scope overtime? Well, I, when I started, I started, you know, in 2009, I mainly did resumes and then I quickly saw that people needed the profiles and having a great resume and a poorly written profile is not going to help anybody. And then people would say, like, I got the interview, can you help me? So then I was, I added interview coaching and, and then I realized people sometimes had a resume in a profile and didn't know what to do with it. So we had to teach them how to network and how to conduct a proper job search. We have a among we, we work mostly with executives, but they will refer us, you know, their professional level, you know, partners, friends, spouses and their adult kids. So we do work with others outside of executive set, mainly if they're looking for a corporate job. But what we found is that people just don't know how to network. They don't know how to conduct the job search. Specifically at the executive set, we have this little sweet spot of people who have been promoted, recruited, sought after their entire career and they never had to do a proactive job search. You know, because people were always calling them or coming to them, or they knew they knew a friend and you know, that sort of thing. And so to actively have to proactively do a job search, selling yourself, going beyond the people who know you and reaching out cold to 2nd, 3rd, 4th degree connections is something most people do not know how to do. And so we teach them how to do that. And we even have a networking amplification service that helps you reach out to up to 1200 people on LinkedIn over three months. It's done qualitatively, it's done. You know, we're not spamming anybody. And you, you know, I view LinkedIn as like one big room of people to meet someday. And you give us parameters of people you want to meet and we come up with the list and we help you drip the requests. And you know, it helps you get another three to 501st degree connections. It helps you to have another 60 to 100 conversations on average that you wouldn't normally have. And because it really is about networking, like networking is really the sweet spot where a lot of great hires happen for most people. Again, it doesn't mean you ignore job postings. It doesn't mean you'll never talk to a third party recruiter where I find people struggle as if they only submit to job postings and they're not talking to people or they're just hoping that third party recruiter calls them because if they can place them then they don't have to actually do a job search. It's just not realistic for most people and you really do need to network, especially as you rise up through the ranks. Gotcha. So do they usually hire you when they're like trying to get more proactive or like what's the? So people hire us to be ready and they're not looking and they're happy and they just want to be ready. And then I have people that are unemployed 6 months and they're like, I should have done this a while ago and everyone in between. You know, I kind of view this as like, I mean, we're clearly not insurance in a traditional sense, but sometimes people have insurance, right? If you think of your home or you know, renters insurance or home insurance, some people don't have it and then realize they needed it and then they get it after something happens. And then there's some people, although sometimes it's required by law to have insurance, but you have insurance policy and then you hopefully never need it, but at least if you do, you're ready, right? So that that's or sometimes a lawyer, right? Most people don't need lawyers until they need a lawyer. Very few people keep them on retainer just in case. So it's always better to do this stuff ahead of time. Always. The networking building, the brand building, we call it executive marketing. Everybody buys into executive branding. Well, that's your identity. And executive marketing is the communication of that identity. That can all happen before you need it, right? It also helps you get speaking engagements. It helps you get recruited versus you doing a proactive search. Like doing this stuff proactively is honestly music to my ears and what I wish for everyone, whether they hire me or not. Do this stuff proactively, even on your own. But if you need help, people like us are here. And if you don't do it and get to a point where you need it the best, you know, the best time to start is either there's two best times to start either yesterday or today, right? So the key is to just start whenever you start and not have a lot of regret of how long ago you should have started. At some point you just need to start. Is it usually like aligned with the company that they currently work at? I was hired a couple times by companies to do resume work to help their internal staff apply to promotions more effectively. They had a lot of openings and they had a lot of people who were not educated on how to go about applying for promotion properly. And they had me come in and do like how to write your resume to get promoted. And so there are companies that are really smart and do that for their employees because then they, you know, because if somebody doesn't know how to get promoted, doesn't know how to promote their work and they get passed over, they're going a good person. You run the risk of that good person being disgruntled. And so teaching people how to promote themselves internally can help you have happier people and retain top talent. And that the, you know, the industry, the company knowledge doesn't go out the door because somebody's annoyed that they got passed over partially because the company didn't have a proper process in place to recognize the talent. But also every employee needs to own the fact they need to promote themselves. You can't just sit around waiting for people to give you a promotion. And so getting that skill set, if a company gives it to you, that's like an amazing company. And I have been hired to do that a couple times. That makes sense. And as you're growing the business, how do you think about the right size of the business to aim for? I've been in business over a

[50:36] the right size of business to builddecade and I definitely went through those phases where I'm gonna grow this big, and I did. And I get further away from the person, the client, you know, And while I have an incredible team, like I said, my team, most of them have been with me 6 to 15 years and I'm very, very blessed. I like my clients are in great hands with them. I find that as the bigger I get, I get further away from the client and I really like just talking to people. That was the best that even happened to me when I recruited. I rose through the ranks and I get further and further away from the placement. And I really like talking to the job seeker and the client under recruiting the company and the client and under Chameleon. I like talking with the job seekers and seeing what's going on. Oh, it's to take nothing away from my team. But I like being a small business versus a big business because I get to just be more in touch with people, you know, via LinkedIn, via Zooms, like all the things, you know, e-mail. I like being more in touch with people. And I saw recently has a new newsletter. What's? That yes, the Executive Marketing Edge, it's a LinkedIn newsletter and I'm proud to say that in the first week it was launched, it got over 5000 subscribers. So ping me and I'll send you the link for it and. And for the closing question, I always ask the guest, what's the kindest thing anyone's ever done

[51:53] closing questionfor you? That's a great question and you know, I've been so blessed that I mean, I honestly think people do kind things for me everyday, but it would be really hard pressed to pick one. But I would, you know, I would say just my mom always believing in me, you know, and I don't you know, you might people might say like, oh, it's your mom, but like, I don't think that happens for everybody. And it's I don't take it for granted. No, my mom always believing in me, even when I didn't believe in myself is definitely sometimes that carried me through. Cornell was very, very good to me and I would not have what I have and I wouldn't have gone to Cornell if they didn't give me a first Gen. type scholarship. That or I should say grant it wasn't a scholarship. I wouldn't have been at Cornell if they didn't do that. So I would definitely rank that as a top ten, if not the second. Thanks for sharing, Lisa.