from hourly wage at target to beating out 2k applicants w/tim stoneberg

full transcript

auto-generated from the audio, so expect a few typos. the audio is the source of truth.

Hello, hello. Thanks for listening to Guidance Counselor 2.0. Listen, I want to give you a quick rundown of what this podcast is and what you're about to get into as you listen to these episodes. We had Guidance Counselors in middle school. We had Guidance Counselors in high school, but we didn't really have Guidance Counselors in college and now as professionals, we don't really have anybody to turn to to ask a quick question to learn something about the job search or to navigate your career. And so that is what I want this podcast to be for you. I want it to be a tool for you to navigate the job search and your career.

So that being said, I hope you enjoy this episode. And if you need to reach me, Taylor at vaco.com is how to get in touch with me old fashioned email social media at tdesint D E S S E Y N. And finally, please rate and review this in the app store because I want this to be discoverable for others so they can navigate their careers. Hope you enjoy the episode. All righty. Hey, everybody. Welcome. Happy hump day. We made it. We made it. Yeah, kind of. We need to get through today to make it happen through the week. But for those of you who are tuning early welcome.

Good morning. Twitter spaces. What's going on tick tock Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube. It's good to be with you all this morning. Really excited for this one. I say I'm excited every day. And I really am because I love talking to new people. I always learn something, but I'm excited to talk about Tim because again, so Tim, you know, I put out kind of a call to call to action a few months ago. About saying, Hey, I need, I want people to share their job search story. Who, who has done it a little bit on conventionally and Tim, Tim slid into the DMS and he goes, he goes, I think I got something.

And so we were chatting off air before we went live. And Tim, Tim's got a really cool story. And I did not know this, but Tim did exactly what I preached and lo and behold it worked. Imagine that. So I'm excited to have Tim on real quick as people are trickling in this morning. For those of you who do not know what guidance comes with 2.0 is, this is a multi-faceted live show, as I like to say. So this show originally started with me going live for eight to 12 minutes every day during COVID to share some tip or trick of the job search. Kind of like what I've done Monday And then Tuesday, if you tuned in Monday, Tuesday, it's very short episodes, 10 minutes or so of me kind of talking about how to work with recruiters or how to resume and all that.

Well, I had a bunch of people start to DM me as I was going, starting my show. And they were like, hey, I'd love to come on and share my story. I said, absolutely. And so two and a half years later, it's pretty cool. Two and a half years later, this thing's still going. I've had amazing guests like Tim on. And so just talking about the job search and trying to break it down to everybody and be a resource. So that's what this is at a high level. The second thing is the networking platform. So Tim and I are going to talk about commonality on the job search and why that's so important.

And so I want this to be the common theme with a lot of people. So really if I were you, I would log into the show every day, say, Hey, comment, the reason why I tell people to comment is because we're not the metaverse yet, right? I can't see your avatar. So you really can't bring visibility to yourself unless you comment. So if you comment, I would network with everybody who comments and you're going to slowly build your network because like I said I've been doing this for two and a half years now. And then the final thing is I do this live so you can ask questions.

Tim is a wealth of knowledge. His job search he did it the right way and now is the time to pick someone's brain who did the job search correctly. So ask questions, be engaged and finally want to give a shout out to render ATL, the sponsor of my show. They're an amazing event. I was there this past year. I'm going to be one of the hosts for 2023. If you use the code GC2.0, you get a few bucks off. It's expensive. Listen, listen, the ticket's expensive, but I think it's worth it. I really, really truly think it's worth it. Talk to your company, ask if they can pay for your ticket.

They most likely will. Say that's an amazing event. And then finally, I want to give a shout out to people to an in dev. Finally, it's good to see you buddy. Ricardo Brett, I can vouch for your methods, working flawlessly. Well, thank you, Dev. I'll send you a check later. Kevin, thank you so much. Good to see you, Allison from Ladders, checking in. I love it, it's good to see you, Allie. Chris Yolanda Albertis, I love that name. Emmet Grant Daniel, Monday, Taylor, the countdown is on for Monday, just around the corner. Can't wait to meet the rest of the team. So really excited, Josh is joining Vaco from the data side of things.

So I'm really excited that Josh can be part of the family. JC, good morning as well. All right, so I want to go and dive in. Tim, let's give the people what they want. Who are you? What do you do? Where are you from? And we'll go from there. Hi, so I'm Tim Stolberg. And I work for a company called SteelSeries. We make a high quality hardware for the video game industry. So I'm wearing a SteelSeries headset. We do some really cool things. Does it sound great? We do some really cool things. In fact, I was at a meeting with some R&D just last week that I can't talk about, but we do some really cool things with computer hardware.

So we make headsets, keyboards, mice, mouse pads, and some other miscellaneous things, like thumbsticks and stuff for controllers. That's cool. And then where you located? So I am in the Chicago suburbs, and that's where our United States headquarters is located. That's awesome. That's awesome. All right, Tim. So let's go and dive in about your job search. So get the people high, high level overview, what went down, just start, start kind of from, from target and, and, and bring it all the way to modern day. All right. So in 2013 ish, I was working at targets full time, uh, making under 10 bucks an hour. And I was working in their back room in their warehouse and long story short, I decided that I had maximized my efficiency at Target.

I could no longer do my warehouse job any more efficient than I had been doing before. Yeah, maxed out, right? I felt like I needed something more inside decided to go on job search. I had a great interview with Apple. That's what I thought. They didn't think the same. So that caused me to for once kind of introspectively look at how I was being perceived by other people versus like how I saw myself. And I realized there was a discongruency there. So I decided to go to college. That was my next step. That was the thing that I thought, man, I need to change this.

So I went to college long story short, about five years later. I graduated as a 30s, mid 30s, something professional, and got my first real job at the college that I graduated from. Worked that was back in, we pull up, I have I have some dates pulled up that was, I was offered the job at Loyola University Chicago January 29th, 2019. And I worked there a year and then COVID started. And my job was a primarily IT focused, which is not what I actually wanted to do. Like on the infrastructure side, like tech stuff. Like plugging network cables into things and doing IT related physical hardware related stuff.

I always had a love for software though. Fun fact, I released several apps on iTunes before any of this ever happened. That's a whole other story of me wanting to make an app for my son that didn't exist. Anyway, so I started there in 2019, pandemic happened. And my job rapidly went from doing IT work and also some computer engineering to me to be very blunt, helping professors deal with Zoom calls for the first time in their lives, for like a long time. So that was like March of 2020. And so summer came of 2020, and I realized that I think that I want to find something different.

And so I started the job search, the same one that I think everyone has gone through. it exactly the way that I thought that it should be done. This is not how I got the Java Steel series, by the way. I put my resume in, I made clean it up, made it look great, all these things, and I submitted it to it everywhere. If I had the qualifications of something, I submitted it, I submitted it all across the board. Just scatter shot, right? How many resumes do you think you submitted when you started to die? Oh, just even thinking about it. How many resumes as in documents or how many places did I submit it to?

Because I did tailor it a little bit too. Like I did the things, like I did the things. I tailored it to the places I was submitting it to. And I submitted it all across the board, easy apply on LinkedIn or actually going to the places, website and submitting it through their contact form or whatever it was, I submitted it everywhere. And I got plenty of interviews in this summer of, I guess it was 2020. And made it to some final rounds, didn't get any job offers. And keep in mind I was working at Loyola University Chicago, so it's college. So things kind of slowed down in the summer.

I had a little bit more time to do interviews during the summer, but then the school year started again. And so I just stopped my job search. Because I have a job and I didn't find anything over the summer, so. So that fall kind of went and started and I got busy and I started ignoring all of the recommended emails that I would get from LinkedIn. Hey, you're a good fit for this job or whatever else. I just stopped reading them. And it was like October of that fall. I just clicked on one. I don't even know why. And in this email was a company that I recognized, the company I worked for, SteelSeries.

I just clicked on it. It was so, it's just like so happenstance. I just clicked this email. I saw this job, I clicked into it, and I started reading it. And I was like, okay, the job description is definitely like enticing to me like the tools that they use and what they're doing is what I actually want to do. And I know I like the company because I am clearly a gamer. I have like gaming stuff all around my house. If you saw the rest of my house, you'd realize that this like these bowser stuffed animals and like doesn't do justice. Okay. All right. So I knew I like the company and I knew I was a good fit for the job.

And so I, as I kept reading this job description and all the details up and I realized, one, I don't know enough about this job to know if it is a good fit for me, but I really am starting to think that it is. And so I decided I am not going to apply for this job in a way that I always apply for it. Like I literally did. Yeah. Like what? What made that flip switch? Wow. I think it was, it was my core experience the previous summer. You know what I mean? Like that too. All of these interviews that I went on the previous summer, like I would have taken those jobs and I guarantee I would have been so unhappy at those jobs if I was still there.

They weren't the right companies for me. They weren't. I didn't care about their product. What I cared about was just finding a new job. And that's not a good way to be. That's not a good way to fall somewhere where you belong. So instead of submitting, it might even have easy apply, I don't know. But instead of clicking that button, what I did was I went on to the SteelSeries LinkedIn page. I looked through all their employees until I found somebody that had a an HR looking title and seemed like they were open to, you know, being contacted. So I reached out to that person.

What was your message? Do you remember at all how it was crafted? I think that's what a lot of people have problems with is like I just feel weird messaging strangers. I don't remember this specific message. I could pull it up if we wanted to after the fact. But my message was just one of truth and passion, right? Like I have no doubt that whatever I said to this person that I got in touch with, I conveyed that I passionately felt that I was a good enough candidate for the job that I needed more information to like make that official judgment call. Like I I needed more information from them.

And I was just truthful in that. And I don't mean truthful like I need a job and also it fits. I mean like this one job that I'm looking at is something that I really think I'm a good fit for. And I don't want to waste your time. I don't want you to waste your time, but I really want to know. And I just conveyed that in a message. And this person, they got back to me and they weren't the person hiring for that position. But they got me in touch with that person. And it snowballed from there. And I started making real person-to-person connections with that team that I'm now working with.

That's crazy. And it just, it put me in a position where even though there, I've been told there were 2,000 applicants for this job, and I wasn't one of those 2,000 applicants. I was the one person who wasn't an applicant. And it put me ahead of all of them. There could have been a million applicants. In fact, it would have been worse for them if there were a million applicants because they would have had to filter through a million instead of 2000. But I think that just being the one passionate person that's looking for a job and since I happened to just be honest with myself, honest with them from the gates, that particular scenario just worked out for everyone.

And here I am almost two years later. And that's awesome. Company's awesome. My coworkers are as awesome as I could tell during the interview, which was one of the things that I really cared about when I was interviewing with them. Like I said, I had some bad interviews, like bad fit interview fit. Yeah, in the previous summer, the interviews I felt went fine. But when I was interviewing with my coworkers at SteelSeries, like we have more often than And there's a common interest, which I think helps. Like we're all gamers at the company with the gaming company, and so it's easy to break ice. And it's just a good culture fit for me.

And I could just tell right away from the interviewing that these are people that I'm going to work with every day. I like talking to them now. So this is a good sign. You need to get along with and have common interests, I think, with a company, with your coworkers and all these things. It's not what. Let me ask you this, because I think, there's a few things to break down here. First off, would you recommend for people to maybe think about what type of industries or companies they wanna work for before they jumped into the job search and maybe start really narrow? Because I think what you said, I think there's a lot of people, and for those of you who are still watching, definitely comment on interest here at Thoughts.

Because I feel like a lot of times, especially for junior devs, is like, I just need a job, I just need a job. But the one thing I heard from you was, You actually cared more about this one because it was something you were passionate about. It sounds like that's what put you over the edge. So would it behoove? That's my only big word I know. What if behoove me? What if behoove people? Sure. You maybe start super narrow and be like, well, I have a passion for ecom or marketing. So I want to go work on a marketing company. Like, do you think that could be beneficial?

Isn't it ironic that that's, I do, I guess, 100%, 110%, I think that it behooves people to have that narrow focus. When you are, you know, when you're doing, it's not just job searching. You think about when, like for instance, I mentioned I went back to college. I went to and got my degree at a university. And one of the things that I learned as we gave lots of speeches at, I went to liberal arts college. So there was a lot of paper writing and speeches. And one thing you learn is the narrower your focus of what you want to talk about, the more you have to talk about.

And I think that that applies to so many areas. And I think it's so easy to convey your passionate when you have narrowed down your job search to a company that you're passionate about, right? Like it's, imagine they talk to two people and one is passionate, one is semi passionate. Like all things the same, You're probably going to make a better impression if you're passionate about it, right? So yeah, narrow the focus for sure. I love that. What about from an interview perspective, I want to highlight one thing we talked about off air is your email signature and commonalities. Talk about what happened there and how could people replicate that in a way or try to integrate maybe their passions into the job search?

Yeah, that was a really great, like, looking back in this, what we talked about off the air is, like, I look fondly of that, like, happenstance thing. So everyone watching out there. So what happened was, as you do when you're in a view for any company, you talk to a lot of different people. And one of the people that I interviewed with, we had several email exchanges when I was doing, like, the technical part of the interview. I had to put together a project and we emailed some, you know, requirements back and forth and stuff that, you know, software engineers do. And normally I'm on my PC and I will, you know, reply an email.

However, in one response to one email to this engineer on the team, I happened to, I wasn't at my PC. I was, I, I replied to it on my phone and so I use an iPhone and my signature when I reply to emails on my iPhone is not, you know, sent from iPhone or whatever the default is. It is sent from Firelink Shrine. This is not just, you know, this all the emails that I send on my phone is having a signature. I think we have no idea. Right, you have no idea, but you know what? The person that I was interviewing with happened to also play the game that references Firelink Shrine.

If you are a gamer and you play the games made by FromSoftware, specifically Dark Souls or many others, you will know that Firelink Shrine is the hub for all of the things that happen in that game. in that game and the person I was interviewing with also played that game and so it immediately took me from being a person with a resume with a name at the top to all of a sudden I'm me and I have interest outside of just getting this job and it made me connect with that individual person and so like what can people do in regards to making that connection?

It's hard to say because because you have to be authentic. I didn't add Sent from Firelink Shrine because I was interviewing with a gaming company. I have that because I like games. And I'm okay with people that don't play games seeing that signature as well. So because either you're gonna ask me about it and I'm gonna be able to tell you about a series of games that I think is just amazing that you should play, even if you're not a gamer, you should eventually play the From Self-R-Games. But nonetheless, it starts a conversation one. And two, it just gives somebody a way to parse, yeah, like connect and just figure out who you are outside of just the boxes that you're checking on a form.

We're hiring people, we should be hiring people in that we're talking to, not numbers, not, you're not limited to just the bullion fields in your form, you're more than this. And so I look fondly back at that whole interaction and how like me and this person just connected during the job search. And I felt like at that moment, the job was mine. I still had to do great in the technical interview and I still had to just determine if this was the right company for me because just because I connected with one person doesn't mean that I knew that this was the right company for me yet.

Like that's part of the interview process is like, if you're confident enough to narrow your search down to a specific company that you want to work for, then you should also be confident enough to be able to go to an interview and walk away and say, even though if they offer me this job, it's not the right fit for me, because the right fit's out there. You just have to find it and you have to do these things, I think to have any sort of like real success nowadays. I love that. Yeah, I mean, I would recommend people to put their interests or hobbies under LinkedIn.

I, people ask me this too, interest hobbies on resume. Yeah, I mean, I think a small thing. I mean, I would like make it half a page, but if I put interest, ice hockey, corgis, ice coffee and wine, like I think there's enough there where somebody can probably head off the conversation with me. So I love that. I think trying to personalize yourself in a very interpersonal process, like the interview process is huge. I wanna go, I wanna give a shout out to a few more people this morning. It's great to see you, Kevin, Daniel, Nate. It's good to see you all. And then Jordan, it's good to see you as well.

It's so good to have a crew here this morning. So I wanna go back to a topic we talked about, I'll say about being true to yourself when it comes to interviewing. I know we talked about just now with your interests and stuff, but I mean, because I think the biggest, I think one of the biggest questions I get is like, How do I be in an interview? Just how do I be? Do I be myself? Do I be kind of a version of myself? I always say first date vibes is what I always say. You need to be who you are, but maybe not be over the top.

So Tim, I'm curious, what are your thoughts on being true to yourself in the interview process? OK, so I do have some thoughts about this. Are they common, typical thoughts? I don't know. I'm married. So say, say, say, say whatever. I like using my wife as examples for things because she has molded me into the best version of myself. You know, so I took Rachel out on a first date many years ago and I took her to a nice restaurant and I did the things and you know that you're supposed to do like be kind and such. But I told her on her first date, you know, like you're going to be okay, imagine like best case scenario, you get married just like I did with Rachel.

You're going to be eating around this person all the time. So I like eating French onion soup a lot at restaurants. It's like my favorite meal at a restaurant. And I wanted to order French onion soup, but it's probably not the greatest thing to order in a first date. Probably not. You know, probably not. But I told her instead, I have to order my options there. I either don't order it or I order it and say nothing or I took a different route. And I said, listen, I love French onion soup, you don't know. I was like, listen, I'm probably not going to look very, I don't know the exact ones.

I'm probably not going to look very attractive while meeting the soup or whatever, but I really want the soup. So you're either going to have to accept this part of me or, you know, or not, it's fine. But just be truthful, right? I think that that mentality is important in an interview. Yeah, first date vibes, but like successful for first date vibes. You know what I mean? Like the kind of first dates that leads to more dates kind of vibes. Like being true knowing who you are and letting the other person see who you are is important. If you go through any interpersonal relationship, whether it's in an interview or with another friend or someone that there could be a friend.

If you're not, if you're like being somebody that you're not during that, that like initial process, eventually it's not going, things aren't going to line up. And then there's going to be like some sort of friction to like reconcile that. And so why not give the company you're talking to the people that work on that company, why not give them who you are, be yourself, and then they can decide and you can decide if you guys work well together. Let's have have this much data as we can. Let's have the information out there so that we can all, you know, mesh together. Jordan goes first date vibes is a beautiful way of putting it be a hundred percent yourself, but don't scare them off either.

Yeah. So if you get anything out of this interview, eat French onion soup during anything. Yes, you will hit the slot machine in win. But I love that though. I love that. Let me ask you this because because we are, we are wrapping up time here. Time time flies when you're having fun with friends like to say. So one thing that we talked about off air is trying something different if the same thing's not working. And I think a lot of people need to hear that right now. So can you expound on that? Yeah, it's true to so many things. You know, in my initial job search during like the start of the pandemic, that summer of bad interviews, right?

That was me trying the same thing over and over over and over and over and over again. And it worked to a point. It didn't lead me thankfully to a job at one of those companies, but by the time I was ready to interview again, it was very apparent to me that that way didn't work for me last time, and that could have been for many different reasons. But I do know that if I would have applied for this job in that same way, the best case scenario is that I was to one of 2001 applicants, you know what I mean? And I wasn't able to differentiate myself.

I decided that this was the time to try something new. Much like when I had that bad interview at Apple, and I thought I did great and didn't get the job way before I even went back to college or anything like that, I walked away from that for once trying to look at myself and realizing, hey, you need to do something different here. like people aren't perceiving you the way that you're perceiving your abilities. And maybe there's a, there is definitely a disconnect. Where is that disconnect? And in that moment I decided I need to do something different. I need to go to college. And of course I thought, oh, well, I'm just gonna get a piece of paper.

It turns out I didn't know much about anything it seems. So I learned a ton in college. And that's just one of the examples of just trying something different because what had been not working is going to continue to not work if you don't change what you do. Yeah, I feel like I feel like I see all these posts on LinkedIn, I submitted 600 applications and nothing's going anywhere. And I'm like, why didn't you stop like at 300? Maybe 200. Like why did you keep doing the same thing? And I think people, again, I think people just don't know what's up from down to the job search.

I don't know how to get started. And, you know, that's why I want to have people like you on the pod where it's, I mean, listen, the job search is tough. I'm not going to discount that. And people people giving you props with your shirt, by the way, right? And there's no one up here as well. I love your shirt. So I, but people are just so overwhelmed, but and it's hard, but it's not as hard as I think people make it out to me. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's just ironic because there's like, like use terms like use case because I was software engineer.

Okay. So like bear with bear with us. I'm here with you're talking about your software. Yeah, right. So like yeah, my use case in the job search is not necessarily what, you know, one of one of the other viewers right now is like when I was looking for the job that I'm currently at, I had a job and that is a different. That's totally a different use case than someone that doesn't have a job, but the, but that's the thing. That's the ironic thing is that I don't think that the strategy for finding a good job for yourself, changes, whether or not you currently have a job, it might make you feel that you need to put out 600 applications.

But like I did the summer of the bad job searches, if I would have landed at one of those jobs, I'd be so sad right now because I would be developing software that I don't really care about. I just, the industry that it was in was just something that's not interesting to me. Makes sense. That makes sense. So as we wrap it up here to two questions for you as wrap it up And again, thanks for everybody for tuning in today If you have any questions, please ask them now. So the second last question What's your favorite Christmas movie or holiday movie? Oh, yeah, so I love holidays I don't know if there's really a Thanksgiving movie, but like I would just say what what's your favorite holiday movie?

Oh, I have, uh, man, that's not really putting me on the spot. So can I, hold on, I know all the people love this or this, but can I give you like early holiday versus late holiday? So my favorite early holiday movie is Elf. Okay. I like that. I think it's a great kind of like intro into the season. Yeah. I just, I, I just, I love, I love that movie at the beginning. And then at the end, I like watching love actually with my wife. We watched on Christmas Eve, we wrap all of the presents, which is a whole other story because we have three kids.

And when I was in college, we were pretty poor, and we actually had help. Like, we were on a list and people donated presents to our kids. And that helped us get through those holiday seasons. And now that isn't the case anymore. And we intend, fully intend, when I feel like when my oldest son who's 12 now, when And he's just slightly older when he's really old enough to appreciate being able to like pay that forward, pay that back like that when he understands that like the Christmases that he experienced were slightly different than how Rachel and I experienced Christmas because it was a little bit more fraught than he remembers.

And once he can, once he can really, once my kids can appreciate that paying a forward, I can't wait to sponsor a family on our own right and like show them, you know, like you You had good Christmases that you remember because other people helped us and now it's our turn and I think that like so anyway so we watch love actually Christmas Eve and that's when we wrap the presents and so it's one of my favorites but there's so many others there's like four or so many others. So last question of the show. The show is called guidance counselor 2.0 because we have guidance counselors in middle school high school and college but really now as adults we don't really have guidance counselors.

We have therapists which I'm a big fan of but we don't have necessarily guidance counselors So what would be your biggest piece of career advice for your younger self? Let me think for just a minute. Yeah, you can. I think it's a piece of career advice for my younger self. I don't know that I would change anything. I don't have a good enough frame of reference. You know, I was a waiter at restaurants for like, I don't know, what I feel was like 10, 15 years, I don't know, probably not that long, but a long time and I learned a lot of skills that I use nowadays in my engineering job, that I learned as being a waiter, like I learned how to talk to people I don't know.

And that's not a skill I had, but that's a super useful skill now. I talk to other people in other departments all the time and having developed those things. So here's my answer to your question, is that I don't know that I would change anything because it's me, me the person that I am, but if I were to talk to my previous self, I would say make sure that no matter what situation you're in, you're learning from it. I love it. I love that. That's awesome. That's awesome. Well, for those of you who are still with us, thanks again for hanging out with Tim and I today.

Go connect with Tim. Hey, like I said, shoot him a DM. Say, obviously you loved him on the show today. But for those of you who are watching and you got something out of us, please share this episode for somebody who may get something out of this as well. Tim, thank you so much, man. I appreciate it. Stay on real quick as we wrap up. But y'all have a great rest of your Wednesday. Tomorrow morning, we are going live with Unicorn Finders, my other podcast, because the man can't have too many podcasts. So tomorrow morning, 930 AM Central Unicorn Finders, where we are with a really cool startup who's doing some pretty amazing things.

So check us out. And then Friday, we're wrapping up the week with another, Meet the Team Part Two. You're going to be meeting my main recruiter out of Atlanta, Matt Driggers. So it's going to be a blast. So y'all have a great one. We'll see you all tomorrow. Peace. Hey, you did it. You listened to an entire episode And I am very grateful because you know why? There's a lot of podcasts out there. There's a lot of episodes and I myself rarely finish an entire episode. So I appreciate you so, so much for listening. Quick reminder, please rate and review this podcast in the app store.

I want this to be discoverable to others. And the only way that happens is if you take the time right now and rate and review it, please, like right now, unless you're driving, then don't do it. So thank you again. If you need to reach out to me, Taylor at Vaco.com or at T.S. and on all social media handles, and I hope you have a fantastic day.