promotion by layoff w/ ai staff eng, john vandivier

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

all right it says we're live hello [Music] hello good morning see I gota wait good morning I just ordered so one of my favorite Brands this is this isn't even the point of the show this sidebar I'm just frustrated I was trying to get one my one of my favorite Brands I don't run but it's a it's a running brand dropped their hoodies at like half price because they're like a little like something's wrong with them and I was like oh I want they have two light blue hoodies I wanted one of them I or accidentally ordered the other one just now so God shoot

so literally I just emailed them and I was like is there any way to fix it because they were like every SES final if not it's fine but um anyways just I only have one it's three years ago I made yeah a um coding is Magic kind of like Halloween kind of made my own that's the only hoodie that I have now maybe I should stock up I mean winter is coming right winter is where where where where do you live anyways Northern Virginia in the DC Metro Area nice yeah yeah yeah you guys get cold you guys get cold for sure um all right

we got some people tune in Ricardo Richie Garrett what's going on my boys all right uh let's go ahead and dive in good morning everybody happy uh almost said happy guidance concert 2.0 I haven't had enough coffee this morning I didn't get to bed until 1:00 a.m.

last night cuz boy Bo got play voted player of the game last night for beer league ice hockey I made about I probably made I I'm not kidding you about 10 block shots I had I made one block shot with two minutes left in the game off my helmet I just laid out on the ice I just slid and it just bounced off my helmet saved us I probably saved us two or three goals and we won by one so I was very proud of myself player of the game first time ever I don't score a lot but I block a lot of shots and

I organize a hell of a team so that being said I'm a little tired this morning but excited for this episode I'm super pumped for this episode John so like I don't really prep for these things and and most people don't either which is fine like totally fine I told John this backstage I just want this to be a hang among friends and John comes in with like the Google Doc of like the universe two days ago and it was so thought out and so good um so we have a lot talk about I'm already gonna have to tell you this we're gonna have a

part two because I feel like we're just going to scratch the surface this morning with John um but before we dive in say hey we' love to hear from you again this is a networking platform uh I I I tell I I tell every guest is guest are secondary on this like this is a networking show is what I call it right so comment say hey engage I had one girl yesterday messaged me she goes your community is crazy she goes I've met so many people like and actually had meaningful conversations from the community that I've never had before I had an entrepreneur out of

Austin she's successfully exited sold her company once or twice at this point she said tayl I've been on a lot of podcasts she goes I've never seen the engagement after the podcast like your community so I feel like we got to come up with like a a fun name for us gc20 or something but that seems kind of like a mouthful but I appreciate you all thank you for being so engaged connect with John afterwards just send a thank you say it was great to see you connect with everybody in the chat just say hey it was great to see you this morning um and

again really excited for this episode few kind of housekeeping items before we let John kind of Yap it up for the a for the morning uh first off if you want text updates John and I were just talking about like going live on Tik Tok and just going live in general live streaming is very buggy it's very very buggy the the best things I have learned how to use my texting Community for is just I send a text out every morning I literally just send a text out for John's live to close to a hundred folks text live to 615 23556 I text every morning

just from an expectation perspective I tell you who I'm interviewing with and what the topic is um so we love to have you there I started a dad's and Tech meet up very thrilled about this um I it's got our first meet up was 55 people virtually um we have a Discord now we're actually becoming official um and so if if you are if you are an aspiring dad you could be single but if you want to be a dad eventually um would love to have you in this group you can learn a lot I had three or four guys message me afterwards and say

they were almost in tears with the authenticity of the group on the first chat it was nuts so um would love to have you there uh finally Kelly vau and I uh launched the friend zone.

LOL basically uh Kelly Von's a director of engineering out of Atlanta we just help a lot of people on the side find jobs and so we're like why don't we just create a community where like we can all just help each other so that's what that is it's a free tier and a premium tier premium tier is great we actually drop jobs who we know people from just for referrals I would join the premium tier just for that alone um but again we love to see you over there cool all right enough with me running my mouth let's here who else we get to this

one Chris JC Lucas ta we got the crew out today Jared John Katie look at that both from Virginia laterally what's going on Colin it's good to see you all right John we got we got a full house this morning for you so give the give the people what they want man who are you what are you do we'll dive in Taylor absolute privilege to be here um some of the folks have already started connecting with me and serious that's awesome yeah I love it so keep it coming be great to connect with everyone here so my name is John I'm a Staff software engineer

with a little over 10 years of experience about half of that is going to be in the financial industry I also have a PhD in economics so I'm originally self-taught no compi deg ree and then the other half will be in some segments like edtech so I worked for the College Board Government Contracting so I worked for the patent and trade office Department of Defense and some other places and I was recently laid off so um I'll give a couple quick overview points and then feel free to dig in I sent you the big Google doc as you I'm not even looking at it I

looked at it I'm not looking at right now we're just GNA go with the flow but at least I know kind of you know where to go beautiful I was trying to get to this piy 10 you know we like to have pretty numbers and I was like 10 uh tips or 10 Things I I think I actually went over that but we'll go as far as we can get and a part two would be wonderful so at a high level here's the approach that I took I treated the I treated the job search like it's my job um and in fact I went over

the ninet to-5 I probably did uh 12 hours a day six days a week took my rest on Sundays um but I was after it from day one and why was I so motivated I should say I was after it from day two so the day that I was actually notified of layoff and did you take a breather did you take a breather I did not I did not and I'll tell you why I was laid off in the morning um in my immediate reaction was I've seen layoffs at my company before so this was not our first round of layoffs I think I survived

three and the fourth one got me something like that and I knew the procedure was my permissions are going to be gone by noon by lunchtime okay and so my immediate reaction was let me reach out to everyone that I work with and tell them thank you so much for the opportunity to work here we have some of the fol already Ben welcome Ben I love it we got people hanging out yeah and you know and you know this Taylor social network is so critical and so I wanted to leave on a good term even though I was laid off and so I reached out

to everyone that I could before I lost my slack access and then the rest of the day was I made a to-do li st things I'm G to have to do you know turn in my laptop I did some Financial tasks ESP was a thing at my company what's going to happen with that I need to email them and figure that out so that I could understand my financial picture and this is the real thing that I did day one is understand my Runway how much time am I gonna have for this layoff and because I did this financial analysis day one I realized I

got plenty of Runway but the opportunity cost of being unemployed is insane um as a the bills come quick yeah the bills come quick no not even not even the bills just the fact that like so much forone earnings you know oh like I have I have I'm fortunate to have savings I could you know hang out for a year if I wanted to but the opportunity cost was crazy when you're a highly compensated employee like a senior staff plus engineer and so that's what I did and it really struck me day one literally being unemployed is like 2030 Grand a month for me in

opportunity cost so I said next day I'm hitting the ground running you know and that really motivated me to do this like 12 hours a day effort I had to create space is another tactic here unfortunately there was a a young man that I was teaching how to code and I had to end that teaching relationship to create space correct I paused content creation for the foreseeable future now it turned out that I really only paused for like a week but on that second day I told my community like there's going to be a pause yeah I got to work with the latly doio standard

device which this is going to be pretty specific to software Engineers happy to dive in if you want to but yeah laterly doio there's an open source checklist and I just started going through the checklist um and so I'll pause there no I love it no this is good people are are definitely chiming in this morning like I said we got a I have the view counter on my end and there's a ton of people watching right now so again thank youall so much for showing up no let's let let's just keep going uh so talk talk about this checklist first thing in the check

do you need a portfolio so this is going to be specific to software Engineers if you're learning to code or if you are junior going to senior or if you're at the senior level the portfolio helps now at the senior level it matters a lot less right it's not going to be the difference between getting a job and not getting a job but I had this portfolio anyway so let's say that that's checked off the next thing is I engaged in significant social networking um starting with the day I got laid off making sure I left on good terms and then I was absolutely asking

for uh referrals from people I knew at the current company and the prior company yeah I quickly realized I need to ramp up my content creation as part of this oh for real so day two hey we're pausing what day three we were like ah JK it's really it was on the order of like less than a week I started back up with content creation um and it I don't know if it was day three four five but it was that first week is I was like oh actually this is going to help my social networking um and so I'll fast forward to one of

the results so I kept meticulous job search spreadsheet what company am I applying at you know for every company that I apply at it doesn't count unless there's a human point of contact and so I ultimately applied for this spreadsheet I would have 133 rows and some of those were like a couple posts at the same company but I follow a rule of three do not apply for more than three roles at one company okay um so for the most part one company one roll one point of contact but in some cases two rolls at a company something like that so this spreadsheet would end

up with 133 rows and I also would eventually pick up some tools that I hadn't tried out before one of these was use massive massive AI use mass.com I think which is an AI based application tool so I heard about you know AI is so great I would end up working in Ai an d can it help me apply to more places and is this going to reduce my conversion rate well the answer is yes and yes so the spreadsheet I did not include those AI applications they were kind of like throwaway applications okay the AI tool I ended up applying to about 300 places

and I did get three interviews which is not a very good conversion rate 300 to one but those 300 applications were took like very little of my time because it was so automated it's fair I think real quick I do want to get to Richie's Richie's a fellow recruiter I know where he's kind of maybe going with this why the rule of three yeah um so the main thing that I want to do is I want to reach out to that company and I don't want to confuse them so the rule of three is kind of like a rough heuristic but it's pretty much informed

by company preferences okay and this will have a lot to do with a lot of the laterally practices even going back to my PhD in econ I studied the employer perspective of of alternatively educated individuals mainly boot camp grads okay and so a lot of the practices I recommend are what does the employer want uh what do we want we want a job how do we get a job we do what the employer wants basically fair so I found that if I applied to too many jobs when I reach out and talk to a tech recruiter on the other side it's confusing to them yeah

or if I apply to a bunch of jobs and I reach out to a fellow engineer it's confusing to them they're like well which job do you want dude like I I'll refer you but I'm not going to refer you to all of these so I think a a rule of three is nice here's an opportunity it brings so we don't want to do too many because it's confusing but sometimes it's good to do more than one and one of the reasons for that is this can create messaging content and so I definitely AB tested and I encourage everyone else to do ab test your

messaging content when you connect to someone hit that ad note don't just connect to them and then send a message later h it the sounds familiar sounds familiar yeah does I might have even gotten that from you I don't know let's say did let's just okay we'll go with that and so when you add a note laterally has some scripts that we recommend and you can start with those to get a baseline but then AV test it personalize it so personalization is a best practice you're more authentic it's coming from you one of the things you can say if you're looking at two roles at

the company is you can say hey I'm looking at two roles at the company in your opinion which one am I better fit for and now you're giving the other person a reason to interact with you right and you're already showing some appreciation for their expertise I would say um punch up down in sideways so applying for senior and staff level roles I reached out to Juniors and here's the thing if I'm a Staff engineer and you're a junior engineer you already think I'm cool you know what I mean you already want to refer me right so there will be a higher referral rate although

it's less informative discussion when I talk with you you actually don't know the skill Matrix of the company very well punching sideways hey I'm a senior you're a senior you know am I a senior at your company though that kind of conversation and then punching up hey you're the VP you know you know like where am I best fit this kind of thing so punch up down and sideways don't be intimidated about the level of the other company things that inform that rule I love that when it says punch up down sideways when you were on the job search especially somebody of your caliber you

you have a staff title is that something you're like I got to have a staff title I'm always to to staff roles or were you open you're like yo if I see a senior you know or if I even see a engineer three as long as it's kind of in the pay range am I are you submitting your resume to great question the answer is yes okay so um with the laterally doio standard practices when you get to the job se arch your social networking and I advocate a snowball method I'm so glad you brought this up Taylor so in Tech we talk about tiers

tier one two three so tier one is going to be your Fang your big n Fang Fang adjacent companies tier two will be National Brands well-known Brands but they might not be a tech company so maybe a Walmart is ex a good example of tier two right three just means no one not well known it doesn't mean that they're bad just everybody else yeah yeah it just means that if I tell you know my mom about this company she's not gonna recognize it so it's a no-name company a tier three company I applied to all of them and I applied um from mid level all

the way up to uh princip or principal you you applied to midlevel roles I did I did and so let me tell you about that specifically yeah that's fascinating specifically with tier one I did uh and the reason is I kep one yeah yeah I kept failing tier one final loops and I realized that the bar is higher so years ago I got an offer from Google at the mid level and I I turned it down to go to upstart who actually paid me better than Google um and so upstart would be a senior level and I thought oh you know this is quick growing

company it's higher level it's more pay like let's go over there forget about Google right and that might have been the right move I mean Google had layoffs too it seems like layoffs impacted anyone but in the current job search I said now I'm a senior let me go to Amazon let me go to stripe let me go to Tik Tok I interviewed at Tik Tok these tier one companies and I applied it at the senior level and I missed three final loops and I said all right fine I will now apply even at the mid level for these tier one companies so much Awareness

on your end so much awareness yeah that's and this is exactly what I talk about folks who are watching when I say when I tweet be aware you know be aware of your job search how you're coming across I mean I can tell John is absolutely dialed in with with just the overall awareness of the job search because he just said right there he was failing senior level roles at tier one so so what did he do he didn't just keep doing the same damn thing that most of y'all do he was like you know what I'm going to level down let's go mid let's

see what happens and I just think that's off to you I'm telling you I mean you you were writing the Playbook on uh on how to do a job search um what else what you know what what what what are some other snowball method a little bit more theow means you start with the easy interviews and you prep up to the harder ones so tier three companies first and so I st and let me mention this your recruiter buddies will love an engineer to say this taking a pay cut is a superpower dude I'm telling you I'm telling you if you can afford it it's

you can afford it so if think about the opportunity cost of being unemployed compared to your previous salary tolerate a 102% pay cut on that base tolerate it that's way better than being unemployed just think about the the opportunity cost now that starts your snowball you have an insurance policy in place you have this firm ground you can stand on your anxiety starts to melt away man and we can do an hour on just anxiety as a as a laid-off engineer but once that anxiety melts away your performance skyrockets and you also create bargaining power as you and interview preparations so that you can succeed

in those harder and harder interviews so started with the tier three senior level was passing those went up to tier three staff and principal was passing those went to tier two went to tier one didn't pass the tier one senior interviews but I got an I got multiple offers and I got one offer within one month at the principal level this was a tier three company but it was a principal role So within one month I was arguably already promoted by off and then I got negotiated better and better um roles I went back to employers I previously worked for and got some offers there

love that or or what I did in this last job service with me I just have everybody I interviewed with that that went fairly deep a year ago yeah so don't let Pride be a blocker don't let Pride be a blocker I applied to the company that laid me off I applied right back to them they weren't hiring very much but I applied there so don't let be a blocker um ultimately got a bunch of offers did a little negotiation I also accepted two offers where the company pulled the offer after I accepted so two of them two of them reality of how hard the

job market can be right now don't let it phase you play the numbers game big tip right there so just keep it moving and I eventually found this role that I'm that I'm currently at that I'm super happy with um this would be like the like fourth or fifth offer that I was made and that was the one that I ended up accepting ultimately the job search took me two months this is my experience as um a senior engineer at upstart I was doing staff level tasks there but they don't have a staff level so I was able to work up to staff that's another

thing there is set the Baseline with your snowball and then start punching up and advocate for yourself firmly I used career coach I used interview prep Services we can talk about that so be willing to spend some if you can um because if you were to spend if you so let's say you're like all right John money's tight I I feel like there is a need to spend on something to help me what what would be your like top one two things to spend money on if money's tight I'm not spending a dollar okay there are free interview prep services that you can use I'll

shout out interviewing.io okay with interviewing.io you can do PID interviews with current Fang Engineers or you can do or you can do free interviews with community members okay obviously the paid ones are better but the return on investment with zero spend is crazy do those pure ones uh hello interview is a YouTube channel they have a paid ser vice if you go to their website but if you're tied on money just use the YouTube videos they're really really good shout out to Hell interview those would be the free ones that I look at obviously I can plug laterally for the free ones that I would

look at when you start to spend money the game changes but if you're tied on money I recommend a two-step process get employed somewhere and then keep prepping for that next job because getting a tier one job is hard and it's really going to be to your advantage to use interview prep and unfortunately a lot of this tier one interview prep is expensive so if you have the money spend it but if you don't have the money do that next year you know get yourself in a job right now say save up a little and do that next year so what so you did spend

some money can you give some um overview cost so people aren't predatorz because that's definitely a thing right now yeah and I'm happy to go way in the weeds by the way I spent way more than I recommend anyone else spend because to me love the obvious I mean love the love the openness on that yeah so as a content creator as a thought later I'm willing to spend more because to me it's kind of like a research and like I can find out the answer and I can yeah so I spent over 20 grand um wow I don't recommend other people do this so

some of the services that I used I had a pre-existing career coach from before I was laid off so I was actually coached um when I was laid off was able to so that coaching was to a transition into management but I was able to Pivot and redirect some of that coach time into interview prep really really helpful uh a lady by the name of shine gar at Uncharted path breakthroughs is her company she's an ex Prime uh staff senior staff engineer interview Kickstart is a a company that I used which uh hate to say it but I mean this is the reason to do

research is so I can tell you where to save money I would ultimately not recommend interview Kickstart which is just fo r practice interviews interviewing.io I did the coaching plan when I went for sd3 at Amazon which is their senior engineer I prepped for it and I failed the loop um previously I used interviewing.io coaching plan and a couple years ago for gole and I passed their Loop so um call it 5050 if you're doing your risk yeah for some people 5050 chance of a tier one job is like I'll take that risk you know for some people um but just go in mind with

that data um because it's not cheap and then formation.

deev is one that I if you have the money I highly recommend it okay um it's it's also not cheap but uh I felt that that one placed a really you get unlimited interview practice interviews um for behavioral behavioral um coding rounds and system design like all of them so I thought that was a great value too that is awesome um Dane actually has a great question which is what I always ask this with folks to be honest when I asked this I'm never usually happy because people can't get in the weeds I feel like you can get in the weeds in this a little

bit how did you structure your day and I'm talking what time you woke up what did you do how did you structure interviews because I feel like obviously you have this you had this down pat I did I got this whiteboard that's blurred behind me and I was writing notes the whole time and I I love it so it kind of changed as time went on uh early I had no interviews later my interviews took up more of my time and I needed to adjust so that I can press you know 100% but the basic mental I'll give you the basic tools in the mental

model here one is um you should be applying to jobs you should be social networking um and you should be preparing for interview okay so at a minimum you can just say okay well if I'm GNA treat it like a job so I'm working N9 to five just divide it by three just evenly as a first pass as a first thing you do just do it evenly and then what you'll start to do is you'll measure outcomes you'll say okay you know I a pplied 10 places and then next week I get one interview I need to do more applications actually okay well give it

another hour and take it away from and you adjust like that yeah um what I ultim and then with the interview prep break it down figure out the qualitative things you need to do and make sure that you give each of those things at least an hour this is the other mental model if you didn't do something for an hour you didn't really give it much of an effort you need to give it a significant effort interesting okay yeah and so social networking I'm this this is why the content creation came back within the week is oh I need to like spend an hour doing

this you know what I mean M um with the interview prep I don't want to do an hour for interview prep I'm not getting enough coverage across my round types so I actually want to do an hour of coding an hour of cyst design and an hour of Behavioral um and that was basically what I settled on until I started getting to the point where I'm actually crushing behavioral and like I I'm not failing behavioral at all maybe I can like cut that down and do more on the coding which was harder for me believe it or not yeah and so that was basically time

how did you structure um did you have set days for interviews or did you just like make interviews schedule whenever they were available software engineer here so I did the agile thing okay so basically at the start of the week and so if you're an engineer you could say I did weekly Sprints um basically at the start of the week I picked spots on my calendar and so was there certain days yeah there were certain days this week but that might change next week you know what I mean yeah so I I did uh yeah basic time management techniques super important though like block spaces

on your calendar for certain tasks okay and so just like we talked about how do you divide up your day I'm not I'm not like deciding right now I need to do X Y or Z I'm actually making a plan for this week and then I'll will look my results week over week and why does the week over week matter let me give you a tidb on that Taylor please I need to do enough stuff that I can get a statistical signal okay it's so true I J it's just activity you just gota do stuff yeah so for for me when I started my job

search I'm applying to about 40 or 50 companies a week as a senior eventually I was able to ramp that down because I was busy with interviews for juniors I would double it and I would go 80 to 100 now when you're doing 80 to 100 appli in a week you get a statistical signal within one week that's one that's like one of the reasons that we go for these bigger numbers is because I can actually have statistical confidence and so that's the reason like okay every Monday so I'm resting on Sunday right and then every Monday I'm making my plan for this week and

I'm tweaking it where I need to in terms of time management let me give one other tip this is a process I discovered seeking a referral before you apply right so in retrospect it's common sense but this was actually another rule of three Innovation that I found when I started my job search if I saw a job I was interested in I just applied if I knew someone at the company I would reach out and one of the things I would do do is I would say I need to Social Network right so let me apply and then let me make sure I reach out

and get a point of contact at that company well that's the wrong order it's better to get a point of contact first and get them to give you a referral now you have the and so how much time do I spend trying to get this refer well not forever because we don't want our job search to last forever so this is where another rule of three helps and we also have the added pressure that the longer you wait on a job post there's a weaker chance that you're gonna get called to interview I mean like I would say exponentially by the day and and you

may be right and so I settled on a rule of three business days but m aybe you're right Taylor I did not do an AB test on three versus two like maybe two is maybe two is better maybe you're right U but I would say I got so many referrals by reaching out to so I find a job posted a company I like I'm not reaching out for one person I'm blasting messages to like five or 10 people so that I know one or two of them is getting back to me the next day right so don't here's another friction that I found talking to

other people I have a point of contact but isn't it confusing to have too many points of contact at the company no like get a bunch of points of contact at the company that's awesome yeah yeah is it disingenuous John they're asking me is it disingenuous if I ask this guy's opinion but then I go ask the second guy's opinion and I actually go with the second guy no that's not disingenuous get multiple perspectives if you even ask the engineer on the other side they're gonna say by all means get a few opinions dude like this is just my opinion you know what I mean

sure I love it um we're coming up on time but you know we're gonna try to cram through these questions much as possible Dane coming in again um Dan is just recently on the job search D's in my dad's in Tech group um can you speak to quantity versus quality on being active in your social network with content during the search you know I can I got the data um so do you want quality or quantity you want both right um ideally if my personal thing if you're GNA Edge on one side I think it's qual Quant quantity to like get the muscle going but

that's just my that's just my thought I'm with you I'm with you so that's kind of like a second stage thought and and you have the right thought by the way but the first stage thought is just like I want some of both like I don't want zero right maybe 90% I don't know but it shouldn't be zero and if we think statistically if you can get this statistical mental model down just the fact that you want between zero and one and you don't know exa ctly where to go your first guess should be right in the middle think about a coin toss yeah this

is just statistical mental model which frankly is actually hard for a lot of Engineers we're not train the things statistically um and so quantity or quality I recommend going into three different levels of depth on social media so l.o has recommended social communities some of these are large and some of these are small and the idea is that a large community you can't develop deep relationships but there's a lot of opportunity there so join that one a small community there's not really that many job opportunities that you're going to hear about in that Community but you get these deep relationships so also join that one

spend time in both kinds of communities and earlier I said you should be social networking every day and that should be at least an hour and so you don't need to do an hour in each of these communities but your hour should include messaging people on LinkedIn posting in these communities making some social media content those are the basic tasks you're going to want to do in that hour absolutely absolutely um one of my tools my tool Bel is have the audacity to do the things you don't think could or should yes usually this the most random DM that you never thought would hit or

they get back to you is actually the thing that's gonna help I agree let me give you the exact message of one of these DMS that I found works so Tiana when I hear your message first of all I agree and an example of that for me was this learn learning about punching up down and sideways um and so previously I would have thought is it in some way like abusive to ask a junior for a referral am I like taking advantage of them the answer is like no like they are glad to have a relationship with a staff engineer so so you can punch

down it's okay what about punching up is it is a VP even going to bother to respond the answer is like some of them yeah uh not all of them of course one of t he learn one of the things that I learned for me I did the email marketing approach there's this recommendation like don't worry about LinkedIn DMS just go straight to their email so I did some lead marketing software and found emails of like directors VPS engineering managers this approach did not work for me I'll just I'll just let you know this approach did not work I did not get why do you

think that is I think it's just I don't know I think it's just weird to people yeah I think emails a little evasive now yeah and I think if you're like sliding into a hiring manager DMS it's a little weird I mean uh emails I think it's just a little a little intrusive yeah that's my best guess I I really don't know Taylor but I do know the data is that it didn't work so the reasons why I love it I love it but I will say use the LinkedIn messages those do work and here's a message that worked for me um using the phrase

you're open to let me see if I can get this exact yeah so I'll say hey name people love to hear their name don't they so hey hey hey Jim I'm interested in the below rooll be specific direct upfront I'm here to ask for a referral don't beat around the bush it's going to reduce your efficacy rate so Hey Joe I'm interested in the below rooll I'm curious if you're open to refer so use curiosity don't demand don't expect a favor just say if you're curious if you're open to refer now you're the one this is taking advantage of the health halo effect and self-affirmation

bias you want to be cool right what would a cool person do a cool person would help the guy who needs help right so this is not me asking you for a referral this is me wondering if you're cool and of course you're cool so hey Jim I'm interested in the below role and curious to hear if you're open to refer I recently delivered X resulting in y let me know if I can send resume portfolio whatever helps now you're taking an action skin in the game reciprocity if I'm do if I'm willing to work why aren't you k ind of thing so that's the

exact message that I ended up seeing is is one of the most effective ones that I saw I love it I love it um s it's good to see thanks for tuning last question and we're g to wrap up and we'll we'll get to part two I I'll literally make sure John schedules a part two um how do you word up those oh well there you go yeah there you go you did it sweet I'll give you another one that tried that had that here here here's what failed right is if you try to connect to someone and you don't add a note all right

so that fails here's something that worked kind of is the previous one where I said hey I'm interested in these two roles at your company wanted to get your thoughts on what's the better fit for me that worked sometimes um so if you are genuinely torn feel free to use that one but if you're not genuinely torn it actually doesn't really work as as well as the one that I just gave purely for a referral uh purpose but if you are genuinely torn like it works well enough so you can use that as well okay awesome I love it I love it all right so

this was great I mean yeah Dane said it best I appreciate youall hanging out in my opinion so like this is this is what I try to do almost every pod very few very few now let me rephrase that I do have some different themes with different people so it's not quite fair to say that blanket statement but I will tell you this share this share this watch it take notes I mean this was this John John just gave y'all a master class of how to of how to job search in 36 minutes um and and um so we WE John we'll get you back

again um y'all have a great one thank you for hanging out with us John stay on stay on so I can say bye to you backstage I hope youall enjoyed it like I said yeah Kent our uh old goalie Who's now the coach of Middle Tennessee State University yeah we two and0 baby um so uh if you like this please share it I think this could be a resource for so many people um and uh that really need to see it I'm GNA share it in all my discords um so again thank you all so much for hanging out tomorrow I have the great Jason

Torres if you do not know Jason he is fantastic very active on Twitter has his own um Twitter space kind of podcast called Tech commute um he has helped raised $115,000 from a virtual conference that he specifically organized to help with one of his friends whose wife has cancer I can't even do that and he pulled it off so we're going to talk about the power of community tomorrow um and just how it just leads to jobs and why you should have that Focus so y'all have a good one thank youall again John appreciate you my friend and we'll see it the sounds familiar sounds

familiar yeah does I might have even gotten that from you I don't know let's say did let's just okay we'll go with that and so when you add a note laterally has some scripts that we recommend and you can start with those to get a baseline but then AV test it personalize it so personalization is a best practice you're more authentic it's coming from you one of the things you can say if you're looking at two roles at the company is you can say hey I'm looking at two roles at the company in your opinion which one am I better fit for and now you're

giving the other person a reason to interact with you right and you're already showing some appreciation for their expertise I would say um punch up down in sideways so applying for senior and staff level roles I reached out to Juniors and here's the thing if I'm a Staff engineer and you're a junior engineer you already think I'm cool you know what I mean you already want to refer me right so there will be a higher referral rate although it's less informative discussion when I talk with you you actually don't know the skill Matrix of the company very well punching sideways hey I'm a senior you're

a senior you know am I a senior at your company though that kind of conversation and then punching up hey you're the VP you know uou know like where am I best fit this kind of thing so punch up down and sideways don't be intimidated about the level of the other company things that inform that rule I love that when it says punch up down sideways when you were on the job search especially somebody of your caliber you you have a staff title is that something you're like I got to have a staff title I'm always to to staff roles or were you open you're

like yo if I see a senior you know or if I even see a engineer three as long as it's kind of in the pay range am I are you submitting your resume to great question the answer is yes okay so um with the laterally doio standard practices when you get to the job se pplied 10 places and then next week I get one interview I need to do more applications actually okay well give it another hour and take it away from and you adjust like that yeah um what I ultim and then with the interview prep break it down figure out the qualitative things

you need to do and make sure hhat you give each of those things at least an hour this is the other mental model if you didn't do something for an hour you didn't really give it much of an effort you need to give it a significant effort interesting okay yeah and so social networking I'm this this is why the content creation came back within the week is oh I need to like spend an hour doing this you know what I mean M um with the interview prep I don't want to do an hour for interview prep I'm not getting enough coverage across my round types

so I actually want to do an hour of coding an hour of cyst design and an hour of Behavioral um and that was basically what I settled on until I started getting to the point where I'm actually crushing behavioral and like I I'm not failing behavioral at all maybe I can like cut that down and do more on the coding which was harder for me believe it or not yeah and so that was basically time how did you structure um did you have set days for interviews or did you just like make interviews schedule whenever they were available software engineer here so I did the

agile thing okay so basically at the start of the week and so if you're an engineer you could say I did weekly Sprints um basically at the start of the week I picked spots on my calendar and so was there certain days yeah there were certain days this week but that might change next week you know what I mean yeah so I I did uh yeah basic time management techniques super important though like block spaces on your calendar for certain tasks okay and so just like we talked about how do you divide up your day I'm not I'm not like deciding right now I need

to do X Y or Z I'm actually making a plan for this week aybe you're right Taylor I did not do an AB test on three versus two like maybe two is maybe two is better maybe you're right U but I would say I got so many referrals by reaching out to so I find a job posted a company I like I'm not reaching out for one person I'm blasting messages to like five or 10 people so that I know one or two of them is getting back to me the next day right so don't here's another friction that I found talking to other people

I have a point of contact but isn't it confusing to have too many points of contact at the company no like get a bunch of points of contact at the company that's awesome yeah yeah is it disingenuous John they're asking me is it disingenuous if I ask this guy's opinion but then I go ask the second guy's opinion and I actually go with the second guy no that's not disingenuous get multiple perspectives if you even ask the engineer on the other side they're gonna say by all means get a few opinions dude like this is just my opinion you know what I mean sure I

love it um we're coming up on time but you know we're gonna try to cram through these questions much as possible Dane coming in again um Dan is just recently on the job search D's in my dad's in Tech group um can you speak to quantity versus quality on being active in your social network with content during the search you know I can I got the data um so do you want quality or quantity you want both right um ideally if my personal thing if you're GNA EDge on one side I think it's qual Quant quantity to like get the muscle going but that's just

my that's just my thought I'm with you I'm with you so that's kind of like a second stage thought and and you have the right thought by the way but the first stage thought is just like I want some of both like I don't want zero right maybe 90% I don't know but it shouldn't be zero and if we think statistically if you can get this statistical mental model down just the fact that you want between zero and one and you don't know exa