job search tips with jake and dan

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Hey, what's going on everybody? I am super excited to get back on podcast train and deliver another episode to everyone. I'm especially during this time to give you something to listen to while you're working from home or walking the dog or your cat because we have somebody that walks their cat in our neighborhood. Don't ask questions at the East Nashville. But I'm really excited to bring this specific episode. Even more so than usual because I have my two dear dear friends, Jake Shepard and Dan Thompson, both in the Vaco family. Jake hails from Raleigh, North Carolina in our office out there and the day Dan is down in Tampa in our office.

So they're going to do a little introductions about themselves in this podcast. We'll speak too long. I know it's been a bit so as always, if you can really take two seconds off, you'll listen to his podcast and rate and review it. Again, that will allow this thing to become more discoverable to others. If you need to reach me, Taylor at Vaco.com is going to be the best way to do it. If you want to follow me on all socials, it's at t-decent, t-d-e-s-s-e-y-n. And as always, I hope you're staying safe during this time. And I plan on bringing more episodes to you all over the next few weeks.

Go ahead and follow me on LinkedIn. I'm starting to put up more videos on LinkedIn about helping people walk through the job process. And kind of real time, right? So I'm dealing with all these cans right now that are currently being laid off. And so I'm making these videos, essentially in real time as I'm working with candidates. And so hopefully that can be of help to you as well. And again, it's just my first and last name on LinkedIn. Hope you guys enjoy this podcast. Thanks. All right. So hey, everyone. Thanks for checking in and listening to my podcast episode. So I'm really excited about this specific episode.

One, because obviously I haven't put one out in a bit because it's been crazy on my end with the job market the way it is. But also, two, I'm really excited to bring my dear friends, Jake Shepard and Daniel Thompson, to talk about the current state of economy and some tips and tricks on to get yourself better position in the market right now. And so I'm going to go ahead and let Jake and Dan introduce themselves and give people their backstory so they know where they're pulling obviously their experiences from. So Jake, if you want to go ahead and start and kick it off, man.

Yeah. Thanks so much for hosting and for having us on. So it is definitely an interesting time out there right now. We've talked to a lot of candidates that are just not sure what to do next in clients as well that will just kind of all right. Let's just pause for a second, but there's certainly just as many that are active and ready to go. So a little bit about me. I'm a senior director at Vaco. I lead both and managed service engineering teams. So I'm in a hiring position myself as well as recruiting and building out technical teams for software specific companies here in the Raleigh Durham North Carolina area.

Been here for a little under five years now doing that. And it's been blast. But yeah, just excited to be here and talk a little bit about this and hopefully we can help some people and I make their next move here. Yeah, absolutely. Dan, go ahead, man. Yeah, no, thanks Taylor. Thanks Jake for having me on. It's always good to catch up and chat with you guys. Again, Dan Thompson. I run our VT practice. I make a technology practice down here in Tampa, Bemma, they go for nearly seven years now. So we're doing a lot in the app. Dev space business intelligence space down here in beautiful sunny, sunny Tampa, Florida.

That's awesome. And Daniel also has Dan. If you want to shamelessly plug your four to Gator podcast now, now's a chance for my two listeners. Yeah, I know absolutely. We're waiting to hopefully get this up to three or four. Once you get this on a reach lead on the time. I also run a podcast that's about the greatest college football team of all time, the Florida Gators, stadium and GAL, so that stadium and GALE, which is of course the corners of where the greatest football stadium on earth, a Ben Hill Griffin stadium is. So thanks Taylor for the plug. I choose that I should never have done that.

All right. So first thing I want to talk about, I mean, I guess, you know, I'm sure like both of you two on the call, you've had a lot of people reach out to over the last two weeks. People are panicking. You have the people who have been laid off. You have the people who are nervous about being laid off. You have the people who aren't even in the conversation about being laid off, but they're nervous and kind of what they want to do right now. So I'd love to hear y'all thoughts. I mean, Jake, if you want to go first and kind of what, what to tell the, the job seeker right now and come to better prepare themselves and got a position themselves in the market right now.

Yeah. I mean, I think what, what we're going to see coming coming through the other side of this is really just needing to be prepared to move quickly. You know, you don't want to be that person that all of a sudden has the same skill set as, you know, 30, 50, 200 people in your area that are all looking for a job at the same time and just have that delay of not being ready to take an interview or ready to even apply for a job. So what right now, what I would recommend is just, just make yourself available, whether it is pract, brushing up on your current technical skills for to be prepared for an interview, whether it's preparing your LinkedIn and your resume to match and to be, to be full of all of your, your current skill sets and accomplishments or even just getting pre getting some pre-written letters of recommendation or, or any accolades that you may have.

All of those could, you know, be super helpful when it comes to just getting a speed to market as we say and making sure that you can get into your next opportunity a little bit faster than right now your competition. Yeah, absolutely. Dan, do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah, no, I agree. I can echo what Jake said. Always be ready. Be ready. There are companies that are hiring now. I'll be ready with your resume. Update your resume. This is a good time to, to spend some time and reflect on it. Make sure that it all makes sense. Make sure that it's updated with your, your newest and latest and greatest, whether it be technology skills sets, achievements, accomplishments, whatever that might be.

Take this time and reflect back on that. But also I would say you can use this time and there's a lot of companies that are giving away free services, skillshare, lynda.com, et cetera, that are giving away. Free education certifications, places where you can go and learn. And this isn't an opportunity for you to upskill yourself, whether it's in, you know, cloud technologies or infrastructure, whether it's a new programming language. But, you know, use this time as an opportunity to be able to learn and to grow in your skills. The market is going to change drastically even when we get back to work. So, you know, utilize this opportunity to, to maybe learn a new skill.

But I would also say this, you know, technology where I would imagine a lot of folks that listen to podcasts are coming from is a feel where you can burn out quite a bit. So, also take some time for yourself. So, take some time to reflect. So, take some time if you can. You know, so it's a walk outside or to decompress a little bit. We have a weird set of circumstances right now that, that kind of puts you in a position where you can, where you can sit back and reflect. And, you know, if you want to read a book or do that puzzle, you've always wanted to do.

Take some time for yourself because, you know, when the economy is, is back and everybody's back to work and I have no doubt that we're going to be an overdrive and you're going to, you know, wish you had spent some time doing some, some relaxing things as well. I absolutely hate puzzles. Yeah. I'm awful at that. Hey, Jake. So, I know you made a comment about your thoughts of when the market comes back and it's just going to kind of be feast over famine. I mean, what kind of expound on that? As we were kind of talking offline about it. Well, I mean, really, to that, to that comment, I'm speaking specifically around technology comes in.

Sure. And, you know, that's a great thing. Sure. And, you know, there still is this kind of, we got to find ways to help support local and, you know, by gift cards for future use from local restaurants and coffee shops and things like that. But, from specifically around the technology around, you know, because technology and software specifically can be used across so many different industries as a transferable skill set. I've seen a lot of clients just here locally that are like, all right, let's just freeze here. Those that are transferable depending on your technology, they can kind of just pop in to other industries. What our job, you know, as advisors and what you, the candidates job would be in the sense of figuring out what industries are going to have the most rebound.

I think that there's going to be quite a few that have been at a stand still for a little bit that are going to need to catch up that being anything related to retail, anything related to transportation, anything related to travel and for any sort of tourism. You know, those companies that have really stopped to a grinding halt, they're going to have to come back because you have a ton of people that still have a lot of cash in the bank that are just, all right, let me just hang on to this right now and see what happens. They're going to be itching to get out of their houses and all of a sudden, I don't even know if those systems are going to be able to handle, handle the huge influx.

Not to mention that we're seeing a lot of companies that support elective surgeries or, you know, dentistry or anything like that where people are like, I'll be able to just cancel those appointments and wait. The influx that's going to happen from some of just those scheduling applications alone is going to be absolutely insane once they lift some of the stuff. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I think my big thing right now is, I've been on a few video calls this week with a few engineers, software, software guys and girls. And it's, you know, I've, I've, I've, I've affirmed the people that have done it. But right now is, right now is a time where you need to be asking around, Hey, you know, how can I get ahead of the job search?

You know, what are people looking for right now? You know, for me, at least in Nashville, I'm not seen where a lot of employers wanting to get hubs or, you know, portfolios, like it really needs to be in your resume. And again, that's, that's just what I'm seeing. I'm not saying that's that's that across the board. But I think that, you know, I've, I've obviously talked to a few people and, you know, we've kind of chopped it up a little bit. And it's like, you know, right now, like take, take right in a resume like sucks. Like it takes time. It's, it's really obnoxious. And like if there's any time where you can, you have the time and are somewhat forced to do it is, is obviously right now.

So I would absolutely say take time to, to obviously get your resume, set up, you know, my big thing, you know, I've really found a lot on resumes lately over the last, obviously over the last few months on my LinkedIn and Twitter. But I mean, if you've been in the industry for any amount of time, it needs to be over a page, right? I say this on time. I want to catch a guidance counselor in the shin who said it needs to be one page. Yeah. Yeah. But, but I, or even to, yeah. I mean, yeah. I mean, I would say three is really good, especially if you've been in, really in any industry for more than a few years.

But I think the big thing is, is like, you need to get us quantitative as possible. And obviously makes your resume with a, with a sense of, or with, you know, your functional jargon, right? So developing web applications for financial software that is your lives across the world, right? So very functional high level, you know, your mom can understand it. But then also too, it's getting granular, you know, leveraging, you know, react to S with hooks to solve this problem or using nodes for, you know, highly transactional services, right? I mean, stuff like that. And so you want to be able to write a resume that's functional enough to where non-technical people can read it like recruiters.

But then obviously technical enough for managers are going to be able to know what you do. And I would say that is a lost art among resumes. Like listen, you don't need to say I work well with others because you've been, you've been holding the positions for 15 years. We get it. You obviously can work well with others. Like, like, let's get down to, hey, I hope say the company, a million dollars in infrastructure services to scale down our servers from the AWS perspective, right? Like that's the type of stuff that companies want. However, if you don't work well with others, I'd love for you to just tell me that at the time.

So we can do that. No, I mean, you guys, you guys make a great point. I mean, right now we're going to be in a position where companies are going to probably have, you know, a lot of companies are going to have an influx of resumes and there's going to be, you know, that opportunity where they can decide. So when they're looking at your resume, well, what can you do to problem solve, right? Like nothing more. And the last three weeks has taught us more than companies had to figure out a way to problem solve and figure out a way to adapt. So show us ways that you've done that.

Show ways that you've, you know, done one thing and then all of a sudden a business crisis forced you to change direction and be malleable, right? So those are the things that companies are going to look for because then they're going to look for those separators as they're trying to decide because, you know, I have no doubt in my mind that the economy is going to come booming and soaring back. But companies are going to be in a position where they've looked back on the last, you know, a few weeks, few months, however long, you know, this might go on and say, okay, well, now that we know that we've dealt with this, what type of person was successful is something like this comes again, right?

So that's what they want to see when you talk about, you know, being quantitative and qualitative on your resume tailor, that's where they want to see you changing, you know, technologies or adapting to changes in technologies or, you know, cloud and VDI and everything that we're doing from, you know, infrastructure as a service now, you know, what have you done in that world or what did you do to try to learn and grow during this time, right? I mean, maybe you came from an environment where you weren't, you know, on Google, a W.S. or Azure, you know, but maybe you spent your time, you know, when you were quarantined, learning more about that.

That to me is what hiring managers are going to want to see a lot more of of what are you doing to adapt to the changing nature of, you know, the working economy, which is hard as is to believe we are watching change forever right before our eyes right now. Dan, that's a really good point about that, especially that pivot being able to be adaptable. And you know, as we're going back to resume in LinkedIn writing on that, that's something that I prefer always to not have a skills section. Because I never look at that. I want to see what you've actually done. And if you're trying to exercise some skills that you haven't done or demonstrate that you've done them, but you haven't done them at an enterprise environment, that's the great opportunities to start flexing your muscles on a special projects or side projects section of your resume, as well as your GitHub, you know, if you come from one environment and you're thinking, wow, the market's really shifting to this.

Maybe I should start playing with that and teaching myself, you know, put it on your GitHub and put it as a special project section and add a new tool to your tool chest and make it an easy way for others to be able to see that outside of just the work you've done in your companies. Not to mention right now, there's, you know, don't want to take too much advantage of it, but it's a little bit of extra time that you have, you know, not commuting or not having to take your kids to school or go to any events or sports games or anything right now.

You might as well teach yourself a little bit and round out your skills set to be more marketable to the rest of the opportunities out there and put that on your LinkedIn on your resume. If you have something really cool, you want to show post it on LinkedIn and be like, hey, I just built this app, you know, go ahead and check it out. Here's my GitHub link, you know, these are things that can be seen even months later as activity on your page. And if I'm looking for every reason to qualify or disqualify a candidate, you know, I want to see what who are they?

Where do they do? And you know, do they have a voice and the ability to be either a leader on the team from a thought perspective or from a pace or from a community perspective or are they someone that's just going to take orders and kind of sit down, you know, and every little bit of that that you can kind of, you know, round yourself out just makes you that much closer to finding that dream job. Yeah, I love that. So let's move it to the conversation a little bit towards working with recruiters right now, right? And what are some advice is Dan, give give give advice to for individuals.

I mean, I have my own, but I'd love to hear yours for, you know, somebody who got laid off who's never worked with recruiters before like where to start, how to begin. I mean, just kind of shed some eye on that. Yeah, no, I would say, you know, first things first is try to remember if you've never worked with a recruiter. I'm sure you've been, you know, reached out to by one or you've heard, but do some research in your market? What are companies that have been in the market for a while? So it seemed to have a good reputation, you know, seemingly have some folks that have stayed there for a while that have been able to build relationships and take some time and do some research, right?

You know, at the end of the day, you have to look at as a recruiter as as an agent for you, right? You know, our job is to really help you and help our clients make a marriage, right? So you want to make sure that you're working with, you know, a recruiter and I always encourage and tailor you and Jake do as well to work with a couple of recruiters, right? As good as we think we might be in our market and as well respected or whatever it might be, we don't have all the relationships or maybe somebody's had a 10 year relationship. So get to know, get to know a few and number, you know, the second thing is as we just talked about, make sure your resume is up to date.

It doesn't have to be perfect, but go in, you know, with a sandbox resume of, hey, this is what I have and then ask for advice and then be open to that advice. You know, when we get feedback on a resume, it's not to be critical. It's it's to try to help, right? This is a living document for you. So, you know, we are able to look through, you know, hundreds of resumes every week. We kind of know what works, what might not work. And if you've not, you know, updated your resume, but sometimes let us, let us help you, right? Again, you know, it's it's not to, you know, put you down or anything else as much as it is to say, hey, let us, you know, put you in the best position to be successful.

Number three is just know what you're looking for in the job. What are your drivers, right? Recruiters going to probably ask you, is it money? Is it community as a benefit, is it technology? Is it team size as a product? Whatever it might be, know what you're looking for in a company. And then whatever you're looking at jobs online or you're looking with a working with a recruiter, you know, know what those are because there's going to be jobs that pay more money than other jobs that might suck. There's going to be jobs that pay really well, but have terrible benefits and you might net out, you know, worse than another job.

So know what some of those drivers are for you. And then finally put yourself in a position where you know you're going to be happy. You know, I think that everybody's kind of looking back on these last couple of weeks and saying, hey, the world can change, you know, pretty drastically, pretty quickly. And man, it's awesome to have a great job and a company that cares for you. So, you know, I don't know what that might be for you, but try to look out for that company that thinks it's going to, it's going to look out for you as well. That's good. I love that.

Jake, do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah. I mean, what I would add to that is if you're working with a recruiter that, that, you know, values the career progression that they've personally made on the relationship that they've made with clients, they're also going to be somewhat defensive of their clients. You know, so what I would say that if they're pushing back on, you know, any sort of reason, you know, for, hey, this is kind of a communication style of this client or this is what they look for in team members or this is how they view collaboration, you know, and you're somewhat kebada, you know, a good recruiter should be empathetic to your situation, you know, so they're not going to hold it completely against you.

But there has to be this element of if a recruiter doesn't push back on you at all about that client and what encoches you to what's best for that team, they're probably don't have the client or your best interest in mind, which means they're more of one of the scenario typical recruiters that's how it's actionable. But if you can build that relationship with a recruiter that defends both you and the client in the sense of how are we going to bring this together, you know, from a personality and technology perspective as well as all the ancillary benefits, you know, that's someone it's just a good resource to have even if you're not looking long term.

Right. But if you don't have that, you know, I would be cautious to work heavily with that person. Absolutely. Yeah. And my, you know, my two cents is, you know, for me, the quick guide for me is the two and two role. And I know some members of my team got frustrated when I said this online because they've been on the two year mark. So I say this just as a general reference and obviously if you're getting flooded by recruiters in your inbox, but it's a two and two role. Right. So typical recruiters bounce around every two years because they obviously can't hack it. And so they need the base raise because they can't make it on the commission side.

And so you like if you find your recruiters met the same company for more than two years and end your local market for two years, I think that's a great starting point. But I would say the most important number is work with somebody who has at least been at the same company for two years. And then the more years that that person has been in the market, the better that they're going to know the market. I mean, for me, I've been in national now the national market for six years. I'm still learning about companies. I've screened the developer today that has, you know, an office that in the Ecom space down by my barber.

And I've never knew that. Right. So like, so I'm still learning about these companies in Nashville. So and I've been doing it for six years. Right. So now I'm Jake Dan. I'm sure y'all can both agree that as well. Yeah. Now, you make a great point. And that's not the put down like you said here to put down anybody that's been there, you know, last time, you know, and you can even do research on that company because you might be working with a great recruiter that might have only been somewhere a year and a half. But what is the nature of that company tell you, you know, if you look around and click on some of the other LinkedIn profiles, do you see a lot of people that have been there three months, you know, six months, eight months, or do you see a lot of people that have been there three years, five years, seven years.

And the reason we do that is because those are companies that really have fostered relationship and have really fought or relationships for me. And have really in my opinion, shown that they're an officer company that cares a lot about, you know, general relationships rather than just kind of your smile and dial sales approach or your, you know, VMS type approach or your, you know, very transactional approach. At the end of the day, like we said, a recruiter is your agent. And on the opposite side of the recruiter side is your business developers, those that are bringing in, you know, new companies and new clients. And you want to make sure that, you know, those that have been there for a while are building long term relationships because there's companies that I've now worked with for, you know, five and a half, six, seven years now.

And we know exactly what they're looking for. So when we talk to you, we know what their interview questions are going to be like, or what type of personality they're looking for, or what's going to drive them to hire somebody. You know, we know, you know, what the company looks like, we know what the bonus potential looks like. We know a lot of those things. And so if you're, you know, talking and working with a recruiter, you know, it's important to make sure you know somebody that knows the market and knows, you know, the companies that they're working with. There's a lot of companies that will just throw a bunch of jobs out to, you know, 40 recruiters and just hope whoever gets in the fastest at the cheapest prices the one they're going to go with.

And then there's those that sit down with the CTO and, you know, Jake, you do this really well. Sit down, strategize, come up with road mapping and how can they go help fill those molds. And, you know, and I think, you know, the, the approach to that compared to this kind of smile and dial approaches. Jake, if you meet or tailor you meet or if I meet somebody that's spectacular, there's a whole host of people that we can call and say, hey, you know, Mr, you know, CTO or, you know, Miss CIO, I have an awesome.net developer and Angular, you know, nine developer that, you know, really is just, you know, kickass and it's going to do great for your company.

They're more apt to do that rather than just trying to, you know, hope for the best than, you know, cross your fingers that, you know, some huge bank is going to open a job for you in the next couple months. That's a really good point. I mean, even I just dealt with this list last week, you know, so many, so many companies were like, let's just pause for a second. But I've got a couple clients that I'm actually one of the interim hiring managers for them, you know, that that was a, and we were able to push right along because I, I know the intimacy of their budget for that year as well as income from a revenue perspective and what that looks like, especially with where they're trying to go from modernization efforts and we were able to move forward, you know, and make some very competitive offers that ultimately resulted in people accepting them.

And now they're going to be pretty far ahead from some of their competitors that have maybe taken their foot off the gas a little bit because they didn't have the cash on hand or weren't ready to to make those strategic hires. You know, so you just, you never know really who is until you have some people that are kind of working on your behalf on the inside as well. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think having people really leveraging recruiters as your own agents and as a market professional, I think, I think it could help more than you realize, right? I mean, I had one senior architect I've been working with that only wanted one specific position at one specific rate and it took us six months and we found them something and you pulled the trigger.

So, you know, it takes time and you need to go and start building these relationships soon or rather later. Well, cool boys. Well, thanks again for hanging with me. I really appreciate you too. And maybe we should do one of these again here's, yeah, sounds great. Talk about that. Absolutely looking forward. All right, good deal, boys. Talk soon. Thanks. Bye.