Mindy Thomas

Career Chat – Mindy Thomas Interviews Sarah Johnston

 

Mindy Thomas:

Hi everybody. I’m Mindy Thomas, and this is Career Chat. We air every Monday at 11:30 AM. And Tuesdays at 8:00 PM. Social networks are highly important and they’ve been researched since the 1930s. And what the surveys have shown is that career changers are finding jobs through acquaintances, friends of friends, simply just about everyone they know. But what we didn’t know was down the line, the eighth and ninth people outside the circle, they are also very valuable in helping you to find a job today. I feel very privileged to introduce you to my next guest. Who’s a subject matter expert. Her name is Sarah Johnston. She is known as the briefcase coach. She is a former corporate recruiter who turned into an executive resume resume writer and career coach, catapulting herself to success right away. She’s been featured on ABC, CBS LinkedIn and Business Insider. Sarah, welcome to the show.

Sarah Johnston:

Mindy. I am so honored to be here. It’s the highlight of my week is getting to have this conversation with you and help job seekers out there, land their next opportunity.

Mindy Thomas:

Oh, likewise. I’m very excited. You’re here. I didn’t mention one of your star accolades is Sarah is was voted last year as one of the top five voices to follow on LinkedIn. Well, you know how many people are on linked in? Congratulations, Sarah, that’s amazing.

Sarah Johnston:

So much. I have found, I guess my voice, if you will writing content on LinkedIn and, and just honored that I can inspire people and help people find jobs through what I write

Mindy Thomas:

Terrific, your business. You’re based out of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. And I know that you work nationwide probably on a global basis as well, working with college students all the way up to the C suite. And primarily you are writing the resumes and doing interview coaching as well as what else,

Sarah Johnston:

Job search strategy, which is what I think we’re going to talk about today. And what I’m most passionate about is helping people think strategically through their job search. So that the very first thing that they do, isn’t just launch on the job boards and apply for hundreds of and feel like their resumes going into an ATS black hole for really to take that step back and assess who they are and the value that they can bring to the organization, what their secret sauce is, and then how to attack a job search strategically. So they get greater results.

Mindy Thomas:

Before we jump into that, I would really like to understand how you found your voice and passion as a corporate recruiter. You were recruiting for a living. And obviously, I mean, I was a recruiter. I remember moving the words all around. I just loved finessing the words and moving them and making them look better, sound better and communicate the best message possible. What kind of recruiter were you back in the day and what made you move to be opening up your own shop?

Sarah Johnston:

Yeah, so most recently I was a healthcare recruiter. I worked for the largest children’s hospital in the country and loved the work that I did. It was very meaningful and I’ve worked for other companies and had recruited other industries as well, but I love the work I did, but realized one, I had a passion to help job seekers. I noticed that job seekers, you know, commonly made mistakes that help, or that prevented them from getting jobs, really great candidates for being passed over because they didn’t have to sell themselves or position themselves. And I wanted to be able to work with people on that one on one basis. And then two I’ve always really wanted to be an entrepreneur. I’ve always wanted to work for myself and getting to be a business owner. The briefcase coach was a lifelong passion of mine and it’s been a lot of fun.

Mindy Thomas:

How did you come up with the name Brief Case Coach?

Sarah Johnston:

You know, my husband and I swear we’re drinking a glass of wine one night talking about the type of work that I wanted to do. And you know, when you’re on GoDaddy searching for names that are still available dot coms that are still available, you might have a list of a hundred and we kind of took it down from there. And Bruce, his coach just made the most sense. And, and now that it’s my, now that I’ve learned it, it really fits because a briefcase is a tool that you take with you that helps you keep things together that helps you position for that next opportunity that helps you stand out. And I have a tool for job seekers as well. I helped them stand out and I help them be better position. And so you know, it’s not essential to have a briefcase. It’s not essential to work with someone like me, but I think it can really be the differential.

Mindy Thomas:

It’s really a catchy name, no doubt. Let’s get right to this subject of social networks and Mark Granovetter, who is an American sociologists, a Stanford professor. He did research in the area of social networking. Can you tell us a little bit more about his work and how important is for the job hunters to really exercise some proactive if you will execute on this because without it they’re really they’re really going to have a tough time in the, in these economic times.

Sarah Johnston:

Yeah. So when we were kind of discussing last week, what we could talk about, this is a subject that I’m really passionate about. And the reason is, is that often see, as we just mentioned, job seekers launching straight to the job boards and they start applying for jobs online and they get really frustrated by the fact that they’re not hearing from companies, companies on average get 250 applicants per position for a corporate role. And so as a job seeker, especially in these hard economic times where there’s a higher than average employment rate, you have to do something different to stand out. Martin innovator was a Stanford researcher and he did a lot of look into social networks. And this is back in the seventies. And did this study any found that shockingly, it’s not the strong times, the people that you know, really, really well it’s often the weaker ties that can be most helpful in a job search.

Sarah Johnston:

So when I’m talking to job seekers, I think there’s a lot of value in coming up with one, a target company list of all the places that you want to work. All the places that hire people like you for the job that you want to do, but to my mapping, your network, taking the time to really think through who you know, and from all the different buckets of life that you’ve known, people, people that you went to college with, people that you’ve worked with in your first job, people that worked with vendors from previous jobs, thinking through all of those relationships, because often as research shows and from Mark Granovetter and from my personal relationship with my clients, the people that you think are going to be the most helpful in the job search people that you think you can call it, they are often more resistant to pick up the phone. Whereas those weaker ties of seven, eight degree connections are more willing to introduce you to their connections are willing to endorse you and take that extra step on your behalf.

Mindy Thomas:

Well, it’s interesting, you know, there’s an old saying your net worth is your network.

Sarah Johnston:

I love that saying absolutely. It only takes one person to change the trajectory of your job search,

Mindy Thomas:

You know, and to piggyback on that, Sarah, you know, we look at employers, employers trust their employees to refer. I mean, look at the referral bonuses that are paid out on an annual basis. Why? Because onboarding someone that’s a loser in their eyes, or they got to get rid of a cost, just hundreds of thousands of dollars, billions of dollars to companies every year. So I think you agree that the employers do trust people to refer good people to them.

Sarah Johnston:

Absolutely social networking is so important. Think about it. If you’re going to go buy something on Amazon, you’re going to buy a $15 pound case. You’re probably going to read five reviews before you made that purchase. The same goes with hiring. You want to hire someone that someone else endorses, someone that you trust. They endorse them. You’re more likely to take a chance on them. So social proof matters, which is why as a job seeker, you have to leverage your network. This is the latest stat should 40 to 60% of people find their job through referral. And if you look at job bites data from last year, a significant number of candidates were hired through employee referrals. Companies are really putting a lot of stock in, in your pulley referral program. They’re prioritizing these communities and are even giving bonuses. As you mentioned to people who make referrals.

Mindy Thomas:

So one of the first steps is to paraphrase. What you have your clients do is they look at each bucket beginning with the old positions who they know current role or past roles who they know from their church, who they know from their social life, right?

Sarah Johnston:

Oh yeah. Who, you know, from your kid’s soccer team, I mean, you cannot overlook the values of the relationships that you make through your kids, through your parents, friends, these relationships all matter and often are people that you wouldn’t consider when you’re job searching, but you never know what somebody from your kid’s soccer team is the executive vice president of one of the companies on your target company list. And these are people who know you and can vouch for your character.

Mindy Thomas:

So what do you do with the list after you compile the list?

New Speaker:

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Sarah Johnston:

After you’ve compiled the list, it’s important to also make that target company list as well. You also want to work. So the key is help people help you start setting up informational interviews. Maybe you can start with your warmer contacts. First, your biggest fans and people who know you, your champion circle, and go to them and say, Hey, Joe, I’m launching a job search. And you’re someone that I’ve always valued. You’ve always given me really good advice to kind of prop them up a little bit and say, you know, I’m looking to make a career change. And here’s a list of my target companies to bring to them, maybe a condensed list of your target companies. Did you know anybody in his list of companies? Do you know anybody that I should be having a conversation with? What do you know about this company? Do you like this company?

Sarah Johnston:

How do you feel like they’re doing profitable profit wise? Or do you feel like they’re successful? You will, should I be talking to you and then take that target company was to step further and look up who would be your boss on LinkedIn, figure out who you’d potentially report to. If you had the job that you want to have, and you could go to your network and say, do you know this person, could you help me get an introduction to that person? And so it’s all about getting decision-maker conversations. What works in network. You have to get decision to your conversations at your target company list.

Mindy Thomas:

That’s great advice. Great advice. So what about target companies? How do you know what companies to target? How do you find those companies? Are you Googling who are the best companies to work for in chapel Hill, North Carolina, or Philadelphia? What do you think about that?

Sarah Johnston:

This is an often overlooked step. I always asked job seekers. So do you have a target list of companies and people say, Oh yeah, I have like five or six companies that I want to work for. Well, here’s the news. You’re not fishing in a big enough pond. You really need to have a list of 25 to 35 target companies to build out that big of a list. You got to do what you mentioned. You have to Google best companies to work in Chapel Hill or whatever you’re areas will get. Those companies fastest brewing, whatever your industry is. Maybe you’re a CPG consumer product, good company, fastest growing CPG companies. Maybe you look on LinkedIn at people who are working at some of your target companies that you already know about and where they worked before. So kind of work backwards. See where people worked before.

Sarah Johnston:

If you’re interested in the startup, you could go to venture capital firms that back companies in your area. So maybe venture capital firms that fund CPG companies and see who’s in their portfolio to see if there’s any companies that could potentially be on your list. That way you can go to chamber of commerce websites, look on their websites to see who is active and engaged. That could also help you get that, create that list. On average, my clients spend about 20 hours of building out that target company list. And if you really take the time to do a deep dive research, your options, you’re going to have a lot more success because you don’t want to overlook a company that could be potentially a really great fit for you.

Mindy Thomas:

That is super advice. Listen, we have to take a short break. We’re going to be right back to continue the conversation and look at what should people that are employed right now. What should they be doing? We’ll be right back. Okay.

Mindy Thomas:

Hi, everybody. Welcome back to Career Chat. We are with Sarah Johnston, also known as the briefcase coach. She is talking with us today about what we should be doing if we’re employed right now or unemployed. So Sarah, let’s talk about some things that people that are employed right now. I mean, everybody’s a little bit worried. Even if you have a job, what should they be doing right now to ensure that they’re ready?

Sarah Johnston:

I’m going to borrow the words of another career coach. I respect Diana Chan and she says, everyone right now in these uncertain times should be following their ABCs. Always be connecting. If you have a job right now, you should make it your goal to try to connect with one new person every day, because it’s the relationships as we discussed that are going to help you land your next job. It would also be smart to update your LinkedIn, make sure that it’s keyword optimized so that someone could find you if they were looking for someone with your skill sets and brushed off your resume. You know, as we were talking between the, during the break right now, we’re hearing you and I are hearing from people. Who’ve had job security for most of their career and their job searching for the very first time, maybe in 20 years. And so if that’s you and you, haven’t had to launch a job search, the resume is changed. It looks very different today than it did 10 years ago, 15 years ago. And so if you aren’t fully invested in the job search, now now’s a great bet the best time to get ready and get your documents in order.

Mindy Thomas:

Great advice. One of my favorite career coaches is Kerry Hannon who targets the boomers out there. And last week I saw a quote that went like this networking is one letter away from not working. And it just like, I just thought, wow, that really says it all. So it is important to keep those connections going. The resume are there, is there anything new that’s come in that you could talk to? I mean, we always talk about using the action verbs for the achievements. Not putting on the addresses, but putting on the city, state and zip code, right. Having the LinkedIn URL right on the resume. Are there any other little tips right now that are coming out that people are including?

Sarah Johnston:

Yeah. You know, there was a study done by the ladders.com a couple of years ago. And I like to remind people with this study, it was a heat heat map of recruiters and how they read resumes in the study found that on average recruiters spend between six and 7.2 seconds scanning a resume before deciding they wanted to continue looking at a document or stop looking at it. And some of the takeaways, the key takeaways from this study is having a header at the top of the document that tells me you are. And the value that you can bring to the organization helps immediately give the recruiter, the person reading your resume, some context for who you are often using key words in a, like an executive summary section at the top that align with the job description. So even borrowing phrases from the job description and using it in your executive summary, can spoon feed the reader more of your value that aligns with that role. The more you can target and tailor your resume for the exact job, but better for that keyword match. And then binary using light design elements like bolding shading, some white space can help draw the eyes and texts and helping your resonating more readable.

Mindy Thomas:

I love all those tips and you and I were both recruiters back in the day. And the way I look at this is I don’t want my recruiter to have to read the entire resume front and back to figure out who my client is. We want to get it right away. You don’t have much time, so let’s get right to it. Put that branding message it right up front, maybe that little summary expertise, boom, and really sell to that job posting. I’ve always said, I read the job postings. Like they’re my recipes line by line word by word. So we’re always customizing. That’s incredibly important to make sure that you’re customizing your documents, whether it’s the LinkedIn narrative or the skillsets in LinkedIn against the resume. And certainly the cover letters. Let’s talk about cover letters for a second. 50% of the recruiters read them 50%. Don’t when I was a legal recruiter. If they didn’t have a cover letter, I really kind of shook my head. Like, gosh, you didn’t have enough time. Just send me a little letter. What do you think?

Sarah Johnston:

I think they can be a key factor for some hiring managers. If you know, 50% read it and want to see it, then you better send one. Especially if you’re a career changer or you’ve been laid off or you’re making a big pivot you need, this is where you can use this space to tell your story. You also want to make sure that you’re aligning your passion with the pain points of the job. The person reading the cover letter wants to see that you actually care about this particular position. And you’re not just blind applying to a hundred jobs.

Mindy Thomas:

You know, one of the mistakes that job hunters make is as soon as they get laid off, Oh, I got to get my resume done and they start calling and you say, well, what would you like to do? What, what is your target? And then I’ll do, I’ll do anything. I will do anything. Sarah, what’s your response

Sarah Johnston:

Marketing one-on-one is know your target audience and know what they care about. And so as a job seeker, it can be really tempting to try to be all things to all people and to try to create a one size fits all resume or to try to go after 50 different opportunities. But the thing is, is you’re doing yourself a disservice because hiring managers want to hire someone who’s a perfect fit for their job. They want to hire someone who really deeply cares about the organization and the mission and the work that they do. And the only way that you’re gonna get their attention is if you convey that message. But if you convey that you care about all things, then, then you’re not going to, you’re going to miss out there. You’re not going to get their attention. So for a job seeker who is feeling frustrated or in the trenches or desperate that reeks, and it actually turns hiring managers off. So it’s, it’s very important to be targeted, have a targeted message and understand your unique value proposition and your special sauce that you bring to an organization.

Mindy Thomas:

That’s all great. And, and the, and the fact is that if you write a generic resume, you’re not going to get seen the ATS, won’t pick you up and you’re going to end up at square one, again, being frustrated. So clarity is very important. There’s an ultimate success formula out there that my favorite all time, coach Tony Robbins it’s, it’s actually called the ultimate success formula and there are four steps to it. One is clarity is power. Number two, take action. It’s not enough to know what you want. You got to do something about it. Number three, notice what’s working and what’s not. And then four change your approach till you get what you want. If you are not clear on step one, you’re never going to get to success out here in this economic times. It’s funny. I was reviewing a resume this morning. And the, I, I was really impressed that someone had actually put in two of their bullets that they had contributed to COVID-19 at this particular company, a variety. I forget what it was, but I just saw COVID-19. I said, this person’s on target. You know, they are including their contributions right now. What do you think about that, Sarah? Isn’t that fantastic?

Sarah Johnston:

Oh, I love that. That was so smart. [inaudible] Innovate.

Mindy Thomas:

It, it, it was really you know, fantastic. I was just, so it was the first time I’ve seen a resume during the last two months that actually mentioned COVID-19 and the contributions. Right? So what other issues are coming up for your clients right now? Given the economic uncertainty are people looking to change careers or just get their resumes done and get, and ramp up the search. Are they looking to get out of, of industries completely

Sarah Johnston:

Seeing both? I’m seeing people whose industries have really taken a hard, hit people from the tourism and travel industry. We’re having to make a pivot. And what they’re doing is they’re really looking at the value that they offer and highlighting their transferable skills. And we’re looking at other industries where they can apply those transferable skills. So I am seeing people who are making career pivots because of hard hit industries. I’m also CC, and I bet you are too many of your client work. Just people are feeling anxious. They’re seeing the unemployment numbers. And even though they may be in a job and maybe, maybe very happy in the job, there’s some fear and anxiety right now. And I hope for people listening that they will walk away from, from this conversation, I’m a little bit less anxious because when you, when you’re anxious, you don’t perform at your best. You’re not as relatable. It’s, it’s hard, it’s hard to get breakthrough. And so whatever you can do focus on like giving us that energy, maybe that’s prayer, maybe that’s meditation, maybe that’s exercise, whatever you need to do to release that anxiety. I would encourage you to do that right now. Cause there’s sensing a lot of it in people.

Mindy Thomas:

Well, I think that that’s great advice, job. Cause we have to wrap up in just 60 seconds, but what’s the importance of, of joining a job club today?

Sarah Johnston:

Oh, I’m a huge fan of John clubs. If you go to that website, www dot briefcase, coach.com. There’s a whole section on my website for job clubs. These are free organizations that are community sponsored that give you job search news, help you find new community, helping you get matched with other people in your, your area that will help you land a job. And I just think that these are lifelines for many job seekers.

Mindy Thomas:

It’s like phone a friend, right? Well, Sarah, I can’t thank you enough for making time for us here at career chat and for my audience, this has been a fantastic dialogue with you. And thank you so much for agreeing to be to be on our show today.

Sarah Johnston:

Thank you for the opportunity. This has been wonderful.

Mindy Thomas:

Welcome. And to our viewing audience, especially our medical professionals are first responders, everyone out there that is really helping the American public get back on your feet. Thank you for your service and your sacrifice. We will be here next week. Same time, same place. We look forward to seeing you again on career chat.

Speaker 5:

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