Happy New Year! Did I say that already? Oh probably. It has been an odd week with my computer being half-alive due to a power supply fan issue. I gutted the beast last night and replaced the old, janky power supply with a new one. If you are in the market for a new power supply, this Amazon Affiliate link will take you to the closest in shape and size to mine. It was also the fastest to arrive at my house. I did order a different one previously and played a bunch of “This is on it’s way!” games with Amazon until they actually conceded that they may have lost the item in question, and I should probably cancel. That journey was several days and several steps.
We did not come here to talk about my computer power supply issues. We also did not talk last December much about “the job hunt”, which is usually what I do in the run up to the new year. Many people pursue career changes in Q4/Q1, and this year, some of them did not do so by choice. LinkedIn was a mess of people slap-fighting about whether or not to hire people with “#OpenToWork” banners on their profiles. As someone who has had a tragic four-year window of hopping from consulting project to consulting project, I feel like I want to level my best Greta Thunberg stay and say, “How Dare You!”
I will add one more thing. Please be kind to people who have lost their jobs. It is cold out there. Not just because it is January and I live in the northern hemisphere.
What advice can I give you if you are job hunting? I have spoken previously about how I break the script in my interviews and given some tips on resumes. I was going to include links to these blog posts… Aaaand then I got tired. They are in there, and you can type one word into the little search box. Like my Amazon Affiliate Ad-related sales, my wisdom does not come easily to you. You have to search for it. You have to find it. If you were all more click-thirsty and generated me some theft-revenue from mister Bezos, maybe I would put in the extra work to make it clickable. See? This Is All Your Fault.
At the moment, I do not have good career change advice. Usually, it revolves around ensuring you have relevant skills, waiting to collect your final bonus check, and what to do when negotiating offers with publicly held companies. None of this applies to anyone who got into a Zoom meeting to be congratulated for being tricked into the room so IT could lock the rest of their account privileges. It also does not apply to people who just got an email and no Zoom meeting at all. I don’t know which group I most empathize with—Both methods are cruel.
I sat down today to discuss shipping software before realizing it is a new year. Now, I feel like I am on a different topic and will go with it.
How do you make yourself stand out in a sea of resumes?
In the world of remote work, some of your competitors might make as much money in one day as you ask for in one hour. This FOPO (Fear Of Pricing Out) is real. There are many countries where 50 Dollarydoos will cover someone’s cost of living for an entire day.
Return-to-office and Hybrid-is-best bean counter nerds are rubbing their hands together gleefully here. Their inability to adapt to the New Normal means they have an edge as an employer for some subset of the population. “You must re-embrace your shit-ass commute!” They say. “You must re-embrace your love of our free coffee, snacks, and choice of sparkling waters!” they say. And by choice, you mean “what flavor of La Croix will you drink today?” and the answer is always “not lime because that’s the flavor everyone already drank, and now it is gone.”
You see? Return-to-office is a bitter hellscape.
But that is not the topic of conversation today.
Let’s pretend you have gotten some kind of interview for a job.
How do you stand out to someone who lives in Cheapostania?
Here are some ideas.
You have desirable skills. You might have three to seven years of experience in an area that a company needs on day one of your new job. Many companies need to balance the costs of training people in technology against solving problems right now. Sometimes, you cannot afford a candidate who is cheaper in price and who can be trained over six months. The long-term costs might be worse.
You have some hard-to-obtain career successes. Whether it is related to the meme-able question, “Will It Scale?” or some fancy-schmancy tech stack that few people use, you may have some competitive advantages over other candidates. I will praise the residents of Silicon Valley for their mastery over projects at scale. Many people can ship software. I have had to come in and perform blowtorch-and-pliers level of work on some systems that have been stood up by people who have not had thousands or millions of concurrent users. These highly desirable skills may make a difference in getting an offer.
You understand how business works. This is hard to measure and is one thing many people fail to grasp. Being able to function in your role is great. Understanding your customers’ needs and the total costs of ownership of your project is even greater. Being able to think outside of the task list is important, and it makes a difference between surviving year-over-year as a business and breaking out and going to the next level.
You can make hard decisions. This might not matter as much in the first five years of your career as it does later. And if you have just been downsized, this might be one of those things you need to demonstrate in your interviews. If you have been working for a decade and cannot think of two to three instances where you have had to make a hard decision, you will likely struggle to find a role that suits you.
You accept that not all decisions are yours to make. This is another big one, and also a scary one. The Amazon Way talks about this quite a bit. “Leaders are right, a lot” and “Disagree and Commit” are two related principles from their list of fourteen. I have had to disagree and commit many times in my career, and I can speak confidently to the times that it was the right thing to do and the times that it turned out to be unfortunate.
You should sound confident. I saved the best for last. Confidence is really important. Interviewing generally sucks. Interviewers sometimes do not want to be there. Interview processes are painful, awkward, and voluminous. Many companies do not have a good grasp on how to hire effectively. I get excited when being interviewed poorly because it is one of my superpowers. You would be surprised that I will tell interviewers this, and it often comes out as a point in my favor. I will bluntly say, “Your company is terrible at interviewing, which means you are probably bad at hiring. I can fix this for you.” You might expect that this will cause an interview to end. Sometimes, it does, and I am relieved about that. I don’t want to work at a company where I cannot fix big problems.
That is quite a list, isn’t it?
When the interviewer asks, “Why should we hire you over another candidate?” This list should give you a few talking points. It may mean the difference between getting an offer and a generic “good luck in your search” reply.
The market is flooded with talented people due to market conditions and emerging talent pools inundating decision-makers with low-cost options to get work done.
These questions will help you get career traction.
Good luck out there and see you next week!
