BSidesSF 2012 - Across the Desk: Different Perspectives on InfoSec Hiring and Interviewing

hi everybody we're gonna get started this is the talk about what it takes to find a job that's just right for you and if your hiring manager what it's like to find a candidate that's just right for the job my name is Lenny Zell so I'm gonna introduce myself I'm gonna let my partner in crime crime introduce himself as well I work for a company called NCR corporation I run a group that provides managed security services to small businesses and I also teach at Sands Institute my area focus there is malware analysis how to analyze malware and perform forensic type work and through these experiences I've had an opportunity to look for candidates look for jobs and

that's why I want to talk about this topic Lee so I run an executive search firm and I've been recruiting information security professionals since 1996 and in addition to doing that and working with a lot of different customers and all the different vertical industry vertical segments and the different the products the services the end-users and all these different industries that we work with you know one of my passions has become a project that I work on something called InfoSec leaders which really is geared towards information security professionals to give them some good advice and guidance as they try to navigate their careers so we put together this presentation because when me and I were talking about

what does it take to find a job what does it take to find a candidate realize that there are a lot of really poor decisions that are being made poor decisions on behalf of both the candidate who is looking for a job as well as poor decisions on behalf of a hiring manager that's looking for a candidate and so we decided to do a bit of role-playing in this presentation so throughout this presentation I'm gonna be trying to present the perspective of a hiring manager a person or a company that is looking to hire a candidate and my hope is that my view is going to be useful for those of you who are looking

to hire people and in this presentation leaves gonna take on the role for the most part of a person seeking a job so job candidate and the reason we're doing this is because when we're looking to understand why is it that so many bad decisions are being made in this process we realize that a lot of it has to do with not understanding the other side's point of view and understanding this other side point of view is very important because well I mean I think that what happens is this it's very important because there really you know two different parties in this process and for successful recruitments it kind of comes to play you really have to put yourself in the

other person's shoes you have to understand what they're thinking and you hope that they're going to be able to look into how you're approaching your job searches as well so finding that marriage and finding that connection is really an important element of searching and finding your pursuit of your career happiness and finding the right opportunities that coincide with your long-term career plans so I mean you know it's it's very interesting because you know I think the one thing that really kind of gets into the hiring process is that a lot of people have they come into this process whether you're the hiring manager or you're the candidate and you have some preconceived notions on what your expectations should

be from an interview process or how you're going out and finding and looking for people so Lenny if I have so many different discussions about this theoretically that that's kind of like been some of the genesis of the presentation yeah and you know it's interesting because you talk to some people and they say if you're in the information security industry this is a good place to be like your peers probably oh you're InfoSec that's good I heard that there's really a lot of demand and that's true there's a lot of demand for qualified InfoSec professionals and yet a lot of people that I talk to are looking for a better job or looking for an interesting job

and also I talk to a lot of people and they would like to find they would like to hire onto their team and and these parties keep missing each other there's very low unemployment and InfoSec as far as I can tell against I don't have data but as far as I can tell not a lot of InfoSec professionals are unemployed at the moment which is a good thing compared to what the rest of the country is dealing with but and yet a lot of people are looking for a job hiring a hard time finding the right position and companies looking to hire and having a hard time finding the right people you know a lot of the situation becomes is

that you know every you see all the time you know we have job postings we're looking for people and I think there's a very different you know thought process between saying that I'd like to hire people as opposed to actively being able to pull together opportunities that are attractive and appealing that will you know to the information security community so I think that you know there's a big problem in the industry where a lot of people change jobs but they're not really changing jobs they're just changing golf shirts they're doing the same exact thing for another company maybe they're earning a little bit more money maybe add a little bit something different but they're really not

progressing their career and I think that when you start looking at your job search process and you start looking for people you have to think about does that person that you're interviewing what are you going to be giving to them and from that individual what are you going to be taking extracting from this process so let's dig into the so the core content that we want to present we've decided to tackle several key aspects of job search and hiring and as the as the backdrop for this discussion I wanted you to I wanted to point out this one one idea that we we are people are looking for a job and they tend to think that they are

interviewing for a company but the reality is there's no such thing as a company a company is comprised of individuals decisions are made by individuals and so what we want to present to you are different perspectives that individuals in this mating ritual take on right you you if you're an employer you're a person a hiring manager looking to to get somebody onto your team that's very important to you what's in the mind of a person looking for a job and similarly if you're looking for a job what's in the mind of the other party but you're trying to attract so there's a good match you know and the best way you know I think that

you know when it all starts like how do how do we all start our job search processes right what's the first thing that you do if you're looking for a job you create a resume right so I mean the resume is essentially your marketing document I mean that's basically you know how are you quote-unquote selling yourself to those prospective employers and I think that you know one of the big things that you know candidates do when they pull together their resumes they start thinking about wow how great was I in my current job right what did i do what did I manage what did I own right how big was my team how large was my

project and people start putting together these resumes and they want to quantify and quantify and quantify instead of really talking about things that become very important talking about actual skills actual accomplishments the value the impact that they made to organizations because what happens is this is that you start thinking about things that start making you proud and make you feel good but in essence your audience is not you your audience is the hiring manager yeah so there are several things I want to say from a hiring manager perspective when looking at the resume first of all if I am looking at a resume that means that the resume usually has gone through a screening process and somebody in a charge decided

that it is worth my time to look at the resume so in my mind the primary goal of the resume is to get past that initial screening process to get past the HR person and as a hiring manager I might only take a few seconds worth of look at the resume to form in my mind the opinion whether or not I should talk to this person and the rest I'm gonna probably rely on the conversation the interview to discover oh whoa what's going on here what kind of a person is this so it is very much two purposes in my mind of the resume one get past the initial screening process and two form that first impression that will serve as

the baseline for the rest of your conversations you know I mean and that's one thing that I think everybody needs to point out is that you know there's so many different components to actually getting to find that position that's right for you and no matter what you've done in your career and this is really gonna sound but no matter what you've done in your career and how much you've worked and what kind of you know passion that you've poured into if you can't get by a corporate gatekeeper and get you to an interview or somebody like a Lenny can make a decision about your future you're gonna want to fail so unfortunately all these types of things

you have to start thinking about how am I going to convince a person who probably does not have a ton of vested interest in your career initially how am I going to convince that person to give you the time of the day and to open the gate so you can actually have a meaningful conversation about your future there's a lot to say about the resume because in a way it's a very conflicting document because what I said was that the job of a resume is to get you past the screening process now the HR person doesn't quite know what InfoSec is about they don't know the difference between incident response and an application security not necessarily right depends

on the HR person of course so in many ways you're crafting your resume to hit all the right terms all the right things that are mentioned in the job description but so that might get you past the initial screening but the problem is that in doing so you're making yourself look average because you're speaking to the job description that's probably kind of generic and so I want to put talked a bit about what is in involved in creating that job description if you're a hiring manager just like the resume is a marketing document for the candidate the job description is a marketing document for the hiring manager and this can be really tough because I and I speak as a

as a hiring manager here in many cases I don't have a lot of control over what the job description says because the company if you're working in a large organization might have to use some generic templates that might have been used some kind of a generic title like computer security associate what does that even mean and they might have some generic standard verbage regarding how understanding information security threats is important but but as a hiring manager i might have very little influence on what goes on into that job description and that that makes it hard for me to attract the right position and i need to start thinking outside the box well how else can I reach VP

that I want to reach if I can't rely purely in the Job Description to attract the right kind of person you know and and and when you start thinking about if you are in a position where you are hiring folks you know that you know the biggest problem that I see is that job descriptions become all-encompassing so you start looking at these job descriptions you say well how many people do you want to actually fill this job and the truth is is that as a hiring manager it's very tempting to put this huge litany of skills into this one document and then all of a sudden you start thinking like wow this would be ideal but you don't even think about

what the cost would be to acquire that person who has all those skills like the perfect candidate well yeah well everybody start looking for the perfect candidate and really there's no such thing because there's no such thing that there is a perfect candidate or a perfect job or a perfect opportunity you will if you will actually make your opportunity a perfect opportunity once you're in the door or the actual the candidate will become better and more suited for the environment as they get more ingrained in the culture but one of the issues and hiring is that we start we've become a culture where we always are betting on skill and we've stopped betting on aptitude and one of the

interesting components in this industry is that the way that people get smarter is that they evolve with the industry I mean you know I remember when we were recruiting firewall people like in the late 90s and be like wow if you had firewall experience everybody loved you you could have had tons of jobs now like understanding some elements of firewall are just a component of a network security skill set in fact you can't even be a network you can't even be a network engineer with not even a security due you can even be a network engineer without understanding firewalls so you start thinking about these job descriptions as you're writing them or as you're responding to them and

thinking about can I really tackle what's in front and how is this job description matching the direction that I want to move my career too and can I respond to that I also want to say with respect to the job description so I mentioned that the job description in many cases is not an accurate representation of what the hiring manager is actually looking for and if you're a candidate for a job what I would like you to think about is when you read the Job Description think about what else is it not saying and how else can I find out more about this position and it means not being lazy and doing some searches about this company what

kind of technologies do they using kind of people get the hire in the past there's all this this history online that you can find or find people in your social network who might give you an inner scoop and eventually your best bet is to find who is the hiring manager reach that hiring manager directly and talk to him and in many cases he'll be glad to talk to you because first of all he'll be pleased that you took the time to find him or her but secondly she'll get to tell you story straight without the filter of the corporate HR system sometimes that's a good thing you know in the essence of what we do as a firm

and our my regular job is that what we are is really storytellers and we're telling story is about what we've learned of the culture of the organization the growth of the position all those different types of elements which of course if you're just going blind into an opportunity it's very hard to figure out so hopefully if the hiring manager is really serious about building their team they're gonna then become very receptive to a candidate reaching out and asking those questions I will say this I wish everybody was as progressive as leni is but they just generally aren't so you have to think about your own ways about how am I going to social engineer this process you

should really get to the point where I can get some real information that might make a difference on my guilt my direction so I think that that's you know a big deal there but you know one of the bigger issues that I always see in hiring is the concept of title and how many people think that title is important in their career development that's it's a big deal it's a it's a nothing else is a signaling mechanism because when your mom asks what do you do for a living should you can tell well titles are better with mother-in-law's than moms but at the same point you know III think that the one problem that we

have is that we've all been conditioned that titles are very important and in essence unless you're going from organization from like organization to like organization like if you are going from Investment Banking to Investment Banking your titles going to be very important because those environments are very similar but if you were going to go from like a services company to a product company or from a product company to a health care organization or from a health care organization to a retail company these titles might not even coincide what was associated with one job description is completely different from in another job description so what you should really start thinking about as a candidate is that how do your skills apply to what's

being asked for not how your titles are in fact a lot of times in your resume you can over title yourself out of consideration and that's a real problem because an HR person is gonna say well well we're not looking for a manager this person is a manager wien while as a manager in your organization you might just be an effective team lead so you have to really think about how people are going to perceive that title yeah yeah it's a signaling mechanism it can take it away for example in Investment Banking there's a special significance of signed to the title of VP if you're a vice president that means certain thing in an investment banking community and it

means that you're you're pretty high up there but it turns out that there's a lot of these VPS in a large investment bank and if you work to talk to a smaller company and they see on a resume that you are a VP they will think that you're outside of their price range they'll think that you're too high of an executive to to matter and to know what's going on in this smaller company and what what that let's go back to what one more thing about titles is that the you oftentimes have a lot of flexibility regarding the title because a lot of organizations actually if you're looking for example our organizations will say well in our internal HR system we have a

very specific title that would have to assign for this job opening and it might be security associates - right but if you tell anybody all right work as a security associate - that doesn't mean anything to you so a lot of organizations might allow you to take on another title that is something more meaningful if you're working with external customers or with clients and while you probably have no ability to negotiate the official internal ERP title you might have the opportunity as part of your job search - and negotiations to talk about what kind of a title do you want to assign to yourself that's gonna be outwards facing if that's important to you so I'm gonna

be a little bit different with Lenny as Lenny's gonna ask for a permission I'm gonna ask for forgiveness so what I would tell you this is that when you're pulling together these resumes that you're pulling together is that you should obviously make sure that you list your and for your internal title but if you start talking about there's nothing wrong with listing on a resume a functional title that might be more generally accepted within our industry and then your internal title that's associated with your role your company so that will align with any background check process that your company will deal with because you have to start thinking about well even though that there's a system the system necessarily

has not caught up to the different nuances that and the different specialties that work within our industry so let's say let's talk about online reputation I think a lot a lot of people who attend besides are progressive in their use of social networks in fact that's how the word about besides spread and mates pairs in many cases right so so to a lot of us it is important and we probably spend some time building up an online reputation and the expectation of course is and as a hiring manager when I see a resume that catches my attention the next thing that I do is I google a person's name and I want to see what's going on there

and if when hiring for a lot of positions where I want the person to have a strong reputation maybe I work in a consulting organization and it's important for my customers to respect the person who who's coming to them to talk to them they are probably going to look at do a google search so I want in many cases the part to have a strong online reputation I want to know did he ever write any articles did he participate in en la online forums did he in any way express his understanding of well the job he's applying for and share it with the community and and and in many cases I might even find it a little bit strange

if I don't see this person on linkedin or on twitter or there's no blog or anything this is something if this person doesn't exist online nowadays it might be a little bit strange to me but other different other industries might be different like leah i think you talked about something this is where it's desirable for the person to be not known oh yeah well i mean i think that there are a lot of industries that you know the concept of securities that they don't want to be targets out there so they maybe have policies against no matter what kind of disclaimer you put out there that you're tweeting or a blogger or whatever it might be you know

i think that you know what the most important thing like whether it's like it could be government it could be investment banking it could be a hedge fund industry it could be any company that's been in the public eye because of attacks so you're talking about you know different things like so it's very hard for a candidate to figure out what they want to do for their online quote/unquote reputation and i think the best advice that I could give everybody is that to really kind of be focused and aligned with your career goals about how you want to build that and what kind of voice you want to talk to you know do you want to be viewed as edgy and

controversial do you want to be viewed as professional and thought-provoking so whatever you do you want to you know sometimes less is more sometimes if you're all over the place and you're spending all your time on social media a lot of prospective employers will say well when this is person get any work done so you have to start thinking about how others how the hiring manager is going to be thinking about how you've controlled that online brand or online image and so so you you were probably going to be profiling the hiring manager if you're talking to this person and you might want to look up his reputation online right you want to know well who

are you gonna be talking to well it's whenever we talk about social engineering and penetration testing we talk about the importance of doing your reconnaissance on the target well in this case if you're applying for an or they are your target and the more you know about them the better I mean look what's good for the goose is good for the gander right so I mean at the same point like you know the fact is is that both people are making opinions because you're forming opinions about the company you're forming opinions about the hiring manager and they are forming opinions of you and in my experience once the initial impression has been made if it is negative no

matter what you're not going to get a positive result it's very hard to undo that quote-unquote blink reaction in an interview process and I think that you know what we've seen nowadays in our business is that we've seen a lot of companies doing and I a bothers the heck out of me but it's just the fact of life they do a lot of quote unquote back-channel reference checking and what does the most well what that really involves is this is that you know when their standard reference process would be like okay well let me have a hiring manager or peer maybe a customer that can vouch for your ability and the candidate would give that but because now your LinkedIn

connections are very public and because people are accessible and they're connected very closely and we go to events like b-sides and we go to events like RSA and we see a lot of folks out there it's much easier to quote-unquote get a read on somebody what their work ethics like what kind of person they are if they cause problems in their past work environment so like I always talk to people is that what you're trying to do is control what I call transitive trust what you're trying to make sure is that you know you're gonna be able to touch in other people that if they're asked about you they're gonna say good things so you want to be you have to be

a little bit more conscious as a candidate about what is your reputation amongst your peers in your workplace and with others that might touch you so let's talk a bit about what happens after you've got the attention of the hiring manager if you're applying for the job or if you're looking for a candidate you've got that potential candidate and you want to talk about you want to talk about fine this might be the right match we're here in the same room talking to each other it's like a first date you know you're sitting at a table you've just met and what happens next right you're gonna now talk about what well I think you have to talk about

you know the most important thing I think is you know you start talking about you know as a candidate you want to talk about your technical skills and when I say technical skills that doesn't necessarily mean you know what you've been able to do on a keyboard when I talk about technical skills or actual hard skills that you bring to the opportunity so you start thinking about those things about you know how do you demonstrate to the employer that you know from the county perspective you say like okay well these are the things that I've done already that make me qualified for the position at the same point in time you know what the candidate is

really additionally trying to do in order to grow their career is to try to actually talk about the things that they the problems not that they have only have self but the problems that they want to solve in the future and how they want to grow their profile so they can continue to learning and continuing have more and more responsibility and impact so Lee mentioned solving problems so if I'm a hiring manager I am looking to hire a person because I have a problem whatever it is maybe maybe I don't have enough people managing my firewalls maybe I know that my application security practices every year I know that I have a problem and so what I'm

reading a resume those few seconds that I spend on it I don't really care what you worked on per se I want to know what problems you solved and so when you're crafting a resume what you want is the reader for the resume say wow he solved that problem for his employer there I want him on my team so that he solves that problem for me as well that's what I want when I read the resume yeah I mean I think that you know one of those things is this is that you know the technical component is really just the beginning of the process and I think that you know it's another thing when you just start talking about your skills

and kind of where you want to go of it you have to start thinking about well what is the hiring manager thinking of like how is this person going to work in our culture yeah and and what I find is is it's pretty much a given that you're gonna have the technical skills right otherwise you probably wouldn't get as far as being able to actually talk to a hiring manager right it's assumed that you've got the baseline knowledge there now what you're thinking about is how you're gonna stand out from your competition if you're a candidate and if I'm the hiring manager I'm thinking is this the right fit and and knowing industry specific information and having

industry specific expertise is become incredibly important because the way you approach security in a big bank is very different from the way that you approach security in a industrial firm or in a an e-commerce organization right so I want to know that if you're coming to my organization you understand what's important to me you understand how to prioritize issues because my customers it might be different from the customers that you used to working with so therefore if you are applying for a job in the same industry where you have experience well be sure to emphasize that in your interviewing process because that gives you a leg up and you're gonna have to deal with some

challenges if you've worked in one industry and you're trying to cross over into another that means you got to think through in advance how are you gonna convince the hiring manager that you really understand what's important to him because right away I can tell you he's gonna be thinking he's gonna be thinking maybe you're you're an expert in doing security for that industry but my problems are very different well everybody thinks that they're special and I think that you know hiring managers you know in a lot of cases what they want to do is they want to try to make the safe hire so if I'm a bank it's very safe for me to hire somebody from a

bank now if you're let's say that you're somebody you've been working I this is a great story right so we work for a pretty large Hospital in New York City that helps a lot of people with cancer specifically and we had a candidate that had absolutely you know he actually worked for a transportation company had no experience in healthcare or hospitals or whatever but it turned out that he had a very close family member who was a cancer survivor and it was something that he was very passionate about things that he did in his spare time to help raise money raise awareness volunteer in those types of industries so when he came to the opportunity and

the employer said well have you done anything in healthcare the person said you know what I haven't had any experience in healthcare so if that disqualifies me I understand but let me tell you why I'm interested in the opportunity and what I've been able to witness so what you need to try to do and it was very successful it was like a real home run so a lot of times the human impact of what you're able to do I think that's very important in conveying that now Eleni and I were just joking out there so Laney said to me goes well that means if you yo if you like shopping does that make you an expert in retail maybe it

does but you know it like I said and and it may be it may do that you look you might understand brands you might understand the online experience now I don't know if you can really convey that fully but talking about some of your passions talking about some of your interests and how they might relate to the job or how you've been able to educate yourself and why you have an interest in that opportunity that's a very key tool for a candidate to be able to deal with especially if the hiring manager has somewhat of an opening as open minds yeah and I think that that reminds me that actually with what we're talking about is forming an emotional

connection with a person's right not not just talking to the facts you know I qualify for this job in healthcare because I'm a HIPAA expert that's probably important or because I know what high tech is right but but but also forming that personal connection it sounds like that made a big difference in this story with your document well I think that you know people hire people I mean that's really at the end but you know what though that you see it's it's kind of you know it's kind of an interesting right we've told you about this Robo screening process and now we've now told you to be human so think about how difficult you guys really have

it right so you know at one point you have to be mechanic and get through gatekeepers and keyword searches and then next time we're talking you hey be human so the truth is this is that if you're a hiring manager and you're saying I need to build the team like there's so many people out here that say we've such a shortage of talent we don't know what to do you have to start thinking about the human element in the interview process you have to stop relying on cookie cutter yes or no opt-in opt-out questions and start looking at people and you know I will tell you this from my experience the best hiring managers the people who have

the most successful teams are the one that understand that this is an individual game and the people who work for them are human and have interests and have goals and have passions just like they do yeah yeah and that'll be true until we start hiring robots probably not that far away now so we talked about having the baseline knowledge for the job right you got to qualify to do what you're doing but there probably other lots of people that have that baseline knowledge the technical skills we talked about having what is being able to explain the industry specific knowledge that you have that helps you stand out from competition and nowadays more and more your communication skills should not be

taken for granted as well there are lots of different jobs and in some cases you might be sitting in the back room you're locked up in a closet doing some typing on the keyboard but those jobs are rare and you probably don't want them anyway you probably want a job where you actually get to talk to people and in fact if you can do that and if you're able to explain that as part of the interviewing process that might help you stand out and that is especially relevant for InfoSec jobs because as informational security professionals in many cases we're supposed to affect decisions within the organization we let's say we're defining a standard for how a server needs to be

configured and you want your operations people to configure server in a particular way but guess what they don't have to do what you're telling them to because you don't control their paycheck you don't control their bonus you don't control their performance reviews instead all we have left is your influence your ability to communicate with them and to influence them you know let me enter spies I always yes any presentation that I have by a show of hands how many people think that they're good communicator alright keep your hands up how many people think that their bosses are good communicators that's actually good that's that how many people have their bosses in the audience with that so so

what I say this is that you know just like with your technical skills communication skills need to be worked on and if you think about your interview process right your resume is your first example of your writing communication skills and when you have a phone interview that's your first verbal indication of it you know I think the phones a lousy medium but that's just the way people do interviews now we're Skype right which or or WebEx or something like that you have to think about like how am I being perceived by that guy during that interview process right so you have to think about the elements of the medium and how you're being able to show your

ability to communicate because right there you're making those judgment the other person is making those judgments about you how those things are happening yeah so when talking about the kind of job that you want or when looking for a candidate to fulfill specific job requirements let's talk about management because there are so many people that I talked to so many of my past and current colleagues and what and when they work in an information security in a technical capacity as a security engineer of some sort the only way that they see for growing their career is to get into management and there is something that I've started to question and I always talk to people who are

thinking about their career path is management right for you so and I speak as a person who has always been very technical and and I still retain some aspect of my technical capabilities in one narrow area but I'm starting to do more and more about management and supervisory responsibilities and and PML type of spreadsheet stuff and and I can tell you being a manager it's not all that exciting sometimes right you have to do with paperwork you have to do with people who are annoyed at each other you have to resolve conflicts you have to deal with HR a lot and I say this and I say it with a cringing expression so that I might turn off some people who

are thinking that management is right for them it's great to be in that position in many cases management has nicer Christmas parties than the engineers in many cases managers get paid more than the engineers but it's not right for everyone and there are plenty of people who are miserable dealing with all that burden that management carries well I know the other thing that I think is probably important too is that you know in you know we're not that far removed from a bad economic time and I think you know even in this industry and obviously you know you know things are not necessarily wonderful economically across the board but like if you think about the first people that

are gonna go are gonna be inexperienced overpaid managers and the highly technical you know people that they can't replace and they can't afford to not have those people are going to stay and those people are going to go so your technical skills actually become your unemployment insurance in a lot of cases and I think that you know what happens is this a lot of people say well how do I go or how do I get into management or how do I figure out if management is good for me you know I always tell people is that they'll come in and they'll say that they've been the most technical person on their team I'm the team lead and I manage tests and I

manage projects and I'm ready to be a manager and they say well I want to manage your job and then what they don't understand is that from that competition candidate pool is that the people who they'll be competing with for managerial positions have just as are just as provision in man Schmidt as they are in technology so automatically they're at a situation where they're in a place where they're failing at the same point in time where you know if you're a technologist right or if you're a manager and you had to compete for a technology centric job there's no way that you know your technical skills are gonna hold up to these technical wizards that you would

be competing with so would you have to think about is this is that like if I'm gonna find my first managerial opportunity the best way to do that is to look internally into your own organization because you've already built a brand they're already comfortable with you and they know that maybe if you say this I want to become a manager if you're talking to your hiring manager your boss or your manager you can say like me I could either give this person the opportunity or maybe they'll find it elsewhere and I don't want to lose them so you start having a little bit of leverage so what you want to be able to do is that if those are some of your

career goals you should be able to explore internally and being able to find those opportunities so that you can start developing that skill yeah absolutely that's the easiest way to get into management within the company because if you're crossing jumping companies you're gonna have a hard time convincing them that you qualify as a manager so we we talked so far about what it takes to convince the other party that you're worthy of a job or that the job is worthy of the candidate let's say at this point in the process in this mating ritual we've we've got some agreement that you know there's a good match the candidate qualifies for the job the job is interesting for the

candidate and now things get really interesting because now the question of compensation comes up and this is where negotiation becomes important in your understanding of the process is what we want to talk about next so I mean one of the things people ask you know only what do you do you know you know I understand you're a great negotiator and I was tell people that the better candidate you are the better negotiator I become right and it's just really you know we're not magical I mean and not Jerry Maguire or you know insert you know your favorite sports agent there it just doesn't work that way but the thing that we do in our organization I think

that's very important in a general recruiting process is that what happens in the recruiting process is that I call it a seesaw and the balance of power shifts during the interview process there's certain point so you think about like you're the candidate you see a job online they're the ha this is what you want right okay then you start you send your resume in okay now you're gonna get an interview okay and then they like you and then they're gonna bring you in for a real interview and then you start meeting with more people and they start falling in love with you and say well this is our person then all of a sudden they say oh we want to make you an offer

now all of a sudden you have all this power because now you've been recognized the person you know you've been identified as the person that they want so like our job here generally speaking is to be able to keep that seesaw balanced and that's really in essence what we're doing is trying to keep back and forth to try to keep it level from the beginning to ever so that no side takes advantage of each other mm-hmm yeah yep so so the negotiation process is all about influence and it is important to understand when you have the influence to get what you want versus they are the party having more influence and type of them inevitably

the question of money comes up right because we all work for because we love the job but we also like getting paid for what we do and we've got families to provide for and so the myatt's rican aspect of compensation becomes really important and in many cases it's a little bit tricky because the party looking to hire you might say well what are you looking for and you don't know what to say cuz you don't want to give too low a figure cuz then they'll be like oh okay no problem but maybe they were gonna give you $50,000 more and you've just but on the other hand well I mean so I mean so the key is this is

that there really isn't that big of gap of basically what you want and what they'll pay right so like yeah I mean and we could do a whole presentation about negotiation and I don't want to get too much into it but generally speaking negotiation is about level setting it's about level setting from the beginning and level setting at the end and it's about staying consistent with your message from start to finish and I think that when you start dealing with these types of things you know people say it will ask people say well what are you currently earning well why is that important well that's going to start building a baseline because of your earning X and the position earns X is it

slotted to pay X minus 10 there's never going to be a place where that's going to intersect so starting to deal with baselines people the misconception is that whoever mentions money first loses that's incorrect in a job prod maybe if you're purchasing a car that might be the case but when you start talking about your career you're starting to build this long-term building there go your long term relationship and how you negotiate your agreement is gonna be the first way that your manager views you as an employee of their team so you should start thinking about when you're taking a job what is the risk premium that I'm looking for what might I be willing to

trade what are some other factors that might be in play here besides negotiate besides money yeah as a hiring manager I probably have a range within which I need to hire a person and it is gonna be very hard for me to go outside of that range I might find the perfect candidate and I might really want them but if what they're asking for is outside of the range in most cases unless it's a small company in a larger organization I don't have control over this and that's why it's important for you as a candidate to realize well what else are you willing to take in exchange for giving up some some financial compensation because

maybe it's a really attractive job maybe you think that this is where you want to grow it feels right to you the culture the people the strategic opportunity there is right and you need to think well what is the baseline amount of money that I need to have to be generally happy to make sure that my my mortgage is paid for right to take care of all of your needs but is there a job if the job is just right they're gonna take lower compensation but what do you want in return if you have some negotiating power to ask for more for example might you be willing to let's say take a lower job if you have more

vacation time or if you get the flexibility of working from home once per week for example and those are some areas where the hiring manager might have some flexibility or maybe not this is where talking to the hiring manager getting into their head and understanding what a what are the elements that you can ask for they can actually give you worth bringing up so you have to understand that in large companies hiring managers a lot of times are powerless and then small companies that they have a lot more flexibility that's just I mean that's a generalization that I feel very comfortable throwing out there I'm not going to say they're not exceptions to that rule but in a general term that's

the case but what you have to think about is that what is the currency that the company is dealing with is there's a company like a financial services firm they deal with bonus right and they deal with fancy titles or they might deal with some perks or where is a high-tech company or something that's emerging like a Facebook or a Zynga or any of those companies out there they might be dealing with equity and they might be dealing with you know quote-unquote communal life within their organization or like a really fun work environment you have to start thinking about the currency that the company has and what you're able to deal with it because they

will not book they'll cook their culture for one person no company's gonna throw that away it's just why their companies and stuff like that so you have to start thinking about what is really in play and what is it yeah so this gets us to a concept that's very well known in negotiation circles if you've read up about negotiations you may have heard this term bad not bad not the best alternative to negotiated agreement so let's talk a bit about that because when two parties are negotiating there's a book called getting to yes and I really don't like this title I don't know if you read the book it's a good book but the title getting to yes assumes that

there is no choice but to get to an agreement right we like this job is right for the candidate the Canada right for the job let's just see what it takes to bring us together but maybe both parties as well it will sacrifice so much that at the end nobody's gonna be happy and it's just gonna be a bad relationship moving forward so it's perfectly acceptable it's a perfectly acceptable outcome to a negotiation to agree to go separate ways but as a party within that negotiation whether your hiring manager or a candidate you'll need to understand what's your next best alternative to negotiated agreement if you are a hiring manager the alternative might be who

else are you interviewing for the position and to what extent is a day a good choice versus what they are asking for and as a candidate you need to understand well what other jobs do you have in your pipeline if you fail to reach an agreement here are you going to go take a next job or maybe the job market is such that this is the only job that you have in which case you're going to be losing negotiating power and you will have to agree to something that maybe you don't want to agree initially yeah I mean I think that that really you know it all you know like Chris Rock oh he says he goes you're only as faithful

as your options so if you think about it that way is that you really have to think about like you know your current job should serve as your baseline it just should serve as your baseline and at the end you know going back to the status quo is not necessarily a bad thing I tell you that some of the best advice I give people is to stay in your current job which always sounds weird coming from somebody who makes their living on the transaction but the truth of the matter is is that you have to find the right job that works for you because making a bad decision even if you get to consent your career backwards

and sometimes taking a job that has a little bit less money or though but it might solve certain components of your career that will accelerate your career so you'll have increased earning potential down the road so you really have to think about your career holistically and what this decision may or may not mean for the over the 30 to 35 year lifespan of your career yeah so let's let's bring it all together we talked about various aspects of the job searching process we talked about the process of hiring people and what we wanted to demonstrate to you is that this is a mating ritual right you've got two parties that are doing all sorts of things to attract

each other and it often ends in divorce in Ellis case not murder yeah it's very much like dating right you're attracting each other you're trying to showcase your best qualities and and it's not going to come back together but you're hoping that you're not going to mislead each other because you're gonna be working together and hopefully you will be able to get along and there's a lot to keep track of here a lot of considerations and where the process can be really effective is when as part of this process you can get into the other party's mindset understand what they're looking for what they want and show the right properties so that they see you as an attractive candidate

or that the candidate applying for a job sees that as an attractive position yeah I mean I think that you know you know if we could leave you with just a couple of thoughts you know is that no matter where you are I mean you're really always interviewing I mean you're interviewing here at this conference by how you meet people and how you interact with them the connections that you make the presentation that you give off the brand that you know that reaction that you get you're interviewing when you're online you're interviewing in everyday at your job you're interviewing when you're dealing with partners when you're dealing with services firms you're always interviewing because people are making judgments of you just

like you're making judgments of them so if you think about how you're viewing others like how they're viewing you I mean that's very important but no pressure right but similarly you're always recruiting right you never know whom you're gonna meet maybe you're not even looking to fill a job at any given moment but you're gonna meet somebody at an event like this you're gonna form a relationship you're gonna keep in touch and then maybe five years from now you can end up working together Wow know that that just might happen like me for example you will think that I'm here presenting to you but actually recruiting I got a job opening in Dallas for a software development manager pass

the word along but you know I mean look I think that it's you know a it's really important for us you know the hopefully you leave here with a good just a thought about how the other party is viewing this and just being able to kind of deal with the different perspectives in this interviewing process so that hopefully in your own careers you could come up with more successful outcomes that ideally lead to your happiness which is really the most important thing so we're gonna we're gonna stick around if you have any questions we're gonna be around also leaves conducting a formal Q&A after this right yes I'm so Amber's gonna come up and make some announcements but we're

gonna do a career advice Tuesday so any questions that you have about your career we'll be able to answer them to be able to talk through them so thank you yeah thanks folks we're going to be around terms for any questions [Applause]