Kathleen Smith - Top Tips for Navigating Your Job Search Journey

thank you this is great so just a question why are you all over there is that for like quick exit okay well maybe everyone move over here to the middle let's get together a little warmth know no one knowing it well there is that there is that that's it great and now they've got everyone sitting down we're the last session of the day how many of you are tired okay let's stand up stand up no I'm not so in one of the presentations I do I talk about the Lions breath so how many of you do yoga or any kind of martial arts okay so this is gonna sound really awful on the microphone but this is a really great

thing when you're sitting in front of your terminal and you're really frustrated or you're sitting in traffic and you're really frustrated and you want to scare the person in front of you that's slowing down so this is what its gonna look like I'm gonna take a deep breath in yeah okay one two three oh come on that was pathetic one two three okay in your neck and your jaw sort of release okay now you can sit down now they basically blew out the eardrums of the a/v guy this is great so some of you know me I've been in the community for a bit maybe about 10 years and the way that I do marketing

I'm a chief marketing officer the way I do marketing is I do ground Intel I don't look at sort of ads or anything like that I get down on the ground and I really talk to people who are experiencing some challenges and I noticed about 10 years ago all of my customers who were looking for people in information security we're saying we can't find people and then I was going to several of the conferences and volunteering and working alongside of people and I was hearing people say I've been in this industry 25 years and I can't find a job what wait a minute or other people yeah I just got you know my CISSP I don't know what to

do I can't find a job I'm like okay there's there's this communication problem if there are so many people who can't find a job and all of these companies who can't find candidates there is this gap and yes I know we've talked about the gap but the gap really talks about these vacancies they really don't go to why the candidates are having difficulty finding a job so we did two surveys last year one survey was basically asking candidates how do you try to find a job what are the things that you do and let's see if maybe we can find the root of that problem the other survey we did which was looking at community volunteering because one of

the things that I was noticing in the community was I would be working alongside someone and they would be sort of a desk manager and then the next year when we would get together in Vegas they were promoted and then they kept getting promoted and that same correlation of their progression within community volunteering was mirroring their career development I was wondering is this one way that people are learning more professional development it's being community volunteering so that was the second survey we did so this presentation is actually taking those two data sets and putting them together so that we can talk about different ways that people are having challenges trying to find a job one person that we asked

was do you know how to find a job if you're in the military you go through tap or a cap on some kind of transition class that is supposed to tell you how to find a job but there really isn't any sort of course out there that will tell you what are the steps you need to find a job and we know in many surveys a lot of people are not really going to say they don't know how to find a job so I would really like to say that the is probably very underreported we asked people what were the strategies these are the candidates what did they use to find out so if they knew that they were

going to be laid off or they were really frustrated and they wanted to just sort of like flame out what were they gonna do to find their next job so they were gonna ask their friends so limited pool of people who can give you references we're going to list go look at companies they knew the names of can you off the top of your head name ten companies you'd want to go to can you think of that right now if you had to find a job right now would you know ten companies that you would know how to search maybe maybe not third was I'd search a bunch of online posting it was really fascinating at my booth today because a

lot of people didn't know what a job board was job boards have been around since 1994 they've been around a while when we used to look at classifieds okay no longer classifieds they're now on a job board so these were sort of this strategy is the top line ways that people said that they were going to try to find a job what are the top ways that employers try to find candidates so this is the other side of the equation this is career sites this is meaning the site that the company has themselves listing their jobs number two source is job boards number three is referrals and number four is social media so you're starting to see this sort of disconnect

people who are looking people are hunting and people who are trying to find candidates and trying to find talent they might be looking in the wrong places we delve a little deeper into what the job seekers did to sort of you know really push their job search a little bit farther they talked about networking but then when you're talking about networking remember we're talking about a limited pool of people social media now do we notice social medias number four for the candidate social media is number two yes their meaning all social media we're talking insta LinkedIn Facebook Twitter I really see us strong preponderance on Twitter I need a job - my 262 followers who are all of course recruiters right

they're not there the person that you know on discord they're the person that you maybe saw added Amit none of them are necessarily going to be a hiring manager but if you're using social media as the number two source of being able to find a job you might not necessarily get to the next point in your job search 3 was referrals this is interesting because when you talk to a lot of companies the the previous study was from Jobvite but when I see experience in sort of recruiters they always list referrals it's the number one way that they're going to find somebody for a variety of reasons and we can talk about that later but um candidates are not

utilizing referrals they're not utilizing the employee referral programs that are out there employer referral programs have been around for several decades it is one of the number one most effective ways for companies to be able to find their candidates yet job seekers are not utilizing the connections that they know and going in and saying do you know of any jobs within your company because most often and the employees are sitting in their cubicle and they don't know about anything else that is going on within the company the fourth way that job seekers were looking for jobs was job boards interestingly enough they were all saying indeed now in deeds a really great site know them really well

but they don't have specific technical abilities in specific areas industries so if you're going to use a job board use several of them because not everyone is going to be on one job board or another you're going to have to add several different job boards into your toolkit so that you're getting the ground Intel of everything that's available out there I want to thank you all for being here this is probably one of the largest crowds I've had lately so thank you much for being here you've made my day so we asked several of the candidates what are the trouble areas really you know what is the problem why is it very difficult for you to find your next job

the one that really stumps a lot of people is knowing which companies hire for their skill sets because you may say I know of a services provider or I may know of a developer developer company I may know of a product company but they don't necessarily know other than the label that is on the back of a t-shirt what that company does so if you go and you talk to my dear friends over here from Nevada wave hi know better but you know you go over and you say well we want to do you know threat Intel or we're doing car manufacturing and stuff and you don't know that that may or may not be something they do you are then

running into that disconnect so this is where we're getting back to the challenge of you have responsibility for your own job search I can't tell you how many times I get LinkedIn messages find me a job like I'm not your mother I'm sorry I'm not you know I'm not going to find you your job you have to do the research you have to take responsibility for what that next step is because number two top search problem job search problem is people don't know what the next step is a lot of people will say well I just got my graduate degree in cyber security and I want to be a CIO there's there's a bit of a gap there you

need to find out what the next steps are how do you do that you actually do research I was mentioning to someone earlier about doing virtual mentoring I've stalked people on LinkedIn in a very polite way or Facebook and I say you have a job that I am interested in doing maybe four or five years down the road can you spare me a few moments of your time I did this 20 years ago in the government contracting community because there were very few women and government contracting at that time and I sent out messages to about 10 to fifteen women who had senior positions about five of them got back to me they're still good friends they're still

good mentors but I follow their career I follow what they do so you have to determine what your next step is it is not the job of the recruiter to tell you what your next step is in your career they can give you some options they can give you some ideas but you need to go to them and say I eventually want to get here is this job going to give me the opportunities and the experience to be able to get there and you're really going to have to be prepared to ask those questions during the interview because if all you're doing is moving from one job to the next and all you're doing is changing a dress and not

gaining more experience you're not doing that career progression that is your responsibility and third I find this fascinating we have a network of people who will tell us a really great restaurant we will have a network of people who will tell us where to go on vacation we will have a network of people who will tell us what kind of car we might want to buy next but our careers are so important to us but yet we don't have a network of recruiters that we can tap into to say I'm looking for my next job the only time that people tend to talk to recruiters is when they're desperate to find their next job right guys okay so it's really

important to start to understand that if you're going to want to have a network of people to help you in your next stage of your career you might want to start cultivating relationships with recruiters now how do you do that okay you're going to be doing interviews phone interviews you might be talking to someone and it might not work you might not have the skills that they need for that that's particular dog but you had a really great conversation you really hit it off with that person now if it was a different situation if that person was not a recruiter and that was just someone that was sitting next to you at a bar you probably would keep in touch

you probably would grab a beer you would probably develop some kind of relationship why are you not doing that with recruiters if you're having a really great phone in or with somebody and hey it's just not gonna work ask them if you can connect with them on LinkedIn ask if you can check in with them I am willing to bet that if you said hey I've got these skill sets but doesn't look like this job is gonna work with me work for me but can I keep in touch I can tell you pretty much 99% of the recruiters I know it would be very happy to keep in touch with you so looking at the skills and looking at

the tools that people need I'm some of you know I've been talking all day we never look at our toolkit we think that a job is going to miraculously appear when we need it we seem to have this expectation that we don't have to work and develop our skills we have to develop our skills as far as certifications and languages that we need to learn but those same skills that we need to develop our career and look for the next job we don't tend to work on them until when we desperately need a job and we all know what happens to that kind of work that we do when we're desperate to do something we don't do a

very good job so the first thing what does your resume look like I do a lot of resume review in this community please if you're going to ask someone for resume review help be sure it is someone who is actually has a recruiting background I really appreciate that colleagues are going to tell you hey this looks great but they're gonna look at it from their lens from being your friend they are not going to look at it from the lens of someone who has to screen the candidates that come through so definitely talk to someone who has recruiting or staffing background so that they can say this is great but it's not going to get past

step one one of the things that I have been noticing in the community that I would really wish this person would stop telling people is putting a graph in the middle of their resume okay please don't do that keep it simple because you never know what the user interface is on the other side of what the recruiter is going to be looking at your resume they may be looking at on a droid they may be looking a Mac they may looking at PC you don't know all the applicant tracking systems that they're going to be looking at it so any of that formatting it's gonna be R de de and it's gonna go someplace if it is in some kind of graph

or table in the middle you have just made sure that all of your certifications and technical languages went out the window right recruiters are all like yep that's what's happening you wonder why you end up in the black hole someone told you to put bolding and italicize and letter underlining and color in your resume please don't black white 10 12-point font let your content speak for itself you don't have to be a graphic artist also remember that the top two inches of your resume are the most important top two inches there's this little thing called the Department of Labor of offices federal contractor compliance program means that all recruiters have to keep track of the candidates that they are

recruiting for a specific job in case they get audited down the road and to make sure that they're complying with EEOC so all of them are looking at your resume through a two inch preview pane what is in the top two inches of your resume your name in 24 font with bolding and underlining and then your address and italicized you're not looking at they're not seeing the rest of what you're doing so really look at keeping your resume very simple keeping all of the top information in that top two inches and really realize that yes they're hiring you for your technical skills but also talk to them about the business value that you are bringing to

them are you able to manage people are you a good writer are you a good public speaker are you someone that can deflect conflict what are some of these other non-technical skills that you can also bring realize that you're going to have to customize your resume per job I know that sounds really boring like I it I just got it all done you mean I have to customize it again Thank You Google we are now all about how many keywords match up so if you're not looking at the job and making sure that the keywords that are prominent within that job description if those aren't showing up prominently in your resume there's not going to be a keyword

match you're not going to get up at the top of the list you may have some really great skills but you're going to be at the bottom of the list so customize your resume realize that you're also in certain instances depending on the applicant tracking system you're going to have to talk about yourself you already talked about yourself in your resume but you're gonna have to talk about yourself again so if you're not very good at writing about yourself you might want to spend a few more hours going through how do I describe all of the things I've done how do I describe those challenges that I've overcome what are the things that I'm really good at

and that I wanted to bring as value being able to write about you in other ways than just a bullet line on a resume and yes recruiters are going to look at your social media profile there's a Microsoft online reputation report that comes out every year and it basically says they are going to do it I cannot talk to you about if that's legal or HR or anything like that they're still going to do it so be sure that when you are posting things that you want to make sure it's not only your grandmother who's going to see it it's also potentially your next employer yes sir

so it is customizing your resume on any job board you can actually post various different resumes in your folder and you can apply with those what I people like well how do I customize it what are the different things I do my recommendation is when you have an objective you know or excuse me not objective your skills that you list out or the things that you're really great at the top three bullet points are your strongest assets your technical ability your business ability what are the strong things that you're really known for and then the bottom two bullet points those are customized to the job that you're applying for and making sure that anytime that you go through any of your

experience that you make sure that you're including at least one of your bullet points and one of your jobs that you previously did that applies to the job that you're applying for you had a question ma'am

I I would rename it but I would just rename it with a nomenclature that you know so Kathleen Smith a-one Kathleen Smith a three something like that so when I started getting involved in the community I sort of noticed this strong rise in headhunters and staffing firms and I also started to hear about that Twitter handle recruiters say and a variety of other bad-mouthing of recruiters online and what's interesting is there is a big misconception about who are staffing firms who are headhunters and who are recruiters so does everyone know the difference no didn't think so so we have our corporate recruiter like our corporate recruiters who are in the room here if you're a corporate

recruiters stand up okay don't hit them they're really great the friends of mine so we're corporate recruiter actually works for the company they sit at the site they talk day-to-day with the people that you will end up working for they are the people that can be able to tell you what the corporate culture is like what it's tense times are they're the ones that are paid a salary to be able to make sure that you come to work for them they are also your advocates within the company so be sure that the recruiter chooses this line of work because they want to make a difference in your life not to be a stumbling block so they want to be your brand ambassador

inside the company developing the relationship with the corporate recruiter is going to be very important to your overall career development staffing firms are actually hired by the company to come in and fill specific spots but they are paid on a commission based on if you come to work for that company and you stay six months or longer they then get a percentage based on your salary so as far as what the culprit culture is like what it's like to work on that team all of those questions are not necessarily going to be something that the staffing firm is going to be able to answer and finally the headhunter the headhunter is actually paid on a basic

retainer to go and find specific employees to work at a specific company but again they're trying to get somebody into the seat so that they can get their Commission now there's there are lots of really great headhunters and staffing firms and a lot of not-so-great headhunters and staffing firms it is your job to interview them just like they are interviewing you and sort of deciding is this the route I want to go you had a question sir a great question how do you differentiate between them you one ask for ask them to you if they have an email address that's not coming from you know that company that's another one there's only one instance in 18 years

that I know if a corporate recruiter who did not have an email address that went back to the company the other is looking at their LinkedIn profile I mean really do the research on the recruiter that you're going to be talking to if they were a tupperware salesperson six months ago and they're now a recruiter they might not have the experience depth within the security field to answer your questions or make you feel comfortable with doing them but back to what I was saying earlier is that not a lot of people build a network of recruiters so I would say make it your goal by the end of 2020 to have at least three to five

recruiters that you've met at a con that you've talked to on the phone and that maybe you even had a bear with that hacker summer camp or something like that because I can tell you the recruiters if they don't have a job for you they actually more than likely know somebody who might because recruiters have their own network as well and they like helping each other but also recruiters like most of us change jobs they may not have been able to hire you at the first company they moved to a second company and all of a sudden my god I know the perfect person for this role I interviewed him six months ago but there you're going to

have to be sure that you have kept in touch with them so that you have this relationship and you can say hey okay I I trust this person they have this new opportunity I didn't even know it was on my radar I didn't even know to apply for it but someone that I recommend or someone that I rely on is saying that do this so how many of you do have a network of recruiters that you work with okay and how many years did it take you to build that relationship three five two weeks sometime okay that's good I'm asked this question all the time and it really feels badly whenever I'm presenting at a university and I say you

know what is more important experience or education I know that there is just a phenomenal industry in our country of doing cyber security degrees and cyber security intern and non internships but just management degrees hands down pretty much every recruiter I talk to is going to want your experience over your education and they would say more your certifications over your degree and this is a challenge because there are so many people who want to change industries or they want to get into cybersecurity or they want to sort of move on in their career and they don't know some of the other ways that they can get the experience well number one question that a lot of recruiters

are going to ask is what's your home lab like you know did you build a Beowulf culture or you know what are you doing right now and if you're not that sort of passionate about security that you aren't doing these extracurricular things you're going to have to maybe look at what really is your passion because the one thing I can tell you about everyone in this room and everyone who's in this industry you like to solve problems you like to break them you like to put them back together you want to find out why so getting that experience it's a lot easier than you think it's the home lab it's competitions fascinating to me that there are several

large companies out there that when they do the recruiting they actually asked which competitions are you participating in and we only want to talk to you if you're at the car hacking village or if you're at the Wi-Fi village or something like that we actually have in the profiles on cyber sex jobs that you can actually put in the CTF that you've been part of yes sir right so how do you convey a home lab or competitions I put it under a community involvement and I put it under you know which competitions you've been part of now if you were part of DEFCON 16 and you competed in that probably not as important as DEFCON 27 but you know

just putting in the competition so you don't even have to say that you won it I mean it's the fact that you stood up and you went in and you were part of it you know that's an eight-hour commitment to be part of that so I would definitely put it under community involvement but yes I saw a few resumes today where people were like I do these 22 things in my volunteer leadership thing I was like yeah folding t-shirts yeah really great important but I don't think it belongs on a resume military reserves a lot of people are overlooking all of the different military reserves as a way of getting experience and being able to get

additional pay also many folks are looking for a security clearance it might be a way to do that yes sir in the back

so I I frequently give these presentations inside certain agencies and they say there are things that I I know for sure and things I don't I know for sure that we have laws that protect our military and our reservists is it come is it complied with you know I would say be sure you're asking that question throughout the entire interview process be sure that is the first question that you're asking and the phone interview that you're asking about it in every face-to-face interview and that you're asking about it during your final letter of employment so that there is a definite understanding that this is something that is part of your professional development and it is

something that you're going to require them to uphold now I'm right now being asked to advise on a case where that's not being the case I'm like look I'm not an expert on it I just know the best practice that I recommend job seekers do a lot of people who are not interested in looking at new opportunities that may look like they're at a lower level and I'm really saddened by this because I know that I've in my several decade career have actually taken two jobs at lower levels that love me to opportunities that took me to the moon so be sure that you realize our security community cuts across everything consumer products finance healthcare the

energy grid transportation there are so many different opportunities in so many places where they don't have as well-defined career tracks as they may have at some of the largest larger cybersecurity services companies but you're going to get an opportunity to be on the ground level to be able to work with the regulations work with the compliance be able to create a team from scratch so looking at those opportunities is is a way of expanding yourself not only from a technical standpoint but also from a non technical standpoint so showing up in the community as I said we had a separate survey that we did and I was this was sort of like my pet project because I was like I'm looking

at all these phenomenal volunteers that put on b-sides all of these phenomenal volunteers have put on DEFCON put on a variety of conferences throughout the country I actually have been part of the healthcare industry and the recruiting community and I can tell you in those communities there are not as many volunteer run organizations or conferences out there this is something that is unique to this industry to have so many people who give their time to their work to their family and then on top of it like me get on conference calls at nine o'clock at night until 5:00 a.m. in the morning to be able to get that con running in August so this is fascinating and it's a great resource

and it's a way to be able to remember when we were looking at some of the beginning slides and the number one way that everyone found a job was asking their friends but if you have the same group of 10 friends you're gonna get the same 10 recommendations for a new job wouldn't you want to constantly be expanding your network so that you're constantly meeting new people who can connect you with other companies and constantly being able to say hey I worked alongside that person folding t-shirts or speaker ops or sponsor ops or something like that I can recommend them into a job competing we talked about that a little bit earlier and I really think it's

fascinating that people are not using their CTF experience as something that they're sharing as work experience so you show up in a room you have a goal you have a problem that you've never seen before you have a limited amount of time you have a limited amount of resources and you're working alongside people that you've never worked alongside before what does that sound like to you that's work experience that's your first day on the job someplace so if you're doing 10 to 12 different competitions a year you have now just set up yourself for 10 to 12 different work job experience says that you can talk about in a resume you can talk about in your LinkedIn and

you can talk about in an interview but there's one thing we do competitions we run out the door we high-five we have a beer and that's it do me a favor the next time you're in a competition sit down for about 10 minutes in the corner of the room write down what the problem was what you learned what you failed at who dropped their pack who picked it up make sure you're doing a sitrep of what happened during that competition keep that in your journal so that the next time you need to talk about something in a phone interview or in a face-to-face interview and they're going to say so what did you fail out

well you're not necessarily going to want to share that you failed out two or three different things at your last job you may be able to then share well when I was in this competition you know I didn't get the flag because I didn't follow the specific protocol that that made me realize that I needed more training in this specific area it is also looking at the non technical skills that you're learning during a competition because one of the number-one skills that employers are looking for is the ability to communicate but we don't really have that opportunity in our present-day workplace because we're communicating with the same people all the time we're not being challenged with a new

experience to talk with people who don't necessarily speak our language so if you're in a competition you're having to explain things to new people or having to explain them to new team members you're actually working on your communication skills and that's another thing that you want to put in your journal from that competition finally if there is someone on that team that you really enjoyed working with please connect with them afterwards please make sure that you're using that opportunity to expand your network because you'll never know who's sitting next to you in a competition presenting presenting is interesting everyone thinks it's really easy to get up here it's not I can tell you it's not

nervousness anxiety lots of coffee things like that but being able to put your thoughts together and being able to present them is a business skill that we all should in the curity community really work on because we are being constantly asked what is the risk how can we mitigate this what are the things that we should do and if you can't explain that in a way that non-technical people could understand it we are missing out on an opportunity to move the community in the right direction but what's interesting is that people will look at the call for proposals and go oh my god that's so hard okay it is but I would tell you that it is a really great

exercise and being able to succinctly say this is what I'm going to be presenting because you're going to be asked to present it in a short abstract and a long abstract and the key takeaways from your presentation guess what that is a management memo right there what is the problem what is the the risk that we're facing and what are the action steps so we need to go over so more time that you take with filling out the call for proposals you're working on your writing skills be sure you're taking advantage of the opportunity of saying I didn't get accepted go back to the speaker committee and ask for feedback 90% of the conference's that I have not been

accepted to I have definitely said please let me know what I could have done to make this better and several of the conference's will actually give you another opportunity to resubmit once you've put in that feedback but also realize that that's one step the other step with presenting is timeline management project management because many of us who are planning to speak in 2020 right now I have to do our proposals this month so knowing when that presentation proposal is needed when you have to submit it and then when it's going to be accepted it's called timeline management project management again non-technical skills that are going to help you but be sure that when you are doing this you're

checking in with your employer are they going to support you in presenting or is this something you're going to do on your own too many speakers get caught and being accepted to present and then their employer gets wind of it and like look we didn't go through the review you know you're talking about some things from work we're not going to let you do this so really be mindful of the process of hey if you want to present and you actually are presenting stuff that represents your employer that you've gone through the approval process that used to be able to do that and guess what they may pay for your travel because I can tell you how many of us

travel to present at conferences and it's all coming out of our own pocket so when we looked at the survey I wanted to share with you that a lot of people spent about eight hours or more of their time because when I talk about volunteering and the benefits you're going to get people are thinking I have to be like Lawrence or Philip who spend morning noon and night worrying about the conference no these same skills that you're going to be getting is just a small amount of time every month you can definitely go much longer higher than that but this is what most of the respondents said they had but what's fascinating to me is what I was

observing on the ground which was what are some of the skills that people were gaining by doing the volunteering and when you cross-check this with the most recent LinkedIn talent survey and what the top skills that employers are looking for boom teamwork planning communication organizing things that we can't normally learn in our day to day job unless you have a job like mine and I'm planning 35 conferences a year I'm definitely going to have those skills but if you're a pen tester organizing planning communication is not something you're going to be working on every single day we get down to the numbers on this so it was just you know a small percentage it was a really big percentage and this is

something that was in the comments from the survey it was actually very fascinating that most respondents once they were asked to think about this they're like wow I really did learn how to communicate with people who are not on my technical team I really learned how to interface with the public I really learned how to okay we have a revenue goal of a hundred thousand and how do I break that down into planning so these are things that you don't have the opportunity to do your professional development day-to-day but it is something that you're going to get by volunteering when we go back to those first slides and we talk about how people are finding jobs people were

number one thing that they were saying was networking and talking to their friends but we all know that making new friends is a little hard you know I walked into the speaker dinner last night and I knew no one that's like how do I get through this so working on your networking skills is really great when you go to any kind of volunteer organization now it's not that you're gonna like everyone right away it's not going to be a kumbaya moment it's really going to be more about I'm being challenged and so I'm going to learn how to work with different people and then I'm going to be able to build relationships with them and that is one

of the ways we all stay young by building and growing in our communities a lot of people said well you know I can't I I only volunteer the day event same amount of skills were learned by people who just were able to volunteer the day of the event I can tell you and those of you who are in the room who are part of besides how many of you plan to go into work on Monday I know I don't because I am just dead tired so you know maybe plan that out make sure that the family knows that you're not going to be available on Friday and Saturday and maybe make sure that your boss knows

that following Monday the you might not be as clear-headed as you would like to be but you still get the same skills volunteering the day of the event this I loved so volunteering is stressful anxiety are the lanyards gonna show up are we gonna get the t-shirts Phil somebody's complaining about the temperature all kinds of things that are outside of your control it is very stressful we asked even further they said it was back stress necks trust anxiety depression all of the same sort of stressful things that we see over and over but ninety-eight percent said that they found volunteering fulfilling how many things in our day-to-day work life can we say are fulfilling so while it

might be stressful it means that we're doing something we're giving back were part of our community and everyone said that hey this is so fantastic I am giving back I am making a difference in my community and this was one that I just wanted to make sure that everyone knows 94% said that they feel like their volunteer work made a positive impact on our industry we're talking about an industry that is negative we are talking about stress we're talking about mental health we're talking about suicide we are talking about all kinds of dark things yet everyone said working in this community and a volunteer capacity they were having a positive impact it was really great to see how many people

really felt that they were making a difference by volunteering by giving those extra hours on top of school and work and family we went a little bit deeper in the survey and I really wanted to highlight this especially to those of you in the room who are employers but also you know employees to say you know you may not need to leave your current employment you might like where you are you just want to do more and learn more and you might want to say I want to volunteer in the community but how do I make sure that my employer is walking side side with me on this and it was really great to see that so many employers

supported the efforts within the community of their employees being able to go out there and say hey we know this makes a difference so really look at if you are an employer and you are looking at your retention issues you might want to take a survey of your company and say what are the cons that we all go to what do you guys involved in how can we work alongside you with that do they need sponsorship do they need in kind do they need a place to host the event there are ways that you can get your employer involved and they can draw on different budgets retention HR program training and development there are different ways that they can retain

their workforce by making sure that they're supporting their employees who are volunteering in the community we went a little deeper and we said that they we found that almost 60% of the volunteers actually stayed with their current company because their employers supported their volunteer efforts second question that we asked is if you were going to move to a new employer how much would they have to support your volunteering efforts to make that move 25% was the standard so 25% meaning if the person has to volunteer at a conference providing paid time off to do that don't have them take their vacation time for that or if they need to travel being able to subsidize it so these are

things that can be taken out of different budgets not necessarily out of program but it can be spread across the company to be able to make sure that people are retaining their workforce but also realize you need to talk you need to be your own advocate within your company to say I'm presenting I'm representing the company in the community how can we work on a way that you're supporting and subsidizing me so I'm not having to look for other employment but I'm also having an opportunity to be part of the community and being fulfilled with my work so you know we said 25% eighty over ninety seven percent would move to new company because they supported community

volunteering so if you would like to have this study to be able to support any actions that you want to do in the community we have the full survey on our slideshare.net account we also have this survey and then we also have the other survey the job search survey and I'm open to any questions even though you guys are asking great questions question in the back it depends so we just had a job fair last week and someone who had 40 years experience brought in an 8 page resume sorry down to 2 pages you know no unless you're looking for an international job and people are more attuned to Seavey's versus a resume no longer than 2 pages

if you have the experience for two pages and meaning 15 or so years then two pages resumes are hard because we're asking ourselves to examine what we've done and that can get really soul wrenching and so a lot of times people start filling it in I mean I was looking at resumes at my booth and people were like created three documents oh that created documentation for security processes so yeah okay okay please you know let's let's add value by the line let's not try to fill up space and again you know is it conveying the message of what you're going to do I've had one job for 18 years you know if someone looked at that and said you've only had one job

for eight what did you do beforehand well I've got an MBA and you know a variety of other things but I've done this one job for 18 years and I really love it question or comment

my thought on that I have a definitive thought on that most of the recruiters I know not pointing my friends over in the room most recruiters I know don't want to read a paragraph they just don't they want to have bullet points that says these are the four or five things that I am strongest in and the value that I'm going to bring to you as an employer you if you're desperate to write a paragraph put it on your LinkedIn profile and remember you know LinkedIn profile above the fold again they're not gonna read a dissertation I it really bothers me when people cut and paste their resume into the summary section of their LinkedIn

profile why you know none of us read more than seven words so why would you make me read 250 to find out that you actually have everything that I need we need to be our own best advocate this is why job search is so hard we're not used to being our own best advocate you know people don't know what the next step is in their career that's your job to figure out that is your job to figure out what kind of culture you want to work in do you want to do clear to work or not do cleared work do you want to work at home not work at home do you want to manage teams not manage teams

not what you've done what do you want to do once you started figuring that out then you can start putting together the the plan of a okay I know about this company you know about that company I've networked with this recruiter I can start building the plan but the biggest challenge that I find for a lot of people is they do at the moment they get the pink notice be thinking a year out if you think a year out from now you're going to be in the same job maybe ask yourself the question okay that's really great you're going to be in the same job you're going to be in the same company what do you need to do to keep it

exciting for you that it still inspires your passion and that you need to sit down and talk with your manager your next review saying I need to be challenged a little bit more or you and I are going to be parting company and it's not like hey I'm gonna quit if you're not gonna give me $25,000 more it's like look I need to do something else I need to do something different or I'll continue doing this but I want to volunteer in the community or I want to start presenting or I want to put together a team that's going to go to DEFCON and compete you need to start laying those plans out do your new

year's resolutions now for what you're going to do in 2020 to help your career I'm Kathleen Smith thank you so much [Applause]