Kirsten Renner - But Wait, I Still Want a Job!

well i'm just gonna introduce hello everybody we're about to have a talk from kristen who's been working in the recruiting space for a couple of decades and she will be discussing how to get a job in the infosec space so with that take it away kristin hello everyone i'm doing this without my notes because why not um this is uh welcome to my final iteration of but i still need a job um best practices wish i was really in boston actually and um i really am a red zone too that's real um so welcome to my time so the things that we are here to discuss today are the following a little bit about and as

you can imagine when i when i first when i wrote this series for 2020 quarantine wasn't a thing covid wasn't the thing um and so i had to adapt the slides a little bit uh some way into the year this was uh my event time during this talk so maybe i don't need my notes um i'm going to try to add um while we're facing our challenges and i'm not gonna i'm not gonna spend a lot of time on them because here we are at the end of september and i think most of us get it by now right we already know what to do so i won't i won't spend too much time on that

other than to say that i i personally think we can use some of what we're dealing with as uh from a candidate's perspective to our advantage um and then i'm gonna go over what i like to just call the classic fundamentals on um challenges that we all face uh when we're looking to make a change in our career then we'll do a q a if we have time um this is about an hour's worth of content and i'm doing it in 30 minutes so we'll see but i'm gonna talk faster all right who am i i am person renter uh i work at a company called noveta we're advanced analytics company uh my only plug

for the day is we have over 300 jobs open at the moment and we pay five to ten thousand per referral i'm a college dropout i started my career doing software development using visual basics a long time ago um as in the introduction was mentioned i've been recruiting for for uh about two decades i've been doing this for a while um started off in telecom and then i've been in infosec since uh for about 10 years um i'm the co-organizer of the car hacking village and um and i run ultras if you don't know what an ultra is it's anything longer than a marathon and i didn't just put red sox on there for uh for this conference i really am

um there's my proof okay so here's the perspectives that i am offering to you today um i have been a candidate i have been a recruiter and i have been and currently am a hiring manager so i hope that having all those different perspectives um is is not only going to be useful to anyone looking for a job but also um for people looking to hire as well right so it's going to be good for you either way if you're trying to hire if you're looking for a job if you ever have or you ever will this content should be useful for you um so speaking of perspectives um all of these surveys that you see

these are not these are not scientific surveys these don't have thousands of responses they probably all have maybe hundreds of responses i either posted them on twitter and or linkedin and then i just captured what you all were saying because when i was going to or when i'm thinking about writing um these talks i was like why do people really wanna uh what are what they wanna hear about and where are they in terms of their career searches um and i asked darth vader if i could quote him and he said yes um and i couldn't word it any better than him so i didn't even try um but it really and truly is good

career hygiene always to at least keep your options open depending on where you are if you think about it depending on where you are in your career search whether you um are unemployed or uh feel stuck you're not advancing in the in the way that you would like to there's there's always reason for you to be uh open and and i am a really good example of that because when i met the ceo of my current company i was happily employed i was not looking for a job and i had no intention of leaving where i was so just get my options open and and it's good to network and good to have conversations so things are different uh

like i said earlier uh at this point um we should all be like yeah i get it uh we haven't been to a real conference we haven't been to a uh in real life uh in-person conference um in a long time it's been it feels like forever for me anyway i feel like it was right around march when uh when it all ended i did this in person in tampa and then uh besides nova and we've been doing it virtual ever since so um we're going to talk about um you know what do we do different what are your best practices um and i'm going to ask you to do as i say and not as i did because i make a

lot of mistakes personally uh i was having a little bit of technology issues this morning believe it or not um and uh there's a glare on my glasses right now right so i'm breaking a lot of rules but um but do as i say however do and how can we use this to our advantage um if you are a candidate and this is good for for employers to listen to too because this is the advice that i'm giving if the future employer is not being flexible is not accommodating you is not providing you with what you need um as a candidate you know for the virtual interviews and virtual orientations and all the different things that are

that should be happening not just in the candidate experience but also um what they are telling you they're going to be able to do for you when you start um in terms of you know whether or not you have to go into the office and another thing that is important for you to think about the more that the future employer is able to be accommodating to you as a candidate and as a new employee probably the better relationship they have with their customers and here's why if they're end customers they're providing a service their service company or a product company the customers are going to be more accommodating to the company as well so it's a really good tell

if they will give you flexibility if they will let you work remotely if they depending on the circumstance whether you're in the clearing space or not there's there are restrictions around the type of work that you have to do and those restrictions are are going to come into play when um accommodations need to be made you know if you've got kids at home you have a whole other bottle of wax you're dealing with now right your kids can't go to school and and you're at home trying to teach them and you've got meetings going on and you've got a lot going on this is this is interesting um and it is very telling how accommodating they're

going to be to you and it goes both ways right if your candidate um is uh throughout the experience you know not being not being flexible as well that will be telling what it's going to be like to employ those people as well so look at your interview experience look at how flexible they're going to be how understanding they're going to be and use that to your advantage when you're deciding um which offer to accept and so i really um don't know that we need to go through all of these um because like i said i think we're all experts now or as close as we can be like i said that we had a little bit of

issues this morning i uh i still can't i can't quite get into discord today for some stupid reason um but you should always always always test all the things now uh 30 minutes ago ray couldn't get on to he didn't have he forgot to get a ticket so i don't know if he's going to see this or not although it's being recorded and he's he's seen me tell those jokes before but it's a good example the first virtual talk um the first real virtual uh conference uh that i spoke at this year uh was the mini half club isolation film and i went into the green room like i was supposed to early and um

and uh ray was handling um very redacted was helping me and he was like okay let's test this out let me see if i can hear you see you and see your slides click okay yay and the mistake that i made and many of us if you look at your computer right now you probably have many browsers open you probably have many tabs open on your browsers and you might also have many documents of them at one time as i did at that time but on my screen i could just see what i was looking at uh which was my slides but and i remember ray said close everything close all the things and um i didn't close all the things

and uh let's just say um some personal documents were open and that's the first thing he saw so it's a little joke between us but you should close everything close all the windows close everything you're not going to use close everything you don't want potentially whoever's watching you in the interview or in the presentation to see think about distractions obviously um probably my dog's gonna bark at some point during this but you know close the windows um look at the lighting with the sound and be aware of what you're doing also think more now so than ever um think about the the footprint that you're putting out into the digital universe right because um everyone's looking at it the

hiring manager you're looking at it the recruiters are looking at it uh we're looking at um the things that you say i'm not saying don't be who you are because that's one of that's hopefully what they put on my tombstone like be yourself um but think about the messages that you're sending right so if every single day without fail you complain about your boss or you complain about your job or you know um you're just you're just that that squeaky of a wheel um i think it's i think it sends the wrong message like we should just look for some balance in what you're in what you're putting out there um in the virtual world because we're

looking at it more than ever uh how to dress in a virtual interview i've gotten that question a lot like i said be yourself but um be aware of what you have on um i actually i was listening to what chloe was saying in the keynote about kind of the the imagery of the hoodie and i gotta tell you i have i honestly wear a hoodie probably 362 days a year um but i'm gonna better get what she's saying right so it depends on what you're trying to get across you have to go on a three-piece suit before your virtual interview of course not um but be aware of how you look um is what you're wearing

distracting is it is it a bunch of weird stripes or patterns that aren't going to translate well on the screen and stuff like that um and i really love and uh and i stole this from somebody else but that you should reverse and then you should practice you can practice uh with a friend you can do fake interviews and do mock interviews um or you can just record yourself and see how it goes uh one other thing i should have said is to always remember to look at the camera to be a little bit more engaging it's hard uh it's hard not being on stage seeing seeing faces but more engaging i'm not going to get into this one too much more

um but uh because i'm halfway through my time already um so on to the fundamentals you all said to me uh when i was about to do besides uh tampa and then nova uh you all said that networking i was a little bit surprised to see that you all said that networking was the thing that you wanted the most help with um so i'll spend a little bit more time on that one real quick i'll say we all know about job boards they all know what they are i i prefer to say that i am not saying um anything good or bad about anything listed on the screen uh or any of any of the products um

two things to say um one thing that people don't even uh potentially realize this is that every state has a state employment board they do because they have to and every employer is supposed to be posting their jobs there and a lot of this happens automatically through their applicant tracking system they post a job there it gets scraped by the uh the state job board so if you uh are interested in being in another state if you want to relocate from their state or you want to see what's going on there in that state now more than ever because of the virtual environment and aspect of jobs being offered um you'll find out about jobs that are

available to you where you are or where you want to be that you never knew existed because of the state employment job boards and for example uh there was a big i won't say the company but a big company that i did not realize was in a certain state and when i was uh testing this uh at the end of tampa i said let's test it out everybody whip out your phone and uh it's fun to do live and um pick a state look for their look right now for their state employment board and raise your hand if you find a company that you didn't realize was there and a bunch of people were like whoa i didn't

realize random big company was in this particular statement because when i the recruiter or when my recruiters are opening the job in the application system they're going to list the states where the job is available so now if it's virtually available it's going to be available a lot more places so it's going to get scraped out and it's going to get posted there so take a look at those um they're state-run so they're not really awesome uh in terms of the way that the websites are laid out but uh but that's very useful uh very very important if you don't get anything else out of this remember this i hear every other day or i see every

other day people complaining about how horrible job prescriptions are i get it i apologize on behalf of um all hiring managers and recruiters everywhere in every job description that was ever written i get it i'm sorry there should never be an entry-level job asking for a cissp what that makes no sense i don't know why that happens i'm sorry i could spend an hour talking about why i think it happens but what i will say and this is very important please you should always apply okay so be reasonable don't be silly but if you're start at the finish line shoot for what you want look for those jobs i want to be a cso i want to be

a solutions architect i want to be look for the job titles that fit where you want to end up look through it understand and realize that since they're not all going to be written in a compliant and and logical manner uh for various reasons and go through it and i'm speaking just for a moment um more to women than men to say that you are statistically less likely to apply to a job that you don't check all the boxes on apply do that for yourself you get into the system and then we'll talk about what to do after that um don't forget to network networking is extremely important especially now more than ever in terms of social media

um twitter is my favorite a lot of 99 of the recruiters that i know uh their favorite is linkedin um if you are able to have a linkedin account uh some jobs won't let you but if you are able you should do that um don't forget about job fairs even now in the virtual environment they are happening in industry conferences my favorite part of them is the villages and the villages are a great place for you to do uh to learn and network at the same time if you have the opportunity always look to volunteer volunteering is going to help you learn and grow and network and uh i can't say enough about volunteering as a good career move for

you so real quick about dms mine are open um don't punish the people that have open dms by uh obviously don't be a creeper but beyond that um two things you will notice i use myself as an example when you go to my well i don't know when i had this on my page but it probably still says that it says if your baby you're recruiting and i don't know you i'm probably not going to connect you and oh by the way i'm not looking so then you see an image that it says hi i'm a recruiter do you want a job well if you really really were interested in me and you really cared

about me then you read my about me and it says don't do that so don't do that take a minute to really look don't use these tools that go out and um are are reaching out to everybody and and and showing them that you actually don't care about me you actually aren't interested in knowing about me because you didn't even bother to read where i said don't do that uh the only other thing i did here was um i saved all the people's identities but if all you're saying to me is hi hello that's not very compelling right i don't need a dissertation nobody does but um and you don't have to be super clever

you don't have to be super hilarious but um be a little bit more compelling when you're reaching out to somebody in through in mailing or through direct messaging tell them why you're reaching out please understand and know that you know i i only have a couple thousand followers so i can only imagine what it's like for people that have tens of thousands of followers going through their dms and uh i'll be a little bit more compelling like tell the person why they should bother to open your message if they don't know you a little bit about resumes um obviously tell the truth uh the most important advice uh to the resume and remember as much as job descriptions stink

there's just as many stinky resumes out there so do uh everyone a favor consider that the person reading your resume there's gonna be many different layers of people looking at your resume there's gonna be sources of should be people that aren't that technical they're looking at a lot of resumes in the same way that you will want to compel someone to look at your direct message you're going to want to compel someone to look at your resume to continue to read i don't really care about the length of your resume i've seen a lot of it has to be this exact many pages i don't care about that as much as i care about the order the very first

thing you should do in one or two sentences is you should say i'm a this and i want to be a that i am a systems engineer and i want to be a solutions architect i am a pen tester and i want to be a security researcher please don't say look at the content and figure it out for yourself because probably i've got resume fatigue i've already looked at a lot of resumes i've got 30 jobs open per recruiter 15 recruiters and they've got hundreds of applications per job so tell them please i'm this i don't want to be at that um then go into the technical skills know that there are i don't want to call

them robots but there are some scripts that are set up the night before they're saying go through all these resumes keywords matter keywords are important if you're not hearing from somebody what you should then do after you apply give it one business day go to linkedin 99 percent of recruiters are using it and they have their dms open and say hi i am this person i applied for this job look for an identifier look for a job number and do customize your resume to your job real quick do a little bit of research before going into your interview come prepared with questions one of the most important things that you can do that's going to be very

revealing to you as a candidate when you are in your interview at the end when they say the famous do you have any questions for me you say yes you look at the person and you make it about them you say um what hesitations did you have coming into this company how long have you been here and my favorite what have you learned if for a moment you will catch them off guard and it will be their opportunity to tell you exactly what it's like for them to work in the company that you're interested in working for running short in time here for real for real for real be yourself always be who you are because and i do

liken it to dating i don't have any dating experience but i imagine that if you went on a date and you said i love kids i love to travel i go to church every sunday and those things are not true in a short period of time uh you have guaranteed that the relationship will fail so why don't you just be who you are as an example again the when i interviewed for the job i have now my hair was blue i thought about should i not have blue hair going to meet the ceo and whatever but no be who you are um so it works out well real quick on negotiating and i will share all these slides because i'm

running out of time um you do not have to tell how much money you currently make that is literally irrelevant to what you should be making okay what you make um has nothing to do with your bona fide occupational qualifications uh those that should be said by there are federally mandated ordinances that have to be followed by employers should be followed by employers they pay you what you should be making based on your skills in your education and the geographical location that's just the law um alyssa miller talked about this i think yesterday on twitter true story um and be just come right down don't don't play games i i never did when i was recruiting i

would um just say hey here's here's what i can tell you um always ask for what you need think about all the different aspects of compensation right think about the 401k and and do you have an incentive plan do you have an educational plan do you have a training program um so think about those different things and think about is there are growth opportunities for me here think about in that moment in your career what matters to you and what you're looking for and just to wrap it up because i think i only have about five minutes um always be open to new opportunities um always be willing to negotiate to network communication is key there are many many many

volunteers that are available like i said my dms are open and i can connect you to people if i if i drop the ball if anybody ever drops the ball if anybody doesn't get back to you i i'm pretty sure that uh all recruiters want to get back to you they intend to get back to you and if they don't give them that one chance ping them again remind them and at the very least uh they should be able to connect you to somebody uh if they don't have the bandwidth to get back to you notice how you're being treated uh in your candidate uh experience notice how you're being treated probably that's why you're going

to get treated as an employee as well um and thank you to all the volunteers who put these all the bsi's together ready for questions wow thank you very much kirsten and actually i apologize we've run over time so we've got to wrap it up but i really quickly want to ask because this question got answered asked a while ago are you going to be at b-sides orlando career hacking village as a matter of fact i am yes i'll be there excellent well thank you everyone for participating and kirsten just so you know you don't have to close anything i'm just gonna de-promote you and i'll take care of all of this so thank you everybody who shuts down the

whole conference today i'm not clicking anything i'm just leaving right brilliant well thank you again really appreciated your talk fascinating