HG - So Who's Line Is It Anyway? (A Recruiter Panel)

thank you for coming to the last session of Higher Ground this is always sort of a a difficult position to do because everyone's tired you had a late night you don't want to be here so I really applaud those of you who came because you know what you're really interested in this talk Whose Line Is It Anyway I should probably explain who I am I'm Kathleen Smith Creator and director of Higher Ground and the two people to my left you're right have been with me since the beginning and I knew that I could count on them to come and be part of this conversation throughout all of our conversations that we've had at Higher Ground these two

days we've really talked about it from the job Seekers perspective sort of what do professional coaches what do professionals in the community talk about as far as how you move forward in your career but we have not had any conversations led by recruiters and if you didn't realize it you actually are going to have to talk to a recruiter at some point in your career and at some point during a specific job search so as I said I have my two most wonderful recruiters the third most wonderful recruiter showing up later so we'll just give him grief um and we're going to talk about the overall job search process and we invite a lot of questions with that so to my

farthest left we have Kirsten Renner and I'm going to have Kirsten sort of explain who she is because if I do the description I'd be going on for hours and hours and hours so Kirsten tell us a little bit about you uh the community calls me crenner so that's what you might know me by on Twitter I am currently running the recruiting team for the National Security portfolio at Accenture Federal services that was once Novato where I was for uh six years and I have an amazing team of recruiters several of whom are here in the room with us and when I hire managers this year um I I help uh lead their requirements analysis and Gathering and sorting of of

candidates and getting them lined up against the managers and I also am a co-organizer of the car hacking Village so as you can see there are recruiters who are involved in this community and you can network with them you don't have to just talk to them when you're desperate to find a job so the handsome gentleman with the wonderful accent that we all love Listening to We Do is Chris Wright and I usually have something against staffing firms Chris is one of those rare exceptions that I allow him to be involved in everything because he knows how to be respectful and cultivate great relationships so Chris please tell us a little bit more about you

thank you very much I am from London hence the accent not from West Texas okay no and I'm not Australian either which is what I normally get uh so yeah so I I've got a cyber security staff in and Professional Services Company it's called Tyro security uh it's 10 years old as of the 6th of August so happy birthday happy birthday um and I've been in Tech staff in in total for over 20 years so I'm involved I'm still very Hands-On it's a small business uh really developing clients building relationships I still get involved with some of our search projects so I'll often manage those be involved in the final sort of qualification processes we go through

often spend a lot of time on on the phone to to clients and actually talking through what they're looking for and why they're struggling Consulting with them about what's really out there in the market and then other than that I've got a whole load of other hats I've got a non-profit I founded I've co-founded that's trying to provide more diversity in GRC and cyber security it's an apprenticeship program completely free and I've been involved with the cloud security Alliance for a very long time so very involved in the community and I absolutely love it and love Kathleen and every everybody that's involved with helping make us do what we do so yeah Chris gave this absolute

hilarious videotape um seven years ago at uh what was called just the career track in 2015 it was all of the things that you should not do with an interview and I really think you you need to bring that back so what we have here on the panel is we have what is called a direct recruiter someone who actually works for a company and finds people to fill roles and then we have someone who is part of a staffing firm who works with clients so Kirsten let's talk more about what your specific role is and explaining what a direct recruiter is um my specific role is for leading a team of of full life cycle recruiters uh

I want to talk a little bit more about what their desk looks like because that's really relevant uh to the conversation they're connected to what what we call our customers is the internal hiring managers within the company that we work for and so we have we have leads who are connected to all of those delivery teams so they're understanding on a on at least a weekly basis if not a daily basis what their priorities look like based on who their end customers are what they need um there may be surge activities that they need to go through for a proposal that they're trying to get people for and so forth but on a day-to-day basis

the recruiters the full life cycle recruiters are going to spend time sourcing they're going to Source in the places where you are making yourselves known as available talent and more importantly they're going to be doing activities like uh all the things you see across all of these conferences this week where they're networking with people who might be passive or who might not have resumes yet or who are just getting started in their Journey their day is going to be split up from sourcing scheduling spending time with the hiring managers and talking to you all and and getting all those screenings done so that they can then lead you through your journey within the company line you up against the right hiring

managers and hiring teams so I just want to clarify one thing that Kirsten said which is she has internal customers internal customers are actually government contracts that she is supporting so she needs to go out and make sure that her internal customers who are various different agencies various different contracts so it's still a customer it's still someone inside but it is the same cultivation that is going on so Chris let's counter that with what kind of role you have and what your customers are okay yeah so as an agency recruiter it's a little different so we do something uh that's called Full desk recruitment so the often the same people that are talking to candidates and finding them for jobs

are actually going out and actually finding new new clients new hiring managers that would be at various different companies so we would actually have you know various companies that we search for and we might only work with some of the hiring managers in some other companies we work with whole teams and and we'll be providing all of their staff so it's it's unusual in the instead of internal clients or internal customers ours are external customers so um you know there might be somebody like Sony for instance as a customer of ours we'll work with just their cyber security team or in some cases we might just work with their incident response team so we have developed those

different relationships constantly but then we're very involved in in filling roles all over the country so we'll differ how it's certainly changed over the last couple of years I'd say but um certainly you know we're very involved in local community to find people but also you know LinkedIn I'm sure we're going to get to some of that stuff but it differs a little bit in terms of probably who our customers are and how we connect with them some of them we might have weekly catch-up calls if we've got a particularly important search on we might catch up with him every single week other times it can be very transactional so it could literally be a four-week search get them placed

follow it all the way through to the actual placement and then making sure that that person's settled so one thing that a lot of job Seekers do not understand and and it's amazing that I'll get this call I'll get this request that will say I had one call why am I why don't I have the job and I have to explain to a lot of people don't quit your job until you know where you are in the process for the next job I deal with a lot of transitioning military folks and they wait until their last week before they're leaving service to start looking for a job so Kirsten how long does it take and what are the

different steps between your initial Outreach to someone actually onboarding oh wow do you mean for the candidates Journey what they are the candidates Journey from Outreach all the different steps and then they finally get the offer and they're onboarded so this this this uh it depends obviously right uh it how long it takes you to get the get connected to the right person if you are fortunate if you uh work with somebody like like in Chris's group for example um they're they're going to be like like your personal agents and they're going to walk you through the steps the best recruiters are going to guide you through what to expect Nest so depending on either the contract or the customer

and what their requirements are whether or not they require an extra background investigation whether or not they require like a customer Fit review different different customers put different things in the journey right so it's not a good straight answer um ideally I want to meet you I want to have a conversation with you and as soon as I've established Mutual you know interest with you I'd like to go straight to offer but so my my intention is always to get there as fast as I can but there's uh you know if there there's a clearance requirement if there's a background investigation requirement all those things are going to add days and sometimes weeks to the process

I tell all marketers and they cannot well they're not paying attention they are doing resume review not not your head if it's true I say customize the experience to the candidate right take care of them schedule around them Force the managers to get together with them if there's three managers interested cool more opportunities for them they all got to show up when the candidate is is available so that is the ideal experience so that you're not having to run through multiple interviews I hate that I hate that that does occur but if it does I mean imagine the scheduling and all of that right so this process I like to keep it inside of 30 days

to be there I I have a company that I worked with and it took 18 months from the original interaction until the onboarding and the candidate actually went and got another job while they were waiting for this process so please realize that you've got a long timeline on this Chris how about your candidates um so yeah it's a bit of an it depends on the client um often but uh probably a good way to describe that when we're involved in this process so the first thing we'll do is sit down with the client and find out why the roles open often they're coming to us because they've already tried to fill it internally and using maybe internal

Talent acquisition or sometimes Talent acquisition is just so busy that they just need some assistance and some help our companies most of them are commercial less public sector and defense which does mean they can be a little bit more agile and one of the priorities one of the ways we prioritize our roles is to look at what are they looking for does that person exist do they skills go together um and then what is their process so you know is their process five interviews in a panel and it's going to take a month that's not going to be very good for us because the candidates that we give them are not going to probably be available by the time they finish

their process um so we always have a very good understanding of what that specific process is and we will talk about that with a candidate so something that you all could do is just ask that question what is the process how how long is it typically um and we've had roles that have been filled in as quick as two weeks maybe probably would have even been a week but but two weeks is is is is probably the quickest up to four weeks um and the quicker the clients can move the higher up the priority list they are for us to to work on their jobs so let's dive into this a little bit more deeply and what are the different

steps because a lot of times people think it's just a phone interview or it's just uh this or it's adjusted that and with all of these roles there are many different levels there are many different customers who have to be satisfied so Chris why don't you start with sort of you know because it's not just one phone call one meeting right and we want to make sure that everyone who's in the room is prepared for the various different levels that they're going to go through yeah certainly so what you typically find is for us anyway you'll you know you'll send a resume you'll connect with somebody we will have a qualification call with you which

is normally just a general call find out what you're looking for um what your salary requirements are why you're looking to move on from where you are currently and what your goals are and then we might straight away or immediately have a position in mind for you in which case we can then talk about a specific position or we might call you back at a later date with a specific position so that's the first part once we've qualified you for a specific role we send the resume across to the client sometimes we work in partnership with Talent acquisition other times we'll be working directly um with the line managers as well we always find it's important to make sure

the talent acquisition is on board with whatever we're doing in that process um so we'll get get the resume across we'll then follow up very quickly because part of our qualification is telling the hiring manager you need to turn these around 48 hours we need full feedback because that helps us change up our search at that point typically we'll see a telephone interview normally with the hiring manager some businesses will will put if it's if we have not worked with them a lot of times they tend to put a talent acquisition person in to have a conversation first um but once we've established a relationship with them usually the hiring manager will just say right yes I

want to interview that person telephone interview then typically a panel um and then at the panel stage after that sometimes it can be a direct decision then sometimes it's like one more interview with with perhaps hiring other other directors or other people higher up so that's a typical process Kirsten so you've got culture fit you've got technical ability you have a whole variety of things and I didn't clarify earlier Kirsten Works in Government Contracting so there are a few extra levels called security clearance adjudication review and things like that so my apologies for not making that clearer earlier but go on I probably should have as well um so because because of that factor there are some it's very similar to the

flow the funnel is is very similar so we're gonna we're gonna schedule a call initially with a recruiter this screening call is where we build your profile we uh we speak to you about what am I looking for what I want to do next so that we can make sure that we're delivering to all the managers that you're interested in talking to we get an idea from you these are the types of positions I'm looking for so we know who to show you to we're not just going to show you one position unless that's all you want so the recruiter who reached out to you probably reached out to you because they had something in mind a

requirement on their desk that they're responsible for and they'd explain it to you and they say Hey listen I'm trying to fill this full stack development position it's in Springfield Virginia and it requires a secret clearance and you say I don't care about my clearance anymore or I'm interested in upgrading my clearance or I'm interested actually into going into come up what you're telling them and that's when it's up to you right you're going to let them know what you're looking for now they know who to share your who to share your information with so that they can give you more opportunities that are potentially a fit for you and as uh as I was mentioned uh any clearance that is

required has to be verified that's typically only takes a day or it should only take a day I try to put slas on managers that they have a day to respond right that's that's my dream um they have a day to respond and then we have to you know as a team be collaborative with each other and notice for each other so the whole team my whole team sees what each other is submitting and in seeing what each other is submitting they can poke each other and go hey here's this other thing that might work here's this other thing that might work right because it's not it isn't fair to expect every manager to know every other manager's roles or

every recruiter to know every other recruiter's role so if they're all working together they can make sure that no opportunity is missed so you're going to have your quick screening call let's just say all the managers do their job and respond in a day I want you to be interviewed at your earliest convenience and I think a decision should be made that day I think they should be able to speak to you and figure it out if there is a further requirement because of the government customer or any or in any situation even your commercial customers if they want to meet you as well we'll explore that to you up front we'll say you know what there's one more phone

call you're going to have to do or maybe you need to go on site and frankly maybe you might want that you might say I'm not ready to make this decision until I see the office or meet some people so so I hope you realize you we have two extraordinary recruiters here but there are sort of two little bits of information pulling out of this one whenever you're having that conversation with any recruiter depending on if they're a direct recruiter or Staffing firm one question you should be asking them is what is the process when am I going to be meeting with people what am I going to do a panel interview am I going to do a phone

interview am I going to do a technical interview do I get to meet the final customer do I get to go on site do I get to meet my team because this is part of your job in the search the other thing you should be pulling from this is you should always be networking with a recruiter this might not be you might not find a job with Chris or Kirsten this year but sometime down the road you're going to want to talk to them about a job you should be keeping up with them cultivating that relationship you should have at least five to eight Recruiters in your network that you like talking to that has given you honest

feedback that have helped you not someone who has hounded you but someone who has actually helped you in the process because great recruiters like these two network with other recruiters and will say I can't find this person for this position they'll network with other recruiters and say I just interviewed someone who would be absolutely fabulous for that job great recruiters network with other great recruiters so always be having no Recruiters in your network so the title of this talk is Whose Line Is It Anyways I remembered a comedy show years ago but it's also something that comes up a lot in when I talk to job Seekers they always think that it's not their job to

do X or Y or Z in job search they think that throwing a bunch of stuff on a resume all of the recruiters are mind readers and they're going to be able to tell what you're trying to convey in your resume so Chris what are some of the good tips and not so good tips about resumes what are some of the things that you've seen and that you've cringed about while you've done resume review here so um I will I shall start slightly before the resumes if somebody posts a job or something on uh on LinkedIn don't just comment I'm interested that is my bug bear I'm interested and then never no contact no sending resume no

application and then you get a message out the blue that said what what's happening with that job okay all right it happens a lot yes you like I can't respond to everybody that just posts I'm interested you know seven send connect with us send us a personalized message actually apply it to the job the link that's on there um but don't just post I'm interested so that that's a little bug bear um had to get off from my chest you forgot to say in the process that you have to apply yeah [Music] [Laughter] yeah recruiting but not that good [Laughter] um so yeah so that's one part of it I think when it comes to resumes

um my big story is you need to make sure your resume represents the right set of experience and skills for the job you're applying for so uh you know I think keep your resume really straightforward two or three pages if you're hugely experienced you might get away with four but really anything that's 10 years plus experience nobody's really interested in um so that can be one line of just where you worked and the dates or you might even consider taking off if you're worried about ageism certainly some people remove stuff that's that's quite a lot of years because people guess people's ages and they worry about ageism so I would say on a resume look

at it why did you keep looking at me when you were saying that look at you I've got a lot more gray hair than when we then eight years ago when we did that video right um I think if you if you're looking at a job description you should have that next to you as you look at your resume and if you've got relevant experience just move just make sure it shows in your resume and then apply for the job so yes it will take you more time to apply for jobs that way looking for a job is a job in itself like there's no there's no easy route round you might get lucky and have a

friend turn around and say oh and will you come and work for me that happens but when you're looking for a job earnestly and you're going through recruiters make it easy for recruiters to look at your resume and know straight away yes this person's good because we do get an awful lot of advert response and an awful lot of applications and probably 98 of them are not a good fit so you want your application to stand out and be very obvious that you are worth taking to the next step my dear I was going to say if you remember anything I said today the first thing you should do on your resume is start with not a dissertation not a story just

a I am of this and I would like to be a vet this that that's it don't assume that that we know based on what you're doing or based on what you listed what that means your job is based on what you're doing what you want to do next it's going to help us drive this in the right right direction just just let us know right at the beginning one sentence I am a systems engineer looking to become a Solutions architect I am looking to get into sales like if there's a different direction you want to go in and and he'd have shown a really important point and that is that you should take a moment to

review what you're applying for and and especially when you get when you get up in years uh customized you know try to to summarize and customize how your resume looks based on the job that you're applying for it is true that nobody cares what I did in 1994. um but they probably care what I did in the last five years so that's a really good point one of my biggest bugaboos on on technical resumes because I did I used to do a lot of resume review on Discord was the infamous I want to make it look pretty because I don't think my experience is enough to get someone's attention content over pretty please you know no

Bolding no script no italics no scented resumes you know none of that the other thing that I that is a big Bugaboo for me is a lot someone out there and whoever it is I want to sit down and have a drink with you and tell you how wrong you are is don't put a table or a graph in the middle of your resume that says I have all of these skills and all of these certifications and everything one it is really not going to go through the applicant tracking system because you don't know what the user interface is for where your resume is going to be reviewed and two everyone loves to put as much in there as possible I have a

cissp and I'm really good at business I have a Security Plus and I'm a creative thinker no you put your certs in one area you put your technical skills in another and you know if you have business skills show how you have business skills don't just tell me you have business skills I managed a budget I had a team of ten I volunteered at besides Las Vegas and I manage 20 people and we built a knock have that in as something that you have done not just put it on there because you look talking to fill up space I have business skills so yes I'll also add columns to that I don't like columns on a resume so I know

it's tempting to have I'm gonna have my skills here my education down here and then here's my experience don't do that get an application uh ats's application tracking systems don't really like those things and as recruiters for external recruiters I we put cover sheets on your resume the moment we add a cover sheet it loses all that formatting and and it causes a complete mess so you don't I would not do columns please yeah and there are so many templates that are out there that I can tell you I'd say ninety percent of the resumes that I review they've been you know force-fed into a template that's really pretty simple left to right top to bottom boring just

very boring because again you don't know who's going to read it you don't know what user interface is going to read it so you want to make sure your content is coming through so another thing that job Seekers don't really think is their job or as their line is preparation Chris talk about preparing job search preparing for interview preparing for meeting with people what should people be doing uh so yeah there's a lot of stuff that you can do to to make sure you're on top of it and just speak to the recruiter first of all ask them right what you know if this is a video is this a telephone call is it a video

call how should I be prepared for it what should I wear um you know those kind of things you can like we'll ask and find that information out because we want you to put your best foot forward straight away so ask us all those questions anything you're not sure of have a piece of paper and a pen or a notepad or your phone open something where you can take notes and because that'll remind you to come back remind you to ask questions have a few questions prepared in advance there's certain ones that I quite like which is which are good for personal questions so why did you join this company how long have you worked here what makes you stay

here what do you think is the best thing about working here get those feelings if people can't answer that you might want to consider whether you want to work there so there's some questions you can have in advance that work really well and show that you're genuinely interested in the company as well there are others that you might want to jot down as the interview goes on so that's why it's useful to to be prepared and have your paper and stuff ready yesterday actually I was doing some resume reviewing while there was a really good talk on about preparing for for remote interviewing yeah remote interviews well will Baggett did a great presentation yesterday it's on our

YouTube channel yes so definitely watch that because he had some really good points of things to prepare for and even I there's quite a lot of the things I do before I have meetings with my clients right you know check the bandwidth make sure I'm working might do a quick check of the zoom calls and turn off all of my other apps yeah all of those sort of things so some really good stuff in there uh at one point that you made earlier that I want to make sure people uh didn't miss is that you were talking about listing some of the volunteer activities that you've done or anything that you've done within the community

and how that translates into some of the requirements within even if it wasn't part of your job uh or if you're more Junior in your experience level there's a lot of uh business skills that uh that you have to exercise here in the in community events right so don't don't lose track of how valuable that is as well um and then you you touched on my very favorite part I always tell people when I'm coaching them going into an interview you know to bring a notebook and to write things down it shows that you're interested in what they're saying right when they're talking and then at the end the thing that they always ask well this this means the interview is

over when you hear do you have any questions for us that means the interview is over right you say you crack your knuckles and then you say yes and you make it about them exactly like Chris said because people are self-interested and and for a minute they won't be the interviewer anymore they'll be a human being telling you a story about what it's like to work here what is the best thing you learned in the last year that's a really good question because if they haven't learned anything how interesting is this place right so just get them to tell you exactly like what Chris was saying about what it is like for them here what why

did you come here and is it is it still true for you the thing that you thought was gonna be interesting about this place do you still feel that way have you you know how have you grown here that's going to tell you if that's a good place for you based on what they're telling you can I I'm gonna add something to that because as your speaker there's reminded me we should write a book you're right um so also one of my favorite questions to to ask and this is because we don't always get the feedback that we really need from hiring managers sometimes we just get yeses and no's and and that's it and it takes days sometimes to get a

bit more than that from them um you won't always get the truth but you can ask the question so I always like to to con encourage people to and it can feel a bit awkward but you know how did you think I did in this interview what do you think I could improve um how do you feel that I would be a fit you know just open questions like that that they might say well I'll I'll think about and come back to you or I've got another three people to interview and then I'll tell you yeah they might avoid it but they may well just give you some some things to say and what you might

even find is you might find something comes out and you haven't discussed it in the interview and it's not in your resume but you have the experience so it might be oh this might be a challenge for you and it might just be your opportunity to say oh wow I realized we never covered that I actually did that here so you know there's always an opportunity there you might might miss out on something that would stop you getting the job and you might actually find out about it and manage to to get in there before before that happens an excellent point and don't be afraid to tell the recruiter afterwards they should be because trust me they're going to let

the managers know if the if the person felt uncomfortable or you know so that they can they can use that to to do a better job as well so two points I just want to summarize on what they were saying is realize that if you do volunteer in the community if you volunteer at a con if you volunteer on a meet-up if you do your own uh what is it at home you're on not Beowulf bolstery your own lab if you have your own lab sorry it's been a long two days so anything you do extracurricularly is that a word it sounded right it sounds right yeah sure that you're weaving that in to your resume and if you can find a

place to weave it into the resume be sure that you're taking notes so that you can answer that in the interview because a lot of times you may have learned something in your volunteer community work you know like you made a mistake and you learned something and you became better for that you don't really want to say you made a mistake at your work you know because they're like you don't want to do that and also realize that you need to do the preparation to find out what the company does how they make their money how they operate I can tell you I went into an interview really excited about this interview and the company was named

Kaiser and I thought it was Kaiser Permanente and I went in to talk about you know health care and all these great things I was going to do in customer service and sales and stuff and the guy just sat there and stared at me and said said we're Kaiser the steel company he was done you know we we both just sort of stared at each other like okay there's no conversation here to have um I was embarrassed someone had recommended me for the job so do your preparation please so follow up my favorite favorite thing so it's interesting job Seekers always think it's the job of the recruiter to do the follow-up it is but Kirsten what should job Seekers be

doing don't be afraid to to reach back out please don't just wait please don't assume that you've uh that there's a certain period of time that should go by uh they're gonna appreciate the reminder they're going to appreciate you the recruiter is going to appreciate I certainly that was my biggest weakness right it really really was me uh intending to get back to everyone but still a issue that I have uh but but honestly it they appreciate the reminders right and and go about it in more than one way like if you haven't made contact yet that's when you need to probably be creative don't just think the application is the only way um you're gonna find that some people

LinkedIn is the best way some people a lot of recruiters um for me it's Twitter you know I have people that are like well you never responded to my application and I can't you know you never responded to my email they they were creative and they found me on Twitter um so don't be afraid to to keep reaching out I think um thank you should job Seekers do thank yous I think so I think so I think you should especially if you get an interview uh reach out ask the recruiter for the hiring manager's information let them know that you're thankful for the time that they gave you Chris what what follow-up yeah I was

going to say thank yous for sure I mean nowadays A lot of these interviews are over Zoom you have access to their email addresses often when you see the invites so you can send them a follow-up email you know same day to say thank you very much for your time I really enjoyed it I'm very interested in the role you should certainly follow up with recruiters you know we we have a whole load of processes that hopefully mean that we're chasing you very quickly to try and get feedback so that then we then can go and speak to the hiring managers like our preference is to have the candidate feedback first so that when we speak to the hiring manager we

kind of have some idea what to expect and also we might have already discussed how we're going to deal with some of the anything that can perhaps have come up um so certainly chase us uh connect with us even connect with the hiring managers on LinkedIn as well and maybe when sending them a connection saying oh thanks I really uh appreciate your time I would even say that you can do that you know as soon as you've got the invite you should be checking out their LinkedIn hopefully you've worked hard to make sure that your LinkedIn profile is attractive and and is the same as what's on the resume there's not too many differences um so I would even say that you could

connect with them say oh we've got a an interview lined up for Tuesday I'm looking forward to speaking to you so connect with them beforehand uh so and also you've done a bit of background there and you can do some background on the company and on the person to see their background as well so one thing that there's no it's never really talked about is whenever you see a job position opening or an advert there's nothing on there that tells you how best to connect with the recruiter it will tell you how to apply for the job but there is no place on the position that position opening that says to connect with the person who you will

be talking to you will find them on Twitter you will find them on LinkedIn you will find them on Instagram you will find them on Facebook you will only be able to connect with them on email why I'm saying this is that you have to become proficient in all these various different ways of communicating because as Kirsten said you can connect with her on Twitter but if you don't have a Twitter account and you're trying to reach out to her on LinkedIn it's going to be a while versus I sent a message to Chris this morning on Twitter and he was like I never look at my Twitter I should have sent it on LinkedIn I knew that I

didn't even follow my own rule so let's let's sort of delve into that deeper um and I run into this question a lot do you have separate emails and social media accounts personal versus professional I didn't know she was going to say that but I was about to say this might sound a little provocative or sensitive but if I'm actively looking for a job I am cultivating the things that are public that I am saying I'm not saying don't be who you are but keep in mind I'm also not saying that we're all stalkers okay however if you post every single day my boss is a jerk I hate it here I hate working but it's just even if they're

not doing it consciously you it's just it's not very attractive appealing right professional something like that right and and but I mean there's different places where we should be able to voice you know be ourselves and be humans right but just just I just I think be careful um with with that so even if they don't even realize that if you're popping up in their feed every single day as the most miserable employee probably don't want to even talk to you right so just just cultivate that um and be cognizant of that particularly you know different spaces um are appropriate for for different types of content I think um like what what you're seeing on my

Facebook is very different than you know what you're seeing in in other areas so I'm going to put Chris on the spot so if you don't connect if you're not connected with Chris yet you will be by the end of this session um realize that Chris spends an awful lot of time on LinkedIn asking a lot of provocative questions and really engaging so how do people stand out on LinkedIn when they're engaging with you because as you said you post a position and someone says I'm interested and then they ghost you so what would be sort of if if someone was going to connect with you on LinkedIn and then wanted to engage with you on not engage because you're married

to a beautiful woman and have a beautiful daughter but how how would you talk about someone who wanted to be considered for one of your positions sort of wanted to stand out but didn't want to be a creepy stalker right this is the time I should say something I wear I met my wife on LinkedIn and that's how we go and get nice knot it was a different act though it wasn't dating app funnily enough um so I would say this like engage with my content um make genuine comments I I was speaking to somebody earlier on today and I kind of have a process that I think works really well and I I talked

to my consultants and other people and and really encourage people to to do it I call it the one three ten rule um so made the effort to post one piece of content a day whether that's sharing something of somebody else's but make it genuine content make it authentic and make it professional um three is three comments on other people's content so not just yeah like that or yes agree you know actual valid genuine con yeah if you're interested and passionate about what they've written about explain why and actually put that on there because that's the stuff that stands out for anybody it's what stands out for me people have taken the time to to actually engage truly

with it um and then the 10 part is look to connect with 10 people each day that are going to help you forward in whatever your goal is so if your goal is to get a new job connect with 10 people that would be the hiring managers in that job so that's just a process that I really like and and I think if you're genuine and authentic with the content you put and and the engagement that you do you're going to catch people's eyes so certainly I've I've you know established really good relationships over LinkedIn and have come to places like this and get to meet people that I've feel like I know really well but have never actually

met so it's so do we have any questions in the audience oh come on yes sir hi uh so you've talked about LinkedIn a lot maybe I'm too old school but uh I remember LinkedIn when it was first growing it was baby F1 and still have the knee-jerk reaction that I hope it does five a thousand times your campaign how do you handle it so I'm going to repeat the question because we have our at-home audience and let me know if I got it right so how do you connect with candidates who don't who don't just are not comfortable being on LinkedIn or who are just not there so what do you say to a candidate who just

doesn't want to be on social media doesn't want to be on LinkedIn I mean that's fine like we're not we're not at the stage where we're replacing resumes with LinkedIn yeah now that might happen or something similar to that might happen at some point but you don't need to be on LinkedIn you know there's pros and cons to it you know if you're not on LinkedIn it's hard to do that networking remotely and maybe get connected and build engagement with people that you're going to want to to try and better your chances of getting a job but likewise you're not also going to write something really silly that's going to stop you getting something as well

um so you don't have to be on LinkedIn I think it's a major part of the job search now and I would encourage anybody that's thinking about it to to actually get on there because I think it would hugely help the opportunities increase the opportunities you've got I would say that they're starting to see other I used to love peer lists I don't know whether anybody new peer list but it was a you know social media site that was just really First Security and GRC people and fortunately um it was also needed to make a profit so it it was wasn't able to do that so it doesn't exist anymore but there are other other companies working on similar

things the cloud security Alliance has got uh the circle platform so it's a there's a bit of a working process progress but there are places where security people can come together where it's kind of not all of the memes and some of the other rubbish that you have to deal with on LinkedIn sometimes so just real quick I love that you asked that question there's a there's a large chunk of the candidates that are qualified for the roles I'm looking for that aren't allowed to have a LinkedIn profile and then there's a whole other section that if they have a LinkedIn profile it just says Jane works at a company like that's literally it so um obviously there has to be other

ways right so that's when we have to be creative and and that's when I would say to anyone who isn't advertising themselves in that way to go the extra step for us so that we can find you so that we can discover you um by either researching the company it doesn't mean you can't go on LinkedIn by the way right you say let's say you don't have a LinkedIn account you don't want one that's cool you can still go on it you can still look at the company all the companies that you're interested in they probably have a LinkedIn page and then you go to people see who the recruiters are or see who the managers

are in the areas that you're interested in being in right the Departments that look like they're interesting to you who's in a management role send them a direct message right without a LinkedIn account you probably have to like pay money or something I don't know or get get a get a free account temporary one and just message them they'll respond and and realize that you could do a Boolean search through Google and most of it will bring up if you're looking I'm looking for Recruiters in cyber security who work at this company and in the Google search results you're going to get most of that profile but you can do the preview and get their contact

information so you can still use it as a directory without having an account any other questions okay so our last session of Higher Ground last day please take advantage we'll have the uh recruiters and career coaches available until five let's give a round of applause to my favorite recruiters