HG - Stupid Job Posts Don't Matter!

welcome back to higher ground this is yes it's kathleen on twitter and i'm the higher ground ring master what i like to call myself so when we're looking for a job a lot of the times we have to look at a job ad and we can all say they don't look great they actually can look pretty stupid so here we have one of my dear friends in the community kirsten renner who is going to tell us why stupid job as actually can help you in your job search hello b-sides las vegas i am so happy to be here again this year um do wish we were in person but we're doing what we got to do as we do um to

be safe so again um welcome i'm glad to see you all we're here today talking particularly about the challenge of terrible job descriptions and and what we should do about them and how we could make them into actual opportunities i'm kirsten renner this is sucky job ads and why we can make this a good thing so a little bit about me um i it's to the point actually where my identity is so tied to my my linkedin that i respond in in person to krenner you can call me kirsten you can call me krenner i'll respond either way i am the senior director currently at nevada nevada is a advanced analytics and cyber security firm

soon to be accenture federal services on the college dropout i do make that relevant to the conversation here shortly i started my career in the early 90s started with software engineering rolled into i.t wound up in recruiting us recruiters say nobody seeks out being a recruiter recruiting finds us and again that is also going to be a relevant part of the conversation we have today regarding specifically job descriptions uh i list down here a few of the prior speaking engines that i've had and uh without further ado so what do we do i think we can all agree that a lot of the job descriptions that we see are less than favorable we are all

in different stages of our careers our own personal career journeys are very unique what we've been through to get us to the point where we are today i will be tying the um responding to job descriptions into how wherever you are personally in your journey you should respond and each of us i will say particularly women people of color those of underrepresented uh groups marginalized groups they face enough we face enough challenges don't we while we're trying to while we're trying to get through what to do next in our careers um and i think gosh even the you know neurodiversity and all the invisible types of disabilities and features as i like to call them

they they they're it's special for all of us right when we're trying to deal with our challenges so all that to say um i i feel like i'm going to turn this for you hopefully into a project that can be fun and can be used to your benefit now dark tangent put on the defcon career hacking village site that half of the people in the hacking community in particular reported that they don't know how to find a job so this is relevant to half of us at least and again women and people of color statistically i don't have the statistics on everybody but they they report that they're uh less likely to apply to a job that doesn't

look like a good match so um a little bit more on that later but i think i'm certain actually i know that we will never be able to get all the employers to get it right we'll never stop trying to teach them to help them do a better job but it is more realistic for us the candidate pool and for the recruiters and the candidates to figure out how to get around uh there are many challenges within the searching portion of our career journeys like the interviews and like the hiring managers so let's just make this beginning of this step a little bit easier for everyone so today's agenda is to think of this as kind of an engineering

problem if you will if you're not an engineer you understand engineering enough to know that one of the first things you're going to do when you're looking to design a solution if you will for an engineering problem you're going to speak to your stakeholders and your customers and your clients and you're going to build a requirements list right we know about gathering requirements we know about defining them we know about sorting them and prioritizing them then we run into blockers we run into problems we run into challenges and we need to create solutions for them i will attempt to do that here i will talk about uh some of those solutions include avenues for connecting

it is the key it is the primary way for us to reach the finish line that we're looking for and again effective interviewing as well so first step think of the job ad once you have seen it what is it likely and indicative of it is indicating to you that that company that posted the job is probably hiring now don't pay attention to how good or bad that is now what should we do and this is fun this is fun this isn't exactly stalking think of it more as ocean but what you're going to do is you're going to do a little bit of research about that company so let's pretend that you are looking to

take on um an incident response position that's what you're ready to do next all right i see it posting for abc company they're doing uh they're looking for an incident responder all right or or it's a position that's like senior knock um maybe that's a good way to get there i remember i remember hearing that that's a good way to get in the door okay we're looking at it so the first thing you're going to do now i know this company's probably hiring now i know this company is probably looking for so they already have available this type of position or they're looking to get into that type of that's that's the two things that are

evidenced in that job posting either they have the position available probably or they're looking to get into it so maybe they are responding to a proposal and they're trying to get the work so now you you likely know these things about the company now what are you going to do well when i say go look at their website or go look at their linkedin duh everybody does that but i'm way less interested in nothing against marketing i'm way less interested in what marketing is telling you about the company they're telling you what they want you to think about the company that's cool i'm glad that they did that but it's way less important to you than what you're

going to find out by taking it another level and saying who else works there and here's a cool thing linkedin does when you search a term uh within the company it can take you to it says do you want to see position results or do you want to see people results click people real quick figure out who else in that company has that job title if nobody listed as an employee of that company has that job title well remember when i said that the job posting indicates that they either do the work or want to do the work probably they want to do the work but aren't doing it yet if nobody there does that okay so

there's a thing you just discovered in our little ocean project so let's say some people are doing it cool let me take a moment to look at three of their profiles on linkedin how did they get there did they get there within that company what did you just find out that there's growth opportunity there that that company gives you the opportunity or do they have to move from company to company every time they were looking to get to the next level you just discovered another thing about whether or not there's room to grow there whether or not there's opportunities there for training and so forth so you don't have to stalk every single person at the company but take a look at

who's doing the type of work you would like to do now you can take it a step further if you'd like and again this is not as time consuming as it seems everything i just described you could do this in an hour you could do this in 30 minutes you could jump over to twitter boy twitter tells us a ton tells us what people are saying to and about their co-workers what the conversations are that they're having about maybe opportunities that they have or don't have and so forth we talk about our best days and we talk about our worst days right there on twitter so take a look at there at what the social footprints are

telling you about what it's like to be an employee in abc company especially for an incident responder okay so once you've discovered these things about the company you can ask yourself because remember we talked about you were going to build a requirements target list for yourself a little bit more on that later do these things match up with where you are in your journey all right real quick i did try to redact anybody that didn't give me permission even though this was it was just on twitter um we have different types of job postings out there and you guys you people talk about it a lot i i got all of these examples a couple of i got in one day i just said

let me just go out there looking to see who's complaining about job posts today may actually i added a list at the last minute because she said something nice i did get her permission so there's her beautiful face um that was a rare gem i rarely see you all going wow cool job description that's not what you say um so there are some that are very nonsensical they're saying sometimes i'm looking for an entry level blah blah blah and there's nobody at that level of their career that's entry level that's not even a thing what did you think about what you were doing here so i get it i hear you there are the ones that make

no sense and they're the ones that are crazy oh i'm looking for a junior software engineer with a cissp and a phd are you now yeah and i want them to work at minimum wage what okay that's crazy but we'll talk about how to build those questions and address those questions in your journey all right are there usually hidden messages well there's two ways to look at this if it says fast-paced environment do they really mean they want you to do 17 things maybe maybe because they're under man staffed understaffed maybe because they just lack resources based on the size of the company um maybe they're a startup there are that might be true and that fits certain

personalities right i've always been the type of person that i'm not saying i never complained about it but i i like having 10 000 things to do so it depends on what your gym is based on where you are in in this stage of your career does self-starter mean they're going to give you nothing they're going to provide you with nothing i don't know everybody doesn't also have the same to be fair depending on the size of the company the bandwidth or the resources or even the the timing that would be allowed for um having an irad team or having a team that they bring in that they call like mini bench or junior bench that they

train and clear and stuff like that so it's super cool if you catch companies talking about stuff like that or better yet remember the ocean project if you see employees of a company talking about this sort of thing hey you know we trained our interns or we have a fellowship program or we took all the new grads out to lunch or we went and threw axes with them and it was great and they all got their certs so we went bowling that's showing you that this is the type of company that's providing those types of opportunities so we're putting out the companies whether they mean to or not are putting a lot of information out

there about themselves so when i asked you all and this isn't probably uh this is definitely not scientific data because i don't have the file account for that but um half of you said what do i do when i see a crappy job description i skip it so you're taking away from yourself the possibility of getting through that crappy job description to finding a really cool opportunity so don't skip it just yet i do understand i get it i hear you if the recruiter's bad if the job description is bad and you feel like you're not going to make the investment yourself you're not going to give them the time if they didn't take the

time to get it right i hear you i understand you but um it is possible that you're missing out on a cool opportunity by doing that i do have just a couple disclaimers disclaimers usually happen at the beginning but i built this slide deck so many times that here it is on slide whatever okay um number one i hear you i read your mind um you are asking or you're about to type and discord and ask me later uh but what about the job descriptions that are written specifically for one person does it happen it does have i done it i have um but it was a long time ago um here's why it happens

and here's what you can do about it so say that the customer has an issue and they say within within this uh scope of problem only someone who uses or built this specific tool and this is a real example so i'm not going to give you the tool because then you're going to know who all the people are that built the tool but there's like five of them um we did end up hiring a couple of them but in this case um the other people that were trying to win the work the other companies that were trying to win the work really screwed this up and they said you must have xyz tool experience 20 years

well it was just built five years ago or less than five years ago so that's awful nobody's going to have that experience what might you have equivalent type experience what does the tool do think about what the tool does what type of tool is it have you used similar types of tools you can address that now in this instance like i described um we really needed the people who who built the tool and that's why it was written the way that it was i actually came up with um a mini metaphor if you will uh when i was recording this talk um with kathleen we all know kathleen we all love kathleen um and i used her as an example and i s

because i could see her face if i knew spam better i'd i can see his face i'd use him as an example but if i if i know you and i know what you've done and i know what you're capable of and i want to hire you i know that you can do what i need i'm gonna either copy it right out of your linkedin profile or whatever the case may be in the kathleen example you know she pioneered things she designed things she was the patriot of things that are now occurring in our community so i might be capable of doing what she has done but i haven't done what she's done because she did it so what would i do in this

example when i pretend that i want her job um when i grow up uh well i could say although i did not meet this requirement of designing programs or getting conferences to do these different types of things what i have done is i've assisted in those types of things or i volunteered my time over in this other place doing something similar you get my point so yes it happens i'm not going to spend a ton of time on these items these are the items where um the company is straight up just saying something that maybe they thought was clever or cute that is actually offensive and disgusting and it's a it is clear indication that you don't want

to do business with this type of company in those instances you do run away just run away it's not worth your time i will not give them a lot of attention but i'll show you super fast these are real they're horrible if you have time to read them take a screenshot they're gross um but again don't spend a lot of time if if you're not interested in a company that thinks it's hilarious that would mention just a 4x female french italian now gross so um if you if you have spent any amount of time in social lately this i don't know if it's because everybody's been cooped up in the house too long or i don't know what's going wrong with

people there's been a ton of this this lately uh companies being called out for really not okay behavior um not okay all right back to your target list now you're going to flip it around and you're going to build your own requirements list for you for you the candidate here i am in my career journey here's what i need so what's important for me what do i need and what do i desire and what's a deal breaker for me so if the company talks like that that's a deal breaker for me okay and you're going to build that requirements list for yourself now um keep keep in mind when you look at a job description and we'll get to one

here in a second they are supposed to like legally to be compliant they are supposed to advertise their job based on what you actually have to have to do it a requirement qual and then some preferred skills sometimes they flip it around we'll look at one of those i want you to do the same thing do you want flexibility do you want training do you want to be able to grow do you just want money do you really want pto do you want to flex schedule figure out what matters to you um i'm going to skip what i was just going to say did you see what i did there i redacted my thoughts okay so here is i know who

wrote this description by the way i know what they were trying to say and i know what this is i know this is this is either like a an exploit dev or or ornari position i know what they were trying to do but i'm pretending i'm you right now and i'm looking at this and i have questions i have reasonable questions first of all remember when we were talking about requirements and preferred why in the world do you require so much and then be nice if you have these things it should literally be the other way around that's i think they flipped it i think somebody was tired when they wrote this okay so step one

you say you want me to have a polygraph but you don't tell me anything else well they can't shouldn't tell you the type of polygraph so i want you to make note of that i want you to think to yourself well there's different types of polys and what if i had one in the past pastor what if i passed a poly in the last five years but i didn't use it so these questions are all smart they all make sense all your questions are valid keep track of them and we'll figure out what to do with your questions here in a second there's two things i want you to do with your questions in a second so i won't go to all the

bullets but i'm going to go through a few because i'm going to run out of time um remember i mentioned that i was a college dropout so actually the job i'm doing now requires a degree so does experience count that's a reasonable question figure that out ask the question so the step level one when you have these questions you're going to start with the recruiter we'll get to that soon also but you're going to come to the table with the questions good recruiters will always always make the time to figure out your answers they're not going to they shouldn't make it up on the spot they should say when they don't know i'll find out

and they should always make the time for you that you need so i did not i said i was going to go through all of them but when you group together all these different tools well in fairness they said etc but i'm just doing an example of a another open source tool that you didn't bother to mention so make note of that question um i this was out of all of the bullets this is the bullet that made me the angriest um i'm not a software engineer however when i look at all these different tools and you this should have at least been two bullets if i've done python and perl but i've never done c plus plus or

java is that the same it's definitely not the same so shame on them for for grouping them all together this way i don't know if they were just looking for many different levels and they grouped it all together or what but that's not okay so we'll get to the end here when you see words like strong or good by the way this is not of ccp compliant this is not compliant you can't do that you can't use a subjective term and then base a judgment on it so your question to them would be how how do you go about quantifying what is strong is three years strong do i pass a test to be seen as strong

they shouldn't have written that under the basic qualifications that's allowed to unpack and we could do this all day but we'd run out of time so what i'm wanting you to do when you have these questions know that they are valid know that they are reasonable keep track of them and you will address them when we get further along in the process so i already gave the perfect example of how you can do the job that requires a degree without a degree so this is also a great opportunity for you to ask the employer okay cool what benefits do you offer what budget do you have for educational reimbursement do you have training plans for people

is there a growth plan this is a great place for you to ask those questions certs what do you mean um do you offer training programs for certifications starts can be really expensive um you say you want me to have a sam's cert are you paying for it cissp what that's really hard are you providing workshops on the side little lunch and learns stuff like that um good companies are doing those things by the way recruiters this is really important i'm not just saying that because i was one or because i do that um repeating is important it is fairly certain that good companies have good recruiters and not vice versa do they make mistakes yes have i made

mistakes yes did they drop the ball probably um they they might need nudges and reminders just like sometimes hiring managers do as well but those good recruiters are going to take the time to take that list of questions that you built and address all of them for you and then the next level you're going to do once you get through making sure now never forget that you are your own best advocate nobody is more of an expert on you than you okay so make the recruiter into your personal agent they should be focused on you they should not be focused on the job they should be finding out about you they should be asking you more questions about you

what you like what you don't like what you want to do what you have done than pressing into the job description for you more than likely the company has more than one job open they should be considering whether or not instead of forcing you into this job they want to fill whether or not you could be a fit somewhere else turns out i'm talking to this candidate and they look like the perfect fit for this position according to what i can tell and found out while i was talking to them because i did my job properly that they would way rather do this other thing so i'm going to provide that opportunity to them as well

then you make it with the good recruiters help to the interview table and what you're going to now do as your own best advocate with the help of the really good recruiter you're going to ask the questions that you identified in the job description and also remember we talked about how i don't have kathleen's quals but i have other things that i've done that show an interest and then and an ability to learn how to do those types of things i'm going to address them i'm going to say although i don't have this i've done this is that okay flip it around and ask the interviewer the question they this always stops them in their

tracks and can turn it into a really good and real and human level conversations say to them you know i don't have this thing under the quals but i do have this let me ask you something did when you were applying for this job was there anything you didn't have and how did you get past that how did the company help you get past that how did the company look past the fact that you didn't have this thing and figure out that you were capable of doing it never forget i said that that's really cool and then as a bonus also ask them what have you learned here in the last year that has nothing to do with job

descriptions but it's really cool you should always say that okay so yes covet has really changed things for us um you're watching a pre-recorded talk right now and we're all attending this conference virtually that's okay i think that it expanded i know that it expanded the ability for a lot more people based on timing whatever's going on in their lives at the time and finances frankly can really be expensive hopping around trying to get to all these conferences it expanded our ability to to network like this which is key um within most of the conferences nowadays and i do know it is happening uh 99 sure what's happening here there's mock interviews and resume workshops

these are really great i can't say enough good stuff about it um go and attend these these sessions and when you do while you're being mock interviewed flip it around and ask the mock interviewer can i test out interviewing you you're both going to learn in that moment just ask say i noticed you phrased this question this way what if it was phrased this other way and then you're both going to learn from that experience so here is the bottom line every time you see a job posting more than likely you just figured out who's hiring now this is an opportunity for you to figure out what does this company stand for what does the face of the company look like

who else is working there what can i discover by watching their career paths within that company does this match up with what i want to do determine if it's a good fit for you at this time and then be prepared always to address anything that didn't look like a match for you so nobody's better or smarter or more technical than anybody else as much as we all just have to be willing and able to learn the next best thing and this is where i'm going to pop all over to discord and take your questions so thank you so much besides for this opportunity and i look forward to talking to everybody thank you kirsten for such a fabulous

presentation i know that everyone looks to hear more from you about what is going on with those stupid job posts and as long as you and i have been in the community we've heard a lot of the same complaints and concerns and criticisms and some of them are coming up in the discord and i want to remind everyone to put your questions in discord and we'll add them to our conversation here so first off let's talk about this challenge that we have in the tech community where there are hiring managers or recruiters who put in hey you know i want to hire someone for this job i want at least 10 years experience obviously the person doesn't know that

the job is or the technology has only been around for two or three years a lot of people sit there and say well i don't even want to work for a company who doesn't know that but let's talk a little bit about how to handle that situation but then also give a little background on why that situation happens so why don't you start with how that situation comes about and then how best to handle it okay first let me apologize on behalf of olive recruiting speaking for all of you guys out there all the recruiters we're sorry um i think it's a combination of a lot of things i think it's a combination of and this is not an excuse uh i mind

you but i think it's a combination of maybe someone being overwhelmed or not noticing or or the description going through the wrong hands not getting approved by the right people hopefully it slips through the cracks also if you're doing that little research example we talked about notice if it happens all the time with the same company or maybe just maybe just one fell through the cracks and it wasn't quite right i think that there are also instances where there's multiple different levels of an opportunity available and rather than post three or five posts they try to smush too many things into one slot and you're thinking maybe as a candidate well if you cared more is

this you know this could be indicative of how you care about me as an employee if you don't care enough about me as a candidate to do better well they should do better um especially you know if it's going through the right approvals and it's a matter of process it's a matter of what's scalable i've seen things work at small companies and as those companies grow and double in size and get larger whatever was working before it didn't doesn't work anymore um and again not an excuse but you can probably liken that to other similar type problems that companies have as as they grow so initially that that could be why things like that happen what should you

do about it communication is going to be key every time and through events like this in particular in the networking um arena as well as you know going either so on social or through linkedin in particular every good recruiter is going to answer their their dms i when i recruited uh years ago um not that many uh i was pr i was that was one of the things i was most guilty of and it stressed me out and kept me up at night uh losing track of me i never meant to do it um now thank god i can just say oh i'm going to pass you to my friend drake or you know to one of my people who's going

to get back to you just because i used to try to own everything and it got to be too much there was just too many people to talk to so communication is going to be the way to get through and you can put it right out there you start with the recruiter and if that doesn't work look for a hiring manager in the company send a message and say hey i noticed you're looking for this although that product hasn't existed that long i do have this or this or you can say you know i noticed you're looking for a junior person you know maybe that was a typo um but here's what i do have let's start the

conversation do like icebreakers right i don't know what dating is like but you have to come up with an icebreaker right sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't so it's probably similar to that yes i think that those are all really good points because so many people in job search think that it's a one-two or a slam dunk when in actuality it is developing relationships and you know being able to talk to the recruiter talk to the hiring manager and sort of explain to them do you realize what this technology is where it came from and how it is not possible to have 10 years of experience but this is the experience that i have built because

something that i've always said is how about we do some reverse education we do reverse engineering in this industry but how about some reverse education talking to recruiters there are great tech recruiters like pierson but then there are also recruiters who every day they are hiring for something different one day it's sales people the next day it's engineers and that is because the company is not putting a lot of investment in their recruiting staff and so sometimes you have a really great opportunity to cultivate that recruiter cultivate that hr person and sort of provide them a little education as to what are some of the things that are in that job description i want to go to another question in here

kirsten that you know and we hear about this all the time you know people they they go through the painful process of building the resume which you know we still have people doing resume reviews so please take advantage of that they fill out the job description even though you know they fill out the application even though the job description sucks and then they don't hear from the recruiter or the sourcer what are your steps that you recommend that a candidate goes through in that situation there are there are many circumstances where the volume of people uh that that aren't of it uh it are so great in some instances where the recruiters are just looking elsewhere

can you believe that it's true they're not even looking in the inbox or at least not as often as they should they're supposed to my team for example is supposed to disposition every day um you're going to have to do communication there as well you're going to have to reach out you're going to have to say hey i applied what should my next steps be don't start with what you think is the manager start with recruiting um if what recruiting doesn't work then you know because you're going to linkedin you're saying who recruits we'll go back to abc company who recruits an abc company well this person has the recruiter title send them a message hey i applied to

the xyz requisition i i haven't heard back do you have any pointers what should i do next is is it something that do you have a question that i can answer for you that will that will help if that doesn't work who's who who's the head of recruiting go there if that doesn't work who's the vp of the engineering department of the software engineering department so forth try that i wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't work i'd love to hear from you if you do all those things and it didn't work and then that would be a whole other issue but i think that's a really good way to start and i also think that a proactive step

is if you had that initial interview you should always be asking at the end of that you know as you said earlier abc always be closing so always ending up whatever tech interview phone screen whatever communication you have always ask them what is your overall process i need to understand when i should be hearing from someone next and then ask them also who should i be following up with next and when should i be following up with them that should be your standard closing for any communication that you have with any recruiter or hiring manager so that you have the lay of the land not that you hang up and it's it's sort of you know just

out there and you know the ether we have another question here about company review sites like glassdoor sort of you know what are the pros and cons of those i have a few but what are yours um i think that what i talked about before looking in in social footprints seeing seeing real conversations happen might be a lot more meaningful nothing against class door in particular but i feel like that is more of a place where people are are complaining um or they look for a place to it's on what is what is the site there's a site that you can do for your restaurants you go to the restaurant or you go to the store and you don't

like it yelp like kind of you don't see as much positive stuff there unfortunately um there there is a process to go through as a company if someone posts something and and it's just flat out not true there is something that that they do to kind of adjudicate if you will um if those things are real so they should be uh they're having the same types of um reviews on indeed as well um and again look at what the real live conversations that that people are having um now it's i would put a lot more salt in the positive things that people are saying right because it's almost like people are are less invested or

compelled to take a moment to go say something positive so i would put a lot more weight on that as you're reviewing those things if somebody says something by the way that is is a flat out deal breaker for you right like i was abused in this place or something like that sure um that's that's something to to make note of but i think that this is also where networking is really important that you know expanding your network beyond your buddies and friends and your colleagues is making sure that you have a wide enough network so that you can rely on people's advice and opinion that you respect versus looking at something that you know company

reviews you know someone's talking about yelp indeed glass door you know there's there's a variety of things that can be taken into consideration with that which is you know people using that as a gripe page using it as a place to you know be the most destructive that they can and at the same time there may not be enough people out there who even know to put a review on glassdoor to say it's you know a good place to work so always rely on your your own network you know you can look at something like glassdoor or indeed but also have a strong network so you can be sure that you're asking the people whose opinion you respect so we have

another question which is you know if you feel that you are very you know well packaged as far as having the right skills and experience but you're not getting the attraction of recruiters to your job to your job search what are some things that you should be doing to make yourself be more attractive to or valuable to a recruiter to be to be found by them i wonder if that's what it means yeah it's it's to be found i mean i think that we run into this a lot with um our community in the sense that people have experience and they have the certs and they know the languages but at the same time they're just not

getting picked up by a recruiter for contact for a job so i keep i keep saying we should you should reach out to them um and you could do it by figuring out very quickly what the what the email address format is at that place send them a direct email if you need to go to linkedin to see who recruits there and also if you're addressing when you look at the job description if you're customizing um what you're submitting as much as is reasonable for that position and you're saying hey joe blow uh recruiter joe i noticed that um that you're looking for this and that the requirement is this please take notice that i did this

and you know take take it take the time i say we have like something three to five seconds i heard before probably i think i heard it at one of the b-sides talks i think there's three to five seconds for capture time in marketing they say something similar like what's your tag line how are you going to get me compel me to look forward right off the bat the first thing you should put at the very tippity top is i'm of this and i want to be of that so this is your resume this is you compelling me the recruiter or the first person looking at the resume you're doing the keyword search and we're looking for those keywords and

maybe you didn't have them but what do you have so you look at the job description and you look at what they're looking for and you make note of it either in your your your cover real short not cover letter not a dissertation your opener when you're sending it in your opener message hi i'm a this i'm a systems engineer looking to get into solutions architecture and here's why compel me the recruiter the person reviewing your resume to keep reading well i think also it goes to something that we point out in many presentations is looking at the job description and being sure that you've customized your resume to what the job description says because if it is a company of any size

it will have the resume go through the applicant tracking system which will basically pick out the keywords that are needed for specific job postings and if you don't match up to that even though you in your mind say well that's that that ets is not going to pick that up right kirsten depending on the app contracting system and depending on if they uh if they set up that but a lot of the larger companies that have you know the larger volume that we talked about before of applications coming in they're going to set up a script every that runs every night and it's only is only picking up those things right so the clear job website has

something it works it works opposite of that so they are they are scraping for us every night and giving to us the resumes that match right that's really cool right so that's that's where the keywords come in so think about that happening and that doesn't mean put every dag on keyword that exists out there but but take a moment to to be customizing your application for that particular job and then those cool tools out there those cool machines are going to pick you up and put you in my inbox but take a moment to to just tell me what what you want to do don't make me have to figure it out like somebody i have actually had candidates say well

if you just read my resume you'll know what i am do me a favor give give me a break hey i don't understand all of it and and i have resume fatigue at the end of the day or at the end of the week so just just do us all a favor and just say i'm a this and this is what i want to be and that's going to compel me i'm going to go you know what i never would realize that especially based on how crazy the formats are sometimes yeah yep so we have another question which unfortunately we're going to have to you know apologize for the industry again um which is getting feedback from a

recruiter if you're not getting the job i think that you know we run into some challenges that we need to explain to candidates that there are some hr legal departments that say you can't give any kind of feedback i mean this is one challenge that many of our transitioning veterans have a chat a problem with is that in the military when you're going for your next sort of rung on the ladder and if you don't make it the military will tell you this is the training you need this is the cert you need and they'll provide you the feedback as to why you didn't make your next goal and then they'll make sure you get there

we don't do that in the job seeker community and you know a lot of companies really work on candidate experience and letting you know where you are in the stage and they can't technically give you full feedback um but some will at least thank you for your time so kirsten your thoughts and how to deal with this so think of think of the recruiter as as not just you know your agent um you know you're your own best advocate you tell them what to say for you but also they are kind of a liaison if you will between the group of candidates and the group of hiring managers who all by the way have day jobs and we

have to track them down we have to find them we have to get feedback from them some of them fill out amazing scorecards and i know everything i ever wanted to know about how your interview went and some of them just go they literally have a symbol or they have a symbol and that's all i know um so it's it's a a little bit of a challenge on both sides for the for them to discover uh for the recruiter to discover what the hiring managers israel isn't telling them so they don't always know but but addressing up front what you think may have been an issue maybe um at the initial stage or at any stage

that you went through say well i noticed that this happened be cognizant of you know read the room what happened um i noticed that this happened i just wanted to address that yeah it's it's hard because this is again where having a really good network of recruiters is going to be helpful for you because i remember my first besides higher ground 2015 that somebody actually was having a lot of trouble with their um getting a job and we talked a lot about you know what they were going through and what kind of interviews they were doing and they had built in their mind a specific impression of what they thought was going on and i was

able to go and talk to some of the recruiters that they had interviewed with and it was something completely different but this is where you sort of get into this hr legal issue of there are things that hr departments really can't tell you they can't tell you that it wasn't you it wasn't the right sort of culture fit you were too academic or and they were not you know sort of in the academic frame of mind this is where you really need to make sure that you work with a lot of recruiters have them in your network and touch base with them they're going to provide you with the really best feedback so we're running out of time kirsten do you

have any last minute things to say and share with our our audience i think that uh all the speakers and all the volunteers at all the b sides and the other uh conferences that we have one thing i can tell you for sure that i'm certain of is is people who give their time are helpful type people so they are going to be good places for you to begin as well when you're looking for answers and solutions start with one of them start with a speaker or a volunteer they'll get you in the right place wonderful well thank you everyone thank you kirsten for again providing your expertise and your perspective to the community we really

appreciate you and love all that that you do for the community bye everyone