BSidesIOWA 2015 Track2: Hacking the Job Market by Josh More

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so uh this talk is on hacking the job market it's basically a lot of reconnaissance a little bit of psychology uh some tech not a lot of tech so if that's what you're expecting great if not there's a tech heavy presentation next door uh so let me introduce myself those who saw my presentation have seen this joke this is me I've been at this for a while and this is what I do I have a company I teach people how to do stuff this is bside so I'm not going any further into that so foundations when you're looking for a job in today's market you need to start with a base Foundation of uh consolidation of online presence uh

typically this is a website people are doing you you know different things these days there are lots of ways you can do it but generally it's a website that collects all of the blog posts papers you've written presentations you've given articles books anything like that in one spot so you have control over how you appear online and that's really what you're going for is as much control as you have uh over your online presence over your offline presence over the companies you Target and how you present yourself to them without this Foundation the job search will fail with the foundation you can land a job that matches you rather than trying to modify yourself to fit a hole

that that has been left by somebody who's left a job um that way you don't leave the job too quickly you know you can really grow in the job and and it works with you so that's the fundamental idea behind what we're going over so the goal with the the public site is to own the internet so you want to search on Google Bing and Yahoo and basically control as many of those hits as you can uh a lot of of us Focus first on Google because that's what we use but it's important to remember that with the change in Firefox a lot of people's default search engine has shifted to being Yahoo and anybody on Windows using

IE has always defaulted to Bing so you have to have a presence there too now how do you get these hits um if you're old enough to have a nice work history behind you you can start repurposing other things you've done uh if you're still in school you know you can repurpose papers uh presentations you've given there and just try to get as much stuff out there as you can on as many different sites as you can like scrib SlideShare things YouTube things like that because the way all of these search engines work is the crosslinking raises the ranking and if you want everything interesting to be at the top so all the embarrassing stuff

you've done over your life is towards the bottom and people don't find it as easily um if you're in a working environment and you're behind the scenes like most of us tend to be you need to slowly move towards having more public work done that can mean getting involved in the marketing efforts that can mean going to conferences like this and presenting and oh it was recorded it's online I didn't know you know things like that uh help build you this online presence sometimes for people who are largely in a deep internal position it can take more than one job hop to get fully public the way you need to get the job you really want

um other ways you can do it is working in open source you know volunteer for for different groups uh do freelance work uh there's a lot of freelance work out there right now uh anybody here identify as a millennial anybody okay a few um your life will largely be freelance work that's where the economy is going and that's what's being expected of people your age um a lot of people my age are having a hard time dealing with that you know a lot of older people are losing jobs and they just can't get a permanent job but many of them have managed to make more money than they ever made as a single employee working for multiple

companies and multiple freelance you know environments um if you're looking to do this kind of thing in the open source Community uh software development is the Classic route you know you can learn good skills that way but the need is in writing manuals inline help online howtos things like that you know open Source technology is wonderful but since it's written by Engineers it has crappy documentation and really poor project management so if you're looking to build uh a presence quickly you can step into one of those roles and it it'll work really well for you so with that in mind if you're employed you might need to know how to leave and when it's time to leave is

really either you've grown out of the job or the job has grown away from you and most companies go through four phases in their growth now they can go backwards it's not always a direct relatively linear progression um but you know when when a company starts out it's usually up you know the stereotypical is the guy in his garage right you know it could be a couple of people in their basement it could be a small startup but it tends to run under what I call cowboy style management where people are you know what needs to be done they just get it done and they move on and as the business grows grows you have to start

trusting your people you know around 20 to 30 people it shifts from cowboy style management to a trust-based model where the people owning the company kind of trust what what individuals are doing and give them the power to do it well when they grow bigger around the 50 to 75 range that trust starts to break down because the person who owns the company is no longer hiring all those people and you start getting some light structure in on the management side and then as it grows bigger you get more structure and eventually at the really big side you have multiple layers of middle management what most people find is they're most comfortable at one of these

four points and when a company grows or shrinks below one of those levels it's time to go so it's important to kind of know who you are how you feel the most comfortable where you feel the most comfortable so you can identify when that transition point is coming so when it hits you're prepared and you're not caught in a layoff or just feel like you hate going into work stuff like that I mean there are other reasons why you can leave you know there are job you know managers they can come in there are bad projects you can get thrown out of the bus by people but most of the people who make strategic job decisions I find

it's because one of these job transitions um now how do you identify when these are coming you know it's you can keep your eye on the business kind of what's going on in the business how are people hiring you know how's it growing or shrinking you can also watch the industry and the industry tells you what's going on job-wise through job ads and if you if you watch kind of how jobs flow you'll know that here in the Midwest you know particularly in Iowa you tend to get jobs after Minnesota gets jobs Minnesota gets jobs after they get jobs on the coasts so if you start setting up RSS feeds for job titles that interest you in major markets on the

coasts and then in Omaha uh Chicago and Minneapolis you will get probably 3 to two months lead time on when those jobs will start hiring here and you can be ready for that as well okay now before we uh go on into the the job piece I want to talk a little bit about resumés um resumés fail typically because there are too many we're in a global economy we're in a highly networked economy which means every job opening can get hundreds to thousands of resumés and what hiring managers are going to do is filter as quickly as they possibly can to get down to rums they actually care about nobody's going to read a thousand

resumés and base them on the merits many people won't even read 20 but generally speaking you try to knock it down to about 20 and then you know filter below that to get what you want so often The First Cut is college degree so if you don't have a college degree you're off often never your resume may never get seen um then it looks for certifications looks for high salaries looks for experience you just trying to winnow the list down to as small as they can get so today most resumés are written to get search engine attention and to drive discussion and that's it nobody makes hiring decisions based off of resumés anymore so what about cover letters now

in the old days you would include a cover letter with the resume to entice people to read the resume well today you know with a thousand cover letters nobody's going to read those anyway so you can be bold you know some people are doing some really interesting stuff with infographics has anybody seen the My Little Pony tech resume anybody Okay Google that when you get home it's it's brilliant the guy has basically created a resume that filters him out of 80% of all jobs but the ones that like him he's going to stick out above everybody else it's a perfect example of targeting um you can Target the similar way with cover letters um what you want to do is

basically in 5 to 30 seconds explain why somebody should hire you and ask for a meeting now that's the traditional way to do it other ways to do it involve meeting people at conferences you know and uh basically tracking people down through social media through the internet and getting the invite in because the key to success is to get past this filter process you know you want to come in the back in the back door and avoid all of hr's filters so that when they want to hire you the hiring manager or the CEO or whoever goes to HR and says hire this person and then they make you go through the steps but it's already decided you don't have

to worry about being filtered out you're just you know c um dotting the eyes and crossing the teas any questions you know that's kind of the foundation stuff any questions at this point all right so let's talk a little about stories humans are hardwired for story uh we want to know meaning we want to learn meaning from others and this is because we've evolved to learn from other people's mistakes so you know we really like hearing what others have done how others have screwed up we like laughing at them when they've screwed up which is why I'm sharing some of the the images I am um so in a job interview situation you have to be interesting

without being arrogant and what's really interesting is a lot of people start out when they're young as very arrogant and then instead of learning to be interesting they simply stop telling the interesting stories so this is a really good skill to try to learn is how to tell a good story how to be interesting and not come across as a bragger so how do you do this one way is I go with this index index card approach so on an index card represents a problem on that in index card you need to note why was the problem significant who is affected when you know who is affected you've created the cast of characters for your story

with whom will the interviewer be sympathetic that's the lead character what challenges stood in the way that's the villain what didn't work that's the hero's journey because you want to identify this is the path I took otherwise it's just hey problem problem solved you're done and you want to have a little bit of a lead in and I'll get into that in a little bit on the back you want to summarize that story in one line and that story then goes in the resume and the resume becomes this list of stories and you don't worry about length you know if you've been in the job market for five years you know you might have two pages if you've been in

the job market for 30 years you might have a lot more length at this point doesn't matter because you're going to be doing a self filter before you send it out so you basically put the stories in chronological order build the master resume and then when you're ready to go you identify these are the stories I care about to I want to tell in the interview you take everything else out that's how it gets down to one page so then you tell the story now how do you tell a story this is a classic story structure you have an in initial hook which is then partially resolved and then you have a secondary hook partially resolved and then you've got

the primary hook and you end you don't want to resolve the story when you're telling it because you want them to invite you in for an interview so it's about kind of leading the discussion planting enough information as social Engineers do but instead of getting the data and getting out like you do in Social Engineering you want to leave it there because they need to ask you back the point of stories is to convince somebody else that you're awesome and that means you need to understand the audience you need to understand what they're interested in so you can repackage yourself to be interesting to them and there are going to be typically three types of people you're going to talk to

there's the distracted type you're going to have half half a minute to two minutes to get your point across uh this is the classic elevator speech you know get it down to a very small amount so you can get it in and then hopefully they'll say oh tell me more second person is they're relatively attentive you have between three and five minutes this is where this narrative structure really comes in because you can expand you can flesh things out um for each point on the resume you want to practice telling a story using a timer and identifying you know why did the problem matter how did it affect people what was the problem solving process what

Solutions and challenges did you have what was the final solution and get that story told in three minutes and leave the hooks there so they can ask you back later because what you want to do is convert these people into the third typee which is the involved or interruptive type and they're going to be bouncing the ideas back off of you it becomes much more of a discussion because discussions is how you make friends and Friends hire friends that's what you're wanting to have happen so you want to let that in that case you want to let the story flow and expand and fill the time this is another way to look at it from a social engineering perspective so

you've got an interest curve over time when most people are having a conversation about what they're doing there's a straightforward you know they're interested they get more interested their you know their curiosity gets satisfied and they're done and they go on and interview the next person what you need to do is put little hooks in the conversation each one boosting the interest level so when you're run out of time they want to have you back to continue the conversation that's the social manipulation you're going through um you want to be incomplete so they ask you back you can do the persuading people like to understand things and get done and that's that's the psychological mechanism you want to trigger and uh and

interrupt so uh so yeah these are the two conversation streams so then you want to think about where do you want to go okay what what kinds of things do you want to do what kind of companies are there that do this and this is a basic scoring approach you know list out the things that you find interesting list out the companies you're considering and score each one because this is a targeted job search this is not a cast your resume to the wind and hope something bites this is you know you have company number one then two then three then four each one gets a custom variant of the resume when you're targeting each one you have

modified your website or whatever web presence you're controlling so that it it's targeted in order to maximize your chance at each step in the process so we're going to stop a little bit here talk about ethics okay the rest of this Pres is about intelligence gathering the companies you are targeting and the people you're talking to have not given you permission to do any of this stuff so it's basically step one of a penetration test you're doing without authorization now it's all public data there's nothing necessarily illegal though you can certainly use some of these tools this way um but you have to decide before you start how deep you want to go and the reason you want

to do that is there are aspects of the internet that show aspects of people that you may not want to know there are certain things about people you don't want to know when you're sitting across the table from them having a job interview and it might help to look at what sorts of sites are out there that you don't want to go to before you start and I'm not going to go any further than that I'm sure you all know what kind of sites I'm talking about um so basically be careful the other thing to know you're up against people who are going to be less careful you're up against people who are going to be le less ethical who are going to

actually use active hacking to get the data they need the model I'm talking about the techniques I'm talking about it's nothing new people have been doing it for a long time what's new is we're now aware of it okay it's becoming a little bit more acceptable in some cases a little less um you don't want to do this kind of stuff in a military setting for example uh but a lot of bigger companies and smaller companies are expecting uh more preparation from job interviewees than we're used to giving so with that Google's a search engine we all know that but there's more you know about Google news I imagine we've all used Google News um

but do you use Google News to search on a company name the company you're targeting the products they're they're looking for the officers that are involved you know there have been times when you can do a search on an officer and find out that the person you thought you were going to interview with just got arrested and you're probably not going to be interviewing with that person you know it's useful data um there are Google Maps we've all used that one but if you plugged the address of the business in on Google Maps sorry the business name and Google Maps to get all of the addresses and then plug all of those addresses back into Google

because what's interesting is in multi site locations you can often find user groups that meet in a business and if you find a user group you can go in and you can see what the business is like before the interview lots of useful data that way um there's Google Groups uh forums uset postings they leak a lot of data about the technology that's in use internally blogs if you can identify the people's names the Google Blog search can find those people you can find the topics they're interested in which gives you those little interest hooks you plant in the conversation as you go a Google Patent very useful if the company's filed any patents and if you

actually take the time to read the patent application you're going to be more qualified for the position than anybody who already works there because very few employees read their own companies patents and then Google code searches and things like that will give you a sense of code style but there's more there's Bing everybody's used Bing right it's great anybody use the Bing events sub search okay this allows you to search within events so you search for a type of event and then you subfilter it's a second layer of search that Bing offers that nobody else does and that way you can really cut out a lot of the Dre that you don't need um there's a tool called

yippi which is a metadata remixer it allows you to do deeper searches through iteration not simply do one search and be done it's intended to iterate through the different searches you're doing a quick and dog pile we've all heard of I hope uh those are basic multi engine searches um there's Yi which does a deeper search it's a little harder to set up and then there's social s. which is a Microsoft experiment it's down about 80% of the time when it's up if there's data that's useful to you it will give you everything absolutely everything about a person all of their social media presences what they're interested in what their schedule is it when it hits it hits big it just doesn't

hit very often so as you go through this process you're going to want to take notes I like to use blank text files um normally when I give this talk to college kids I have to explain what a text file is because they're used to word um I imagine you all know this you want to gather timeline data current data and email formatting data as well as whatever is interesting because those particular pieces are going to be useful later you can go through automated searching have everybody used Harvester come on download Harvester play with Harvester uh free python script it finds a lot of uh email addresses finds a lot of web hosts give it a company name it

just spews data at you um you can also use Google search operators to basically get access to the paid LinkedIn features um because using the the site and the in url modifiers you can find all of the names of the people that work for a company what their titles are things like that if you have the names from this and you have the email addresses from Harvester it's just a quick python or Pearl script to create likely email addresses which is very useful later in the process yeah um Recon NG yeah yeah Recon NG is one I was going to skip over because I have limited time Recon NG is an excellent Tool uh it's basically

Recon within a metas sploit like interface um there's a lot of paid features um it it searches apis so if there's a paid API you can do deep searches in that um you can also pay for access to jigsaw Salesforce sales forces dat.com or Hoover or sometimes you can find credentials to get in and uh that gives you a lot of data uh that salespeople use on companies which can feed the process as well then there's deeper Recon um you've got the basic info it's time to extrapolate because once you know who works there what they do what the products are the question is what challenges challenges do they face because you want to present yourself as

being able to come in and solve their problems so you have to guess at them you know put yourself in the position of the person hiring you you know what what is the firm doing look at press releases uh Google can search press releases there also a press wire is another site that does that what's been tried in the past what's the competition doing now remember no firm is perfect every firm thinks we need to do better following best practices so it's really easy to come in when make a case oh well if you just do X Y and Z listed under best practices your problems will be solved and they'll already be primed for

responding to that message second you want to find out who's likely to be interviewing you and kind of build a tree of of this is what I think the organizational structure looks like this is who'll be interviewing me the first time I need to Elevate the conversation to this person because they at the sea level they're more likely to be able to circumvent HR to give me the job you also want to know about finances a poor company is less likely to take a risk on you inless it's a company that's losing money that has backers that have money in other locations okay this uh so public companies you can search Google finance Yahoo finance go through the SEC filings

actually reading some of the SEC paperwork gives you a treasure Trove of data that can be used later you can do a Google News search for the word Loan in conjunction with the company to see if they're expanding or if they brought in a loan to recover from a problem they had um private firms a little bit trickier uh but LinkedIn helps you identify X employees very easily and X employees are will just give you all sorts of data if you take them out to lunch it just say say hey I'm considering applying can I buy a lunch so you can tell me what it's like to work there uh if they like to go out for

drinks yay even more data so um yeah just keep keep passing them drinks works great um don't be direct when talking about finances you know ask about stability ask if there are any projects that were started and stopped you know kind of faint around the issue because you don't want the target to know that exactly what you're going for because that could cause them to close up you want to make them open up which means expressing interest in what they're interested in and asking leading questions the goal of this entire process is to identify the reason for hire companies hire to support existing growth to accelerate existing growth to help the company become more profitable

to grow into new markets and to recover from massive failure and each one of those requires a slightly different spin in the process as you go through you then want want to identify the present state of the company multigo is a great tool to do this it can just uncover a lot of data there's a free version and a paid version the biggest difference is the paid version is faster um doesn't cost that much I have my own licensed copy U but the free version you know if you're looking for a job and you don't have a job free version will basically do what you need it it's take a little longer to run it's a site

called WP leaf and other sites like this which is a marketing site you give it a list of email addresses and it returns demographic information why is that interesting well demographic information includes political affiliation and average salary data so if you can take this list of email addresses which by the way you've just created from the email format and the LinkedIn list then it will tell you you know this is the percentage of people that are conservative versus liberal this is the average salary range this is the average age range all of which is useful when you're planning the salary negotiation process you can also craft Outreach emails you can identify the people you want to Target and their likely email

addresses and their interests from some of these other sites you can send them basically a cold email saying hey I'm interested in this blog post you wrote a year ago can you answer question a b and c and go through that kind of process um you know it it works uh pretty well okay now you want to project in time you need to be aware of the issues that have occurred in the organizations past that have led up to the current time this avoids wasting time uh in interviews and makes sure that the ideas you have are new to them so you do this by mapping out their internet presence Fierce is a tool that will give a lot of

DNS data um and you know uh Recon NG will do the same you want to use this to identify web hosts you want web hosts you can feed into archive.org so you can figure out what their internet presence looked like last year the year before the year before that and really build that timeline you want want to identify the direction they're going so you can take a guess at the current goals you want to determine their focus are they focused on retaining existing customers getting new customers or targeting investors all of that tells you what the business is is interested in so you can help them move forward in the direction they're going if they're public how's their stock

doing not how is their stock doing compared to their stock in the past how's their stock doing compared to their competitors because that's how sea level people measure themselves they don't care if their stock went down two points I mean they care a little bit if their competitor stock all dropped by 10 that's a win for them similarly if their stock goes up by 10 points and their competitors goes up by 50 they're losing the game even though they're becoming more profitable and understanding that mindset is critical in determining the types of stories you want to tell in the process so then you want to analyze the people you're talking to by this point you should have a feel for who you're

going to interview with who their boss is who their boss's boss is all the way up the tree and uh you can feed this you can feed it into malego um the mapping tool I mentioned earlier you know searching on different people uh you can also use a name check and size to identify likely uh social media presences and then if you can find those types of user IDs you could do Straight Google searches on it that's where you might get into trouble and find data on fetish sites that you don't really want to know about um voice of experience um look at Facebook Twitter Pinterest flicker we all know those also maybe the old sites people abandon old

accounts they don't shut them down so there's data out there on MySpace live journal and Friendster still that can be quite useful you want to identify their personality now I would normally have a conversation about metaphor mapping here anybody who saw me this morning has already seen it if you haven't check out the video later um these two books are excellent metaphors we live by if you have a deep academic background is great everybody should read images of organization it will change the way you communicate so now it's time to reposition who you are okay what's on the Internet is there forever now you can always go into your different sites and I assume everybody's

using key pass or last pass or something so you have a list of all of the sites on which you have accounts right we're all doing that right okay visit each one and make sure the privacy settings are locked down if there's one you don't want shut this close it out you know get rid of it completely because you want to make sure that you show up the way you want to be seen Google and Bing are not search engines they're lenses that the rest of the world uses to bring things into Focus so what they're going to do is they're going to identify the pieces of you that you want others to know about

in the top two pages and almost nobody hits the third page of Google results or deeper so that's really what you're looking for is to to control that level of things social media sites are L are votes uh each link is a vote in the Google world and most of the other search engines so the more cross link you can get going on the more you can can own the search on your name and then it comes time to do a cover letter um You Know cover letters are or an introductory letter is kind of what you would use if you want to do this sort of warm introduction to somebody if you decide to go the

traditional route three paragraphs paragraph number one introduce yourself your skills and why you're awesome hopefully without coming across as an two why you think they are awesome this is what most people forget more people are willing to read a letter if it includes something about them and then three state your intent to call them give them three times that you will be giving them a call and follow through okay you don't want to send out a letter that says call me if you're interested you want to maintain as much control over the process as you can so that when when you say I'm going to call you call that shows you have follow through which

most people don't have and that's going to impress them enough in a lot of cases to invite you in for an interview now when you do this odds are each time you call they're not going to answer they're busy you're GNA need to leave a voicemail so you want to write a voicemail script ahead of time so it sounds straight to the point powerful and intentional instead of having a lot of ums and us and you know I really expected to talk to somebody write the script practice it before you call so when it go you call it goes through regularly now if all this works um you may have to go through a couple of

people to get it to work but it normally works you'll have a phone interview oh that's the cover letter example okay so phone meetings what's likely to happen is they're going to call you and say okay are you ready for an interview and the answer is always no the answer is always I'm sorry I'm heading out the door I've got to catch a meeting can we schedule something for a couple of days from now now why would you do that because you want to maintain control you want to pick a time that works you want to get your interviewer's name you want to get their phone number so it's like okay if they don't get a

hold of me what's their name what's the number so I can get a hold of them get the information why do you do that because youve you got their name now you can make sure you can go through do all the searches you want do a deep dive on the person you're going to be talking to you've got two days to do all of the reconnaissance you need and get prepped for the discussion and then when you're there when you're ready you want to make sure that you have the environment set up properly you need to be in the right location you need internet access so you have quick lookups uh you want it to be

quiet so you can focus you want to have access to these reference sheets you know whether they're text files or something on a tablet whatever you're doing um you want to be able to stand up when you talk because people who stand up sound better and you want to be able to have a a mirror so you can look at yourself so you can smile because when people are smiling they sound friendlier now that puts most people in the bathroom and you might not want to do that um so get a mirror hang it on the kitchen counter door and stand there so you can have this discussion um your two goals in this process is get a real

interview and get the information you need to win at the real interview avoid all the distractions you're not there to chat it's all business okay then during that time you have between the phone interview and the regular interview hopefully it's going to be about a week is when you put together your portfolio so if you've got the in-person interview you need to be able to take control of that and people like things so you need to have something to leave behind and this is the approach I use that works uh this is a standard two pocket folder that is structured so one side has the cover letter in front with the resume in back and behind that

examples of previous work this is the portfolio stuff you've built you've put online you just print it out on a nice paper so you can leave it behind the other pocket has custom materials this is materials created from the reconnaissance work you've done this is going to be where you have market research we've identified gaps in the markets you know disruptive forces coming they might not have thought of yet competitors how the competitors rank against one another not how the competitors rank against the company you're interviewing because they're the expert in their company they're not the expert in the other company because they spend all their time making sure their stuff's working so by comparing all of

the competitors to one another you can then create a gap it's like hey nobody's doing this you make one of those little spot charts you know with x's and zeros or whatever you want and it's like hey no is doing this here is the area you want to focus um you want to create flow documents anybody actually done a PCI Data flow any PCI Consultants here okay the same concept behind a PCI Data flow which is how data moves through an environment applies to other business processes it applies to sales processes it applies to internal operational processes whatever you're doing those sorts of flow diagrams visually depict things in ways most people aren't used to seeing

And when they see it it's like oh it all makes sense now and they're really easy to make um you can look at products and service bundling you know Finding other ways to to to basically pivot their products so it looks new to them you know the sky the limit here you want to make sure that uh what you do looks professional with one exception one document needs to have a typo why do you want a typo because when you're sitting in front of them and you pull out the folder to give them their copy you go oh I didn't notice that typo and you Circle it and you say I'll send you another copy soon the end of the

interview you now have an excuse to send them an email and you give them the corrected document that shows you remembered you have follow through and you have fast turnaround which is exactly what companies want to see visual design matter Ms um this seems overwhelming and expensive particularly if you're not a naturally visual person but all of this can be done with inkscape and lra office completely free open source tools I did the stuff on Linux in my evenings and there are online tutorials for how to do all of this however you learn best whether it's how-tos videos whatever you want to do tons of information on how to use these tools what you you do is you go to the

website fire up take a screenshot take up the eyedropper tool find the hex codes of The Branding colors build a branding color pette and that feeds the documents you're going to create in Libra office and inkscape and then all you do is you put together whatever flows you want whatever diagrams you want and keep it simple and it works really well if you need uh stencils or something to use Google search on file type callon SVG gives you all sorts of stuff you can load in with e make a couple of modifications nobody can tell it's it's something different last thing you want to do before the interview is uh figure out how much money you're likely to be

talking about and this is where total compensation calculations come in who knows about total comp okay the older people know about total comp um so total compensation is how much is the company investing in you today because the Trap you fall into is company says well what are you making now and you give them your salary and they offer you five grand above that and you go okay okay that's not necessarily what you want to do you want to factor in the salary you're making any bonuses and commissions any costs the company paid for classes travel food lodging um Insurance costs money they've invested to maintain your certifications or lure any retirement contributions they've made um fig figure out how much vacation

and sick days are worth add that to the total and add the cost of any tools that you have and you have a justifiable number this is what the company spent on me last year and you can say I want 10% more than that and it it makes it a for a much better cleaner discussion than just talking about take-home um you can also take that number and adjust it if you want more frequent trainings you want more vacation time you need to do a cost of living increase for moving to a different city all of that kind of stuff is is very powerful so now you want to really prep for the interview process itself if it's

local pre-drive to the location you want to make sure number one you're not going to lost on the way to the interview the next day but more importantly by going through the parking lot you can look at bumper stickers bumper stickers display personality of the people that work there um you know you can identify political affiliation the average cost of the car will show you the average salaries that they tend to make there if you don't live there you can do something similar with Google street view um use geolocation searches used to be a tool called push pin it's been merged into Recon it does a geolocation lookup of images from imer and things like that and Instagram and you can

often get pictures of what things are like in the office why does that matter because you want to take those pictures to the local um cloer you know Men's Warehouse or wherever women go I don't know and uh bring the picture and say I want to look a little bit better than this and they will happily dress you you don't need to know a damn thing about fashion it's great you want to plan for the questions they're going to ask because you are going to be more prepared for this interview than they are so they're going to fall back to the basic stupid questions where do you see yourself in five years what's your greatest weakness

you need to have good answers for those and you want to make sure each answer you give refers back to a story point on the resume because what you're looking for in the interview is an excuse to pull out the folder open it in front of them pull out the resume and point and say this is what I did because you want to get them off of the script as soon as possible now a good way to get these lists of questions is to get a interview book any one of them in audio format so you listen to it in the car you practice giving the answers back because you want it to be easy and conversational you

don't want it to be rehearsed necessarily but you want to get the and the US and they're trying to remember which part of the resume you're talking about in there okay and then once you have that based on the Recon you've done you want to plant the conversation hooks so you can drop them in the conversation as you go to make sure the the interest level is at maximum when it's time to leave so you go in for the interview you've got the portfolio you've got everything else you want to answer five questions do I want to do the work will I fit into the culture here are they willing to pay me enough to

compensate for any negatives of working here will they pay me enough for me to achieve my financial goals and if all of those are yes how do I Advance the process because in almost every every case you're going to walk in you're going to blow the socks off of them they're not going to know what to do with you and they're going to set up another meeting with you and their boss so you want to make sure you get that advance to talk to their boss um okay you want to refer to those additional documents as often as possible you know you want to make sure that as early in the process as you can

with them appearing to trigger it you want to be able to open up the portfolio so they look at it because as soon as they see that they're going to be blown off their script they're going to start digging through some of the documents you gave them and asking you questions about that as the conversation evolves you want to visually describe things you know you want want to be able to flip over one of those documents and sketch on the back or correct it live and then give you another excuse to send them a PDF of the corrected copy you also want to use whiteboards why do you sketch on the Whiteboard because whiteboards are

never erased and you will be a constant reminder in their office of anybody the interview after you that you're there anything on red is going to stand out and your name is going to be sitting in front of them for the next several weeks until they make a decision to hire you so supposing that interview process goes well you know the end of the interview is not really the end you need to send thank you emails you know we all know this um you want to include any corrections to the documents you've made any elaborations you've made based on what you've learned um you know get them that electric copy get them that email you also want to write out thank you

notes by hand people still like that um but if you're like me and your handwriting is terrible and your spelling is terrible write on a computer first make sure that all spelling is corrected all grammar looks good then handr write it carefully and send those out the next day because what'll happen is you'll have the interview then that night they're going to uh if they're checking their email they're going to get the thank you email or they see it in the morning couple of days after that they're going to get the thank you note which takes you that one step further than most people go keeping you in their mind um then you will have ended the

interview by saying okay when will I expect to hear and they'll give you a certain time and it's never going to be that time because in part they're slow they're busy but also you've completely set them off their game they're going to need some time to collect so a day after they say they'll call you you call them you know you make sure that uh you know you you have your script just like you did with the voicemail and you just kind of Reach Out to each of the person interviewed you and make find out where you are in the process eventually they will either bring you back for their interview offer you a job or say I'm

sorry we can't afford you or you're not what we're looking for in most cases it's we can't afford you because taking this level of effort to get a job uh will often set you at a higher salary level and uh usually they will find the money sometimes they can't and you know you get to negotiate for that but you know sometimes you have to move on this is in salary negotiation this is back to that total comp idea um companies in negotiation are either going to be open to hearing your ideas or putting you in a take it or leave it position if it's in the lad you pretty much have to take it or leave it there's

not a lot of option there if it's the former consider the financial and the non-financial benefits you know you salary is probably going to be fixed but companies will gladly negotiate around hiring bonuses stock performance pay uh things like that um they will light companies that take the risk with them and in general generally speaking most companies will off will give you a good deal except when it comes to Performance pay because companies when they offer performance pay very seldom follow through systems are constructed so performance is based on the the way the team works how well the team does so you're in a situation where you are not getting paid for your performance you're

getting paid for your team's performance and anybody who's done group projects in school knows that doesn't work so take any other offer um think about non-financial stuff training education uh paid time off advancements in seniority a lot of companies will bring you in as if you're a five-year employee if that's necessary to get things to work within the business um and as with all negotiation your Basics are be fair no one to stop and remember the organization's needs the goal is to find the solution which maximizes benefit for both parties which it comes to giving notice you have to prepare for the worst um in a lot of cases you'll just be shown the door when you give notice

at your current company which means a week or so beforehand you need to clean your desk and take home everything that matters to you so if that happens you can just walk out without a care and instead of being being a stressful time it's hey I just got two weeks of paid vacation right um consider benefits it used to be there was a big healthare gap problem where you know you would have to wait several months before the healthcare kicked into at the new business that's really going away with cobra with Affordable Care Act things like that but if that's a concern think about How It Ends uh one thing you can do is take a vacation day at the end of

the month with your current job and start the new job on that day and then end your current current job the the you know after so you basically have overlapped by one day and the month-to-month Gap is no longer there um think about retirement you know you can roll your money into something you control instead of into your own employer and you know start the new 401K with them but keep control of your own at this point it's a powerful thing later in life um think about non-compete agreements you know if you have had to sign one and in Iowa the controls aren't nearly as good as in other companies in Iowa a company can hire you and then

retroactively make you sign an employment agreement so if that's likely to bite you get an employment lawyer on the phone ahead of time um you can usually negotiate non-competes down in terms of scope a lot of times you can negotiate like a nationwide you will not do security work in the US for one year down to something like I won't solicit existing customers for one year you know they're really willing to negotiate if that comes up um think about intellectual property things you've created on the job may not be yours depending on how the job's created so your options are you know leave it behind try to buy it from the company don't necessarily recommend stealing it

um or recreate it as an open source project if it's something you really think is is useful you know you have those options in front of you and once all of that's done give notice in writing there are good ways and bad ways to do that um think about negotiation rates for work you do do after you leave if they view you as as indispensable one thing you can do is say hey if you need me my negotiation rate or my after work rate is $250 an hour and if they say wow that's high you can say well it'd be lower if you knock this non-compete out of the way you know negotiating on things like that is

pretty easy to do and very few people think of doing it now you may be given a counter offer counter offers are games you only play once it burns your current employer and your prospective employer and uh you will really probably never get a raise there again if you ever take a counter offer so it's almost never worth playing which gets us to the exit interview when you're leaving HR is going to sit you down and they're going to say Well we'd really like you to tell us what we could have done better they don't want to know if they wanted to know they would have fixed it before you left so the answer is always is it was time for a

change and just let it go and walk out the door into your new job so this information came from these resources and these ones and those and those and I put it all in a book so if you want the book feel free to buy the book uh it's available anywhere online books are sold or pirated so enjoy and I'll leave that up for a little while any questions at this

point um so that's true you I mean you there's a psychological concept of pinning and if you name your number first then their offer is going to come closer to your number than whatever number they had in their head people talk about doing ranges things like that the idea behind total compensation is to figure out what you will accept what your range is so you know you can get your total comp and if you just want a move for something that's interesting not necessarily more money you can do plus or minus 10% on that and that's your asking range um in general the idea of them saying the price first is great what it's turned

into today is uh it's it's like a junior high Dance everybody standing on the sides nobody actually wanting to dance nobody wants to name a number first so put that aside if you know what you want just say the damn number and move on with stuff that actually matters um I believe he was next what about theing resume for job the reason I asked because I my called me and said hey look at this gu resume and then we at resume and then we Googled the guy found this resume online and it didn't he basically you know put certain things in the resume he didn't have before so it's like he actually have that experience

put on res here but the one online well so if you have control over your presence the resumes will match because you're going to be targeting one company at a time you know which resume you sent out you update the online one to match what you want the problem is uh companies like Dyson monster I mean I'm getting calls today for a monster resume I put up 10 years ago and they're saying hey we need a help desk technician it's like I don't do that work anymore um so you know you need to have control to a certain point but you know some mistakes you made in your youth they're just there there's nothing more

you can do about it so yes Dan the pirats love it um it's I'm not kidding when I say it's on every piracy site um it's been people like it uh a lot of people say it's overly technical a lot of technical people say it's not technical enough which means I hit that Mark just right um it works and what it it does is a lot of the people that have read it have emailed me and said thank you for getting me the the job I've always wanted um other people that have not used the book have stopped complaining to me about not getting a job so winwin right

yeah uh if it's one um not that much of a concern because everybody's made a typo and the fact that you follow up and correct it gives you a chance to look more professional than anybody else so yep yes I I can't hear you speak

up

right how often they check their phone um I mean there are other ways but you can kind of tell when somebody's paying attention or dozing off or distracted so yeah anything else all right there's my contact info I'll leave it up for a few minutes before I clear out for the next uh next person so thank you [Applause]