5 Tips to a Faster Job Search in 2024!

Today, I wanted to give you a little talk. It's been a while since we had what I internally call a reminder talk. Meaning, I'm gonna give you some good tips and anybody can follow along with this, but if you have been following me and you have been watching my videos, whether you come to the live shows or just catch the Tuesday recordings or the little snippets or the shorts that go out every day or all those good things, these are reminders of things I want you to make sure that you do. If you've been job searching for a while, let's call this like your 3,000 mile oil change or whatever you want, but friendly little taps on the shoulder, which means you got some kind of background with me and my teaching. No matter who you are, you'll be able to follow along, but these will be especially good tips for people who are familiar with the tips I give throughout each of the phases of the job search. Now, the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna start where you should start, which is with yourself. And step one of your job search is not call all your friends. It's not put the open green circle around your face on the LinkedIn profile that makes you look ridiculous. It's not putting a resume together. It's kind of two things simultaneously. It's figuring out where you wanna go, meaning what you'd like to do, maybe who you'd like to work for, what kind of products and services you'd like to build or support, or what industry you wanna be in, or what you think is cool. I'm okay with all that. But the thing I really want you to do is pull together what I call your requirements. I refer to these by a few different names or monikers, nomenclature, whatever you wanna say. But the things that you need and the things that you want and the things that would be really nice to have so that you could create what I call a virtual environment that you operate within every single day. And I've shared this before, that as an executive recruiter, I did executive recruitment between 2004 and 2019 at a very, very high velocity, meaning we were taking on lots of searches, we were interviewing lots of candidates. And during kind of the first 12 or 13 years of that 15 or 16 year stint, we would gather very specific pieces of information about job seekers, just employees in general, what made them happy, and what were the things that they were looking for in the kinds of jobs that they were taking. And when you think about understanding anything that you buy, anything that you live in, like a house, anything that you choose, you have some kind of requirements. They may be written down, they may be not written down, they may be on the back of a napkin, they may be in an Excel spreadsheet. But the important thing is that you have them so that you have an inventory of things that you can evaluate to see, does this decision, does this product, does this service, does this person I'm about to marry, so to speak, do they have what I need? And it's very, very difficult when it comes to job searching because much like marriage, job searching is very emotional. And what we try to do is make it so that you can take some of the subjectivity out of it as much as possible, take a lot of the emotion out of it so that you can kind of take a step back and really evaluate, does this company, does this role, does this career, career path, really suit me? And so what I would do as an executive recruiter as I would interview prospective job candidates, I wouldn't even call this part of the interviewing because this was really me getting to know you, what is it that you want? And inevitably, most people would really struggle with this question because it's very easy to tell me what you do not want, what you don't want. I don't want a boss who's a micromanager. I don't wanna commute an hour to work. I don't wanna travel 75%, right? I don't wanna work with mean, nasty people, right? That's easy, those are problematic. It's front, it's center, it's visible, it's probably very current or very recent. We get recency biases and as we make job changing decisions to go to new employers, we tend to overweight things that are current and things that bother us, okay? As opposed to what? The appreciation of all the things that you have that are absolutely fantastic in your life and my guess is even in your job, even if you absolutely hate it, you probably have equally as many, if not more things that you actually like about it but there are certain things, maybe one, maybe it's a boss or something like that that is making your life miserable and I'm okay with you moving just for that one reason because that's a dang good reason to change jobs but what I'm not okay with is you completely overlooking as you make a decision to go forward, all the other things that you need in your life that you may currently have or want but that you don't really pay attention to as you make the change because you're so focused on getting a boss who loves you because that's your sore spot right now. So my reminder and I'm gonna show you a little illustration of the level of granularity I'm hoping you go to. So let's call this requirements. I hope I spelled that right. I scrabbled this, I screwed this really fast. What do you want, what do you need and these are varying degrees, right? Andy, I absolutely must have, like in my house that I moved in, I absolutely needed an office because that's my business and I need a nice office to work out of each day. It was a must, it was a 10 out of 10, not a one out of 10. What are my priorities? So the office was really hot. Okay, the dance floor that I have in my house, I kid you not, was not a necessity. It's nice because I can put my triathlon bike and my road bike and other bikes on it and do my own little spin classes but I don't actually need that right kind of thing and then what is it that's important to me in the relation in which it's important to the other criteria? So the office is 10, the dance floor was zero or one. I didn't really need it and then there's other things like how many bathrooms do you want? Do you need a fireplace kind of thing? Okay and then what questions do I need to ask the employer in order to determine to the degree to which it satisfies me so every time you ask an employer questions, you're really trying to answer two questions simultaneously so is this a good company? Like are they solid? Are they going to be financially stable? Are they still gonna be here tomorrow, right? You need to know those things but is it a good company A and is it a good company for me B, right? So I need to know that. So my personal preferences go to this list. Now I mentioned all those people that I talked to as an executive recruiter, we have over 12,000 data points that we collected in the first 12 or 13 years of all the people that we talked to that where we engaged and had that conversation. They gave me their requirements and I inventoried all of that from all of that experience and I put it in a spreadsheet that's in my job search coaching program. So those of you that are in the bootcamp as I call it, the premium job search members, you have access to this. For those of you that don't, what I'm talking about is inventorying your own and I'm gonna show you what I mean and one of the things that I wanna stress to you is the longer the list, the better the list and I wanna be really clear. The more requirements you have or that you can identify that you would like to have a conversation about, the better. I'm not saying you need to get every single thing that you want, I'm saying I want you to have an inventory so you can get some information so that you can make an educated decision. It's really, really bad if you didn't inventory it, you forgot to ask it or you didn't have time to ask it and you forgot to ask for additional time or under duress, it slipped your mind and you didn't do a thorough evaluation because the blind spots, the things where they don't really have a spotlight on them, you don't really understand that information that isn't factorable is the stuff that's going to kill you. I'm okay with you realizing, hey, I'm not gonna get something that I would have liked but you know what? I'm okay with it because I can get it satiated outside of work or maybe I can justify not having that because they are gonna pay me more than I was expecting and I might be able to go buy that for myself or whatever it is, right? So what I did was I built this spreadsheet that I'm gonna show you here right now. For those of you that are in the program, this is called the criteria and questions matrix. This is a public version. I do not give this away. There is absolutely no place on the internets where you can get this and you'll probably notice that in this column over here where there's one and two and three, you're going to see an awful lot of rows hidden. That's because I don't wanna show it to you because I want you to pay for the silly thing. But even if you don't wanna jump in the program, this column over on the left, appreciation, atmosphere, autonomy, the boss, challenge, collaboration, the commute, the comp, the contribution, culture and you see culture has a number of sub criteria as do all of these, growth, people, role, travel and so on. Effectively, what that is is those are the top 15 basically happiness factors. So they don't need to matter to you, all of them. Some of them will, but it's a heck of a lot easier when you have something to look at to say, oh yeah, I wouldn't have thought of that or that wasn't on the forefront of my mind, but now that you mentioned it, I better make sure I get it in my list. And what I coach people to do in the program and what I would suggest for you to do is get an inventory of the things that matter to you because when people say, I'm going into an interview, what questions should I ask the employer? I'm gonna say, what's on your dang spreadsheet? What matters to you? I could give you some top pretty cool five to 10 really juicy questions that I would ask like, what does success look like? But I want you to be asking questions around what matters to you. And then I want you to get the answers and then I want you to evaluate actually quantitatively how closely a particular employer satisfies what it is you're looking for. So what we do here is we inventory this. Now, if you don't have the spreadsheet, that's okay. Make a list of your own. And then, but when you get down to appreciation, let's say for example, and I give the, I cue the people, does the company recognize and appreciates its employees? I'm just trying to give them an understanding of what appreciation can be. But for somebody like you, now appreciation is much like a love language if you're familiar with Gary Chapman and the five love languages, and there's even love languages at work or all that kind of other good stuff. But basically, my wife has love languages, I have love languages, you have love languages, and you have corporate love languages. Because some people like to be appreciated with money. Some people are like, I'm okay if you don't give me more money if you give me the dang corner office or maybe the title, or how about this thing right here has been missing a little pat for a while, right? And so if you go into an interview and you wanna know if they appreciate their employees and you say, do you appreciate your employees? And they say, yes, we do. We make sure we recognize everybody every year. That has not answered your question. That has not shown you, do they actually fit you? What are you looking for? Now, I don't have a problem with you opening up the dialogue that way, but you need to get specifics from the employer. Your inventory of requirements and your inventory of needs then gets broken down. So appreciation to you might be annual pay raises. It might be SPFs. It might be complimentary days off. I don't, just get them on the list. I don't care what they are. And you don't have to get them, but I want you to have a conversation to know where do they check the boxes? Are you asking questions like, on this team I'm joining, when was the last time somebody was promoted? What do you do to recognize good performance? Ask them that, get the answer, and then you can match it to, that works for me. That doesn't work for me. Who's tracking? Can I get a, I'm tracking in, in the chat. Now, if you're in the program, this is something that people absolutely love. And then what I tell them to do is, I want you to rank it, each of your criteria. Now, you wouldn't really rank appreciation. You might rank, do they give me pay increases? Do they give me pats on the back? Do they recognize me publicly? Or whatever. But what you do is, you're gonna give it the level of importance on a scale of one to 10, and then you're gonna rate your current employer, and then what you're gonna do is you're gonna go through your process, and you're going to actually evaluate the different employers you're interviewing with. And so, you'll say, okay, employer A, I'm evaluating them, and based on what I know from the interviewing process, they're a seven out of 10 as far as aligning to my criteria of appreciation. And then you're gonna multiply whatever that number is by the weight you gave appreciation, because appreciation to me mattered more than what? How much I need to travel, or whether I have a corner office, or whatever. Okay, so number one tip, number one tip, get this in order, don't have any blind spots. And then you're gonna say to me, Andy, how the heck am I gonna get 86 questions answered in my job interview? You don't have to get 86 answered. You need to get the ones that are answered for the ones that are most important to you, and if you get down to the end, and you don't have all your questions answered, if you're about to get an offer, which is the only thing that matters, is your choice to work there or not. You can ask for more time, you can clean up what your gaps are as far as your knowledge is concerned, and any employer worth their salt should want to give you that time because why? I do not want you coming here to work if you do not truly understand what is involved with working here and what you're getting. Okay, I don't want you making a bad decision. I don't wanna accelerate this and not give you what you need. That's tip number one, okay? So, tracking like a cracking Peter Lee, Lucinda, love it, SB, I know that, Sue, Tonya, oh, Tonya's laughing at Peter, Danielle's tracking, let's see, you know I'm not reading the chat in order. Carol, what's up, my VIP, Case, Loretto, Tiffany, get this in order. Okay, number one. Number two, what would five tips be without a resume tip, right? So, and you know what? This is Andy math and how I count tips. This is really like 20 tips, but we group it as five because I don't want anybody to get overwhelmed. All right, so, when it comes to the resume, there are, I want you to think about, there are, there's how you write your resume, right? Like the way the bullet's supposed to be structured. And that's pretty good and we want you to get that in order. The how is fine. That's the fine, if I any. But the what, the what goes on the resume, even if you were a little sloppy with the how, is what wins the day. And so, what do I mean by that? So, what a lot of people do is they put on their resume their activities. And in some format, I don't even mind that because activities that you perform, like I run the customer service team, I create financial reports, right? That gives me an idea of what you're doing. And I don't mind that, but I would like to have a little more context, like how big's the customer service team? What are those financial reports? How are they used? What decisions are made, kind of thing, right? But those are activities and not really powerful when it comes to selling you. And the resume, as you know, I say, is a marketing document. It is not a work history document. Yes, you use your work history to market yourself, just like I use my work history as an executive recruiter, as analyzing those 12,000 people, as having programs that people come in and crush life with, or whatever. And here's testimonial after testimonial. Those transformative messages can be channeled into a communication on the resume and in an interview that sells you. That's all your work history, right? But you don't care that I had to get up four o'clock every morning and build a product in a system that's on a video-based online training program. You like to know that it is, but you don't care about that, right? There's nothing sexy about it. It's a video. You watch it, I tell you what to do, you go and you do it, right? That's like you telling me, I manage the customer service team. It doesn't do anything for me. My emotion doesn't go anywhere. I don't get excited, I don't really care. That's nice that you have it, check. But tell me what's happened as a result of you doing what you did. So did the customer service team that you managed make the customer service score go up? Did it increase customer retention? Did it increase sales? What actually happened? And so what I want you to always think about are what Andy calls the great eight. They're the eight most powerful goals that any employer, doesn't matter what their business is, they're eight things an employer cares about. Every single employer that ever, ever had a business cares about these eight things. And you want to articulate how you helped accomplish those things, but before you tell anybody on a resume how you accomplished those things, these eight things, you wanna tell them what it was you accomplished, meaning what happened, and then how did you make that happen? So by managing the customer service team, that really didn't make the customer service score go up. You did something that then turned the customer service score up. You streamlined the calling process. You reduced the amount of time it took for your reps to answer the questions for the people with the problems who called in on the customer service line kind of thing. The rest of your life is housekeeping or waste. This is why you have trouble getting your 25 or 50 year work history down to two pages. It's because you put a lot of stuff that doesn't really matter that I call housekeeping. Like managing the customer service team is housekeeping. It's not the punchline and it's not what matters. It is a little context, but I would rather know, I managed the customer service team, 25 CSRs, customer service reps, or something. What did you do? You did everything. You handled the infrastructure, the coaching, everything, the processes that you set up. Great, okay, that's housekeeping. But it's wasting real estate on your resume. And so what I recommend you do is when you're articulating the company you work for and the position you hold, you get a little real estate on the resume right underneath your title to put the housekeeping in. And if you're having trouble following, because I don't have a picture, you can take my free resume template and all the, not only is the template there, but the instructions are in it. So this is important. Now, my point to all of this is that this great eight, every resume bullet, every single resume bullet that's on your resume should address one of these eight things. Revenue generation, market awareness, customer attraction, customer happiness, company growth, or events, mergers and acquisitions, divestitures, going public, right, getting acquired, employee happiness, cost reduction, or process efficiency. I'm not gonna give you all the definitions and examples of each of these because I have at least 25 videos on my YouTube channel that covers all this stuff. Okay, but I want you to read, I want, again, tap on the shoulder, reminder, focus your resume on the great eight accomplishments. And if you literally go to the trouble of putting a bullet in front of any text on your resume, it should start with the effect of what happened to one of those great eight, okay? So you increased revenue, you improved customer service by how much, right? Show a delta, there's always the delta of what happened as a result of you being in place, right? If you tell me you managed a $30 million unit, I don't know if it was 40 million before you start and you hacked it up and now it's 25% less, right? So I need context. So anytime I have a question in my mind as I'm reading a resume, that's bad. Okay, so you wanna give me as much context as you can. Remember, resist the urge to put all your activities down. People care about the accomplishments. Okay, that's number two. If you like that one, click the like button. I got three more. Okay, this one, well, this one, you don't really need to be following me for long to know this is my favorite and non-favorite way of going about searching all in one index card here. One five by eighter is gonna tell you everything you wanna know about what to do and what not to do when your job searching, the actual search mechanics itself. Now, the top line here, if you can read it, says stay out of the trash. So I call the applicant tracking system the applicant trashing system. If you are applying for a job online, while we don't know what the system is that you're putting your application into, it is endearingly known to me and everybody else as the applicant trashing system, the abyss, where your resume goes, where you hear absolutely crickets because it's either not farmed, is not set properly, you're competing against hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of applicants, and it's just not a good way to go. And it's not even job searching. It's applying for jobs. They're not equal. So stay out of that. But the second thing I wanna give you is the next four, I don't know, five things on here, is the sequence in which I would run my job search. So if given a choice, which you all have every single day, I'm going after a boss first, a person in an authoritative position or somebody on the management team that could give me a job. That is your fastest route. It is your best way to, any of you having trouble building your network, it is a way to go from cold to warm super fast. It only takes one email. And I even give you the free template if you want. If you're in the premium program, you don't just get the free templates, you get what I call the boss hunting Bible, which is a whole bunch of pages of all the instructions, all the templates, all the templates to all their nine or 10 different responses that a boss or potential person that you targeted could give you. But that's numero uno. The second spot, so that's number two point on the card, but number one in searching. Number two in searching, next best thing to do, target a teammate. If you're in the job search coaching program, we have a whole session on teammate targeting and what exactly to say to the teammates and how to go back and forth to build a relationship to get into their company. It's the next best thing. The boss is the first best thing because the boss is always, always in search of great people because the boss's highest priority is running an effective team and producing results. A recruiter's highest priority is servicing the hiring officials for which the recruiter has active searches. That's their primary responsibility, which is why recruiter hunting or sending emails to recruiters, corporate recruiters that is, is tertiary to me, it's third because a boss is going to look at your resume no matter what. A recruiter who sits here like this, who has the sales team, the marketing team, the HR team, the recruitment team, maybe that's the head recruiter, the accounting team or whatever that he or she is searching for, if there's an accounting position open and an HR position open and you're a salesperson and you send your resume to me, but the sales exec has not put a open requisition or a budgeted position, open budgeted position on my desk that has asked me to recruit for it, you fall to the bottom. I may not look at yours because I'm so worried about the controller, the accountant who's yelling in my ear or the VP of HR who's wondering where our benefits coordinator is, okay, kind of thing. So my priority as a recruiter is going to be to service my internal clients. You wanna go right to the person who always cares and you say, well, Andy, what if they don't have an open position? Doesn't matter, they'll look. You might not know there's an open position, they might trade somebody out for you, right? Hey, I'd rather have you, you look like a 10 to me, I got a two on my team, I can't wait to fire, kind of thing, I don't need an open rec to hire you, I could just swap her out, kind of thing. Human resources next, okay, and then another boss. Now, I will give you some liberty here because we're all about flexibility at the Milewalk Academy. The boss, number two, like going after another boss, if you wanna put that above team, I'm sorry, guys, I'm like backwards in the camera. If you wanna make that two or two A, that's okay too, but the tip is stay out of the trash, get targeting bosses. Anybody who subscribed to Andy's Boss Hunting Technique who wants to chime in about all the great, I know you're out there because I get the emails every day. Searching, number three. Number four is I have a storytelling technique. We're not gonna go through the storytelling technique today, but the way that I like to structure, virtually every response to an interview question has four parts to it. It's not the star technique, although there are some components, I guess you would make analogous, but you wanna provide some context about why what you're doing is important. That's usually the thing that most people miss and it will give you the biggest bang for your buck as far as scoring points in a story. The next is the overall approach that you took. So not what you were tasked with, not the activities that you did, but the outline of the steps you took with naming the steps only and then going back, so you just now created a map for the person. I just gave you the framework of what I'm about to tell you. Great, now it's gonna be easier for me to what? Hang onto the information and it's also gonna be easier for me to understand where you are in your three-minute story. Okay, so I did one, two, three, four, five and then in step one, here's what I did. In step two, here's what I did and so on and then here's what happened. Now, what you really wanna do whenever you tell a story is every story that is ever captivating and will keep somebody's attention has an exposition and a rising action. A rising action is something that is building up to a climax, but you want them to understand the level of importance. Part of what you're gonna give them in the context is that rising action so they know how important and why this is so critical that you were working on it. So if you wanna think of it in terms of the overall framework that I offer, you're gonna get the maximum ROI as far as your storytelling is concerned. If you start the story with context, that's the C. So I have videos on my channel about my car technique and it's really C-A-A-R. That's why there's a little two there. But let me give an example of what I mean. So a lot of times, and I see this a lot in the people that I coach and prep for their interviews, is you get asked a question whether it's maybe something on your resume, like, hey, Andy, how did you do that? It says here that you increase something and it looks like you implemented this system to do that. Can you walk me through that? That's one way they could ask you. Or they might say, tell me about a time where you solved the problem where, even though that's a behavioral question, you're still gonna give them the format in that car technique. Or something along the lines of some kind of challenge they present, but you wanna use an example of a story or experience that you have to explain to them that what you've accomplished is what they need you to accomplish in their environment, even though you did it somewhere else, right? But you're drawing the analogy for them. And so what a lot of people tend to do is they say, like the IT project manager about who implemented a CRM system. If somebody asks you, well, can you walk me through that project? What most of them are inclined to do is just start with step one. So I was asked to implement this customer relationship management system. It was a big system. We were implementing it with such and such software, or software as a services platform, or whatever. And then they start going in and they start telling the story. And that's bad because, number one, you didn't give them any buildup. You didn't create any excitement. You didn't put it if it was in a pit where there was a big problem or a goal where it's a big aspiration. So you wanna start the story with about 20 seconds, maybe 15, 20 seconds of setup and context. We had this terrible issue where we were losing 25% of our customers each month. And to give you an idea, we have 100 customers, and an average customer gives us X millions a year. So we were losing 10 million a year with the platform we had because our CSRs weren't able to. All right, now, you explain the problem, but what you also foreshadowed was the result. Because what happened? You came in with the big S on your chest and the cape, and you fixed everything. So you brought it back to normal, or you did it even better, or whatever. But you explained to them you're implying all this, it was so critical, I was tasked with addressing this. Or it could be, I was helping somebody the other day. Well, and this woman was in Africa. There was a multi-billion dollar market for certain oil products. Her company was getting 0%, zero share of that X billions of dollars in that location. She was asked to create a strategy and a plan to open up that market. That's creating an aspiration. It wasn't necessarily a problem, it was just that they needed to grow something, build out a team, build out a plan, get together with the government, get together with the suppliers, the vendors, the drillers, the whatever, kind of thing. So if you set that up initially, it only takes a few seconds to let them know why this mattered. You are gonna score so many points because number one, it's gonna grab them. Number two, they're gonna make an assumption that you're important, that you needed to be called in. And number three, without you even telling a story yet. They know you wouldn't have brought that up unless this had a happy ending, kind of thing, right? So don't skip this over. Don't skip over this, ever. The context is so important. And I was coaching somebody, I don't know that she's here, and she kind of made me chuckle, although she was serious about it, but it was kind of funny after she said it. She's like, oh, you mean you want more drama? It's like, well, yeah, I want it to be captivating. I want it to be, I want the person to understand that this was important. And by the way, your solution doesn't need to be extravagant because if you handled a big, I have a guy, he just got a job, 64 years old, but this was, we had worked together about a year ago, but he just got a new job now. I mean, he got one then and he got another one now. And he had created this solution where it really was nothing more than an online document management, DocuSign kind of solution, but without going in and taking up more minutes on this tip, he basically had a $6 million cash flow issue each month, every two weeks, actually. It was $6 million that they could have had two weeks earlier but had they just been able to expedite, streamline, digitize, and all this, the process, they fixed that $6 million product or $6 million cash flow issue. But you don't start the story with, I implemented a DocuSign system, right? You start the story with, we had this collections issue because we were always $6 million behind. Do you have any idea how much interest you would earn on $6 million in half a month, right, kind of thing. But $6 million you don't have, $6 million you're not earning on it, and so on. But the solution was simple, but the value was high. But you just tell me, well, Andy, I just implemented a DocuSign. You mean like you just bought the product and then just hit the button and, right? Well, how does that story sound, right, kind of thing. Who's tracking with me, right? You get the difference. Paint the business problem. If you start a story and it doesn't have this silly C in a circle, you're missing out. You're missing out. And you're not doing the interviewers a service of captivating their attention and making sure that they're paying attention to you. Okay, salary negotiation number five, because I mean like how could we ever end a tip, five set tip without salary negotiation? So as a total aside, this morning, like I don't know, it's what, 11.37 right now. So this is like six hours ago, 5.37 this morning. I was working on my new salary negotiation workshop. It's a five module program. There's bonuses and such, but it's really great. It's about positioning yourself for success. It's about preparing for your offer, all the stuff you need to prepare. It's about conducting and winning the offer, making the counter offer and all that good stuff. It's about handling multiple job offers. It's about how you go through the interview process and raise your pay. I thought everything. I challenge you, if you see this, to try to find something that I have not thought of. And the reason I'm smiling is because I want you all to think about this in your life. As I'm going and I'm putting all these slides together and the talk together and the thing that is not gonna be delivered for a month, I smile because number one, I love to refresh in stuff, which is great, right? New iterations, but number two, and in the spirit of Community Appreciation Week, I want you to realize this, and I'm guessing this is lost on a lot of you, but I smile as I'm going through this because it's so much better than my first iteration because there's a big piece of you all in it, right? You ask me the questions, you show me the scenarios that you're struggling with, which then challenges me to give you the solution or articulate it in so many variations and subparts and what if this and what if this and Andy, what if this? What do I do? All that's in there because you helped me with that. So I'm totally stoked about that. So that's a little aside about what Andy does at 537 in the morning, but that's coming up November 14th, 15th, and 16th. That's not free, but it's gonna be awesome. But some of the things I want to make sure I remind you of when it comes to salary negotiation, you get the offer, don't make an offer, and why do you want to what I call catch the offer as opposed to pitch it? See, because when they say to you, Andy, this is awesome, we need to have you in the company. What would you like? What do you wanna earn? Do you have an expected salary? What would make you happy? We wanna make you happy. Give me a number. Biggest mistake is for you to give them a number of any kind at any time. Why? Because you don't know how badly they want you unless they have solely expressed that, which they don't usually do. It's nothing wrong with, hey, we love you, we wanna get you in here, but you don't really know everything that's going on behind the scenes, and you don't really know what they think of you until they put a number in front of you. So number one, resist the temptation of providing them a number. I do not care. I do not care if they are as hot pink or magenta as this wind muff. Say to them, I'm sure you'll make me a great offer. I'm sure we'll make this work. Put something together. Second thing is, in your counter offer, you ask first, okay? You ask first, okay, and then make a counter. And the other thing is, when you are asking your questions, you want to ask your questions so that what? So because when you get the offer in the first place, you don't truly understand it. And when I told you I just freshened up my salary negotiation stuff, in the process of freshening it up, I came up with 50 different, literally five zero, different questions that you can ask an employer about an offer. Now, all 50 might not apply to you, but I guarantee you 30 of them do. And then 20 of them are maybe, depending on the structure of the offer. So there are a lot of questions and things you will not understand. I coached somebody yesterday who, and she is in dentistry, and she is a dental hygienist, and she had a list of all these bullets that had a whole bunch of things that we actually had to go through, and neither she nor I knew what each one of them was, but could get clarification, we knew what to ask. But so this is complicated. So you want to make sure that you're asking first. And one of the things that asking first does is when you actually ask your questions about the offer, and if you're asking them to the right person, like the hiring official, not the recruiter, or even the recruiter, maybe. When you ask questions, and I'm not talking about asking for anything, I'm asking for clarification. I'm not making an ask. I'm asking questions. When you start asking questions, like, well, oh, the bonus is 30%, and how much did that pay out last year? And they say, oh, really only 10, or zero, or only a fraction of the team got it, or whatever. As you go through your array of questions, oftentimes what employers will do is it will make it sound like they're, to themselves, that the offer is not as good as they initially thought it was. Once they hear you asking the questions. And in many cases, they will counter themselves before you officially counter them. So I want you to make sure that you're asking your questions and then before you get to the counter, you need to make sure that you make an argument. A counter is not, I want more. A counter is not, well, in the market, I did my research and they're paying content marketing managers $50,000, not 45. That is not an argument. That is intel you gathered that I don't believe, kind of thing. You need to make an argument. You make an argument against what success looks like, the value you're gonna contribute, which means what? If you don't have the success parameters, you can't make an argument. But you wanna do that, and then the third little thing I wanna mention here, or really the 17th thing I wanna mention here is when you counter, you ask for everything all at once. Meaning, don't accept anything along the way and while you're asking your questions, do not accept anything or offer them any insight. So if you say to them, hey, on this salary, I see that it's $100,000, I'd wanna make sure how is that paid, is there any wiggle room on that or flexibility, if I say to you, what do you have in mind, I don't want you to tell them that. I don't want you to say, I'm thinking 110. You don't have all the information and you still have 18 questions to ask, right? And then once you get through it and you have all the information and to your best ability, you don't think that you're making any assumptions even though you still are, but you're making less, a lower number of assumptions. I wanna make sure that then you ask for everything at once, you stack it all together because the more you ask for it, the more you're likely to get, contrary to what a lot of you think, right? You think you're gonna piss them off, that's not true. And it also isn't coming on the way you ask and the way you make your counteroffer because you ultimately want to turn control over them to figure out the solution. You don't wanna give them the solution, you wanna give them ideas of solutions. What do I mean? You don't wanna say, you need to make that 120. You need to make that bonus 50K. That's giving them the answer, that's forcing them to comply, but asking them for a path to something or a solution that gets you to a number, they know what they have at their disposal which gives them control. So I wanna make sure that you're doing this. There are many, many things to say, there are many, many things not to say, but a lot of you trip on these because you don't realize that you're asking for things along the way even in the interviewing process. You going and asking for remote work two days a week, that's an ask, that's a negotiable piece of information that you actually agreed upon before you got an offer which means you now owe them one. You wanna stay away from all that. You wanna go through everything all at once. So these are just some careful reminders when you get to the salary negotiation piece. Okay, that's number five. It's 11.45 so I need to wrap it because I said 45 minutes to myself. All right, get your requirements in order. If you're in the job search coaching program, you have my illustrious epic criteria questions matrix which I demoed here. On your resume, focus on the great eight accomplishments. You all do at least one if not more, three, four, five of these things. Next thing is when you search, stay out of the applicant trashing system, get into the boss hunting. Interviews, don't forget the context. Exposition to the rising action is the context. If you don't know what I'm talking about, check out Gustav Freitag's dramatic techniques. Hollywood's been using them, novels have been using them for a thousand years and negotiate. Catch, don't pitch, make no assumptions, okay? Ask your questions first, then make your count. Well, actually ask first, then make an argument, then make a counter and then when you counter, ask for it all at once, okay? And that's that. Okay, I'm two minutes late. All right, so that's okay. I didn't dry run that, I threw that together and it just came out how it came out so I'm pretty happy with that. I hope you were too and if you were, please click the like button if you never wanna miss any of these shows or recordings or shorts every day. YouTube, my YouTube channel gets worked every day. There's a video that goes out. Sometimes it's a live show. Five days a week it's shorts. Tuesday we give you a long format video. So subscribe and if you are with me here today, we're going to the Q&A. If you are watching this on the recording, I'll see you next week.