Melissa O'Karma:
Welcome everybody. My name is Melissa O'Karma, from the Hiatt Career Center at Brandeis. Thank you all so much for joining us this evening. We are really excited to be presenting to you our webinar, Developing a 2021 Career Playbook: Job Search Strategies for a New Year.
Melissa O'Karma:
We are thrilled to have our partners here today with us, our special guest, Early Stage Careers. We at Hiatt worked with Early Stage Careers over the summer for a wonderful session, career panel, which actually featured human resource executives and experts across a variety of sectors, including one of our alumni, a Brandeis alum who works at Facebook.
Melissa O'Karma:
We are excited to partner once again with Early Stage Careers, and offer some insight, some tips, some strategies, on how to best present yourself, and build that career playbook to get the position that you want.
Melissa O'Karma:
We will be recording today's session, just to let everybody know. The recording will be available after today's session. We will email that out to everybody.
Melissa O'Karma:
And again, thank you all so much for being here. Just a quick reminder to keep yourself on mute. We have the chat available for comments, questions, we will be monitoring that. We want to make sure that we get to your questions.
Melissa O'Karma:
We will also have a live Q&A at the end of the presentation, so please feel free to drop it in the chat, write it down, ask it live. We want to hear from you. So without further ado, I'd like to turn it over to our special guests at Early Stage Careers. Thank you again for joining us.
Jill Tipograph:
Thanks Melissa. We're really delighted to be here to partner with you, and the Hiatt center and BOLD, Brandeisians of the Last Decade. College students, graduates and twentysomethings, are really facing an incredibly competitive job marketplace now.
Jill Tipograph:
Of course, more challenging to navigate due to COVID-19 pandemic, and the impact on the economy beyond the 2009 recession. There's so many fewer job opportunities and so many more applicants.
Jill Tipograph:
It's become critically important that early careers be strategic and savvy in their job search process, and they really learn to distinguish themselves more than ever before. So we've come together as a group here to address this unique situation for all of you here.
Jill Tipograph:
We're going to share our Early Stage Careers job search tips and strategies, and then Brandeis is going to speak to all of you as students and alumni, in terms of all the resources they have available to help. And we hope collectively, this really will help you navigate this very complex process during this extraordinarily challenging time.
Jill Tipograph:
We learned from the information that all of you share, that most of you have graduated Brandeis in the past three years or so, and there were a lot of students who are about to graduate or soon will graduate.
Jill Tipograph:
So we really think collectively, this will be extremely valuable for you, but most importantly, is we think this is really a time of opportunity for you, so we hope that you'll walk away with that.
Jill Tipograph:
Before we get started, a little bit more about Early Stage Careers. I'm Jill Tipograph. I'm co-founder along with my partner co-founder Lesley Mitler of Early Stage Careers. Our esteemed Director of Professional Development, and one of our senior career coaches, Judy Panagakos, is actually going to be leading the discussion in terms of the content soon.
Jill Tipograph:
We guide college students, graduates and young adults to be competitive in the job marketplace and to get hired. Actually, our roots are in the 2008-2009 recession, when we saw that this population was really in uncharted territory, and they didn't know how to navigate launching their career or progressing it. We lived it, and we're here to share our wisdom continually with you.
Jill Tipograph:
Just a few logistics before we actually get into the webinar. I think that Melissa touched on some, but I just want to reinforce a few. The event is best if it's on a tablet or computer, so you can see all the speakers. Please keep yourself muted during the presentation.
Jill Tipograph:
And also, we just want to make sure that the name that shows underneath each of your pictures, aligns with what you did for registration. So Brandeis has just asked if you look at the little dots on the top, you have a nickname or initials, could you just put your full name there so that we can all see that.
Jill Tipograph:
So for about 30 minutes, we're going to take you through the content, we're going to share the job search tips and strategies, and then Brandeis will share their resources. Hope that you'll listen and participate because you'll have the recording afterwards.
Jill Tipograph:
There's going to be a lot of different job guides that we are using, that we have at Early Stage Careers. Those too are going to be sent to you afterwards.
Jill Tipograph:
The Q&A, we've left a good amount of time. We want to be able to address your questions. So as Melissa said, put them in the chat box. We hope the questions are generic enough, so there'll be applicable to enough people.
Jill Tipograph:
And then as a thank you, there's going to be a brief survey that Brandeis will send out tomorrow morning, and sending back that survey, you'll be able to enter to win five resume critiques.
Jill Tipograph:
So it'll be five different people who will win that through Early Stage Careers. We're going to draw those entrance on Friday the 15th, so please get it in as soon as you can, and we hope that feedback will actually help all of us produce even more webinars and opportunities for all of you.
Jill Tipograph:
Now we're going to get into the actual webinar. Let me just introduce the agenda, and then I'm going to hand it over to Judy. You know that Judy will be speaking, and then Sandra is going to be speaking from Brandeis's Hiatt Career Center, and then we're all going to regroup in terms of the Q&A.
Jill Tipograph:
We'll go over the jobs or strategies, resources will come from Hiatt, we have the Q&A, and just a reminder about the survey, the presentation materials and critique.
Jill Tipograph:
And so, the topics we're going to cover on the bottom of the screen, you're going to see all these different tabs. So we're going to take you through assessments, what's actually in a Marketing Playbook, all the kinds of skills you need to be building and what does that mean?
Jill Tipograph:
Very important is how do you effectively network, then what's entailed in terms of job sourcing opportunities, a lot about interviewing and then getting through this, how do you discipline yourself, and then move on to Hiatt and Q&A. Judy, I'm going to let you take it over from this point, and thank you.
Judy Panagakos:
Thank you Jill. And thank you everyone for joining us this evening. As we kick off the new year, as Jill mentioned, we wanted to share some of the tips and the guidance, and the things that we use with our clients at Early Stage Careers.
Judy Panagakos:
I think the power of this presentation comes from our company presenting the job search from the business side. We're career consultants in a way. We help people mastermind the whole process end to end.
Judy Panagakos:
Then the team from Hiatt is presenting from the academic side, and they're going to share all these rich resources that all of you can be taking advantage of.
Judy Panagakos:
And if there's one thing that you take away from tonight's remarks, is you should really be trying to use every opportunity that you have. You may not use every opportunity every day, but don't leave anything on the table. You should absolutely be using all these resources and all these suggestions.
Judy Panagakos:
There's definitely one thing that both of our organizations are very focused on and put a lot of stock in, and that's the value of career assessments.
Judy Panagakos:
At Early Stage Careers, we use some sophisticated career assessment instruments, and some of these are also available to you through the Hiatt Career Center.
Judy Panagakos:
We offer them so that people can step back and take an inventory of their skills, their work styles, their work habits, their interests, and then have an expert help guide them through how those things relate to actual career clusters, career opportunities that exist.
Judy Panagakos:
Then in our practice, we take it one step forward, where we go out to the market and try to find actual job postings, that are out right now, that marry up to that information, and then we walk the client through those opportunities, almost like a sampler of what about this, what about this?
Judy Panagakos:
And it gives the person the chance to react and reflect, and see it in real life in the marketplace. So if all of this sounds a little bit like a love letter to career assessments, it sort of is.
Judy Panagakos:
I think one of the things I've learned from working with people the last few years using these assessments, is that it really has two values.
Judy Panagakos:
One is the up front piece, what I just described, which is setting out your roadmap. Like, "What should I be looking for? What do I want to be when I grow up? What do I want to do?" And obviously, that's just fundamental.
Judy Panagakos:
The second piece is all that comes out of the assessments later on. I'm just going to give one example, which is in interviewing. I know it's very, very hard for people to talk about themselves.
Judy Panagakos:
People don't want to come across as being overly confident or bragging, but armed with an objective career assessment, you can almost get the language and the words to use, to talk about your strengths, your success factors, what's helped you achieve what you have so far.
Judy Panagakos:
And then also your weaknesses, which is an important part of preparing to interview. So if you haven't ever done a career assessment, I strongly recommend it.
Judy Panagakos:
And another value, and closing on this one point is, sometimes job searches can go on for quite a long time. Months, months and months sometimes. And often you'll feel stalled or sort of stuck, and you can go back to the assessment and look at what it revealed about you.
Judy Panagakos:
And sometimes just that fresh perspective, leads you down a new path that you weren't pursuing before. So it's just an excellent foundation to get started on.
Judy Panagakos:
For some people, and I know a lot of you from filling in the registration, mentioned that you're looking to do something different in the new year. You're working now but planning to change jobs. And clearly all the people who are still in school, are planning to set on a path and a journey in their job search.
Judy Panagakos:
And so sometimes, in addition to the assessment, you just need a way to step back and generate new ideas. Sometimes people think they want to pivot and change direction, and they just need to freshly evaluate what they're doing right now.
Judy Panagakos:
There are no perfect jobs. Every job has its pros and cons. There's always a little bit of something in your job that you don't love. And one of the ways that you can help look at what you're doing right now, as well as look at what else you might be doing is to leverage the O*NET.
Judy Panagakos:
And if you're not familiar with that, or you haven't used that before, it's a site that's produced by the U.S. government, and it's the largest repository of information about careers and job titles.
Judy Panagakos:
And for each position and each career cluster that's mentioned in the O*NET, the O*NET actually provides 19 different types of information about the role. We just flagged seven of them here on this slide.
Judy Panagakos:
First of all, it's also a free tool which is wonderful. So you can go in and you can look at what you're doing now, and see what... Maybe there are additional skills you should be building or tools you should be learning about, or increased educational credentials that you should be getting.
Judy Panagakos:
And it also helps the other related position. So maybe there's an aspect of what you're doing now that would make you happier. And the O*NET gives you that opportunity to just brainstorm and explore without making any commitments to anything. It doesn't even store your data. It's really just a reference tool.
Judy Panagakos:
And the other major value of the O*NET, it's very, very important, is it can help you inventory the skills that you'll need to be working on. We'll talk more about that in a little bit. But it actually lists out all of the key skills, both soft skills and hard skills like technologies and the tools used.
Judy Panagakos:
And it also shows which of those are considered hot skills and tools to know about. So ones that are in demand against a variety of different positions. So if you haven't explored this yet, definitely in the next couple of days, take a look at the O*NET, because I think you'll get a lot out of that.
Judy Panagakos:
And now we're going to move on to Your Marketing Playbook. Of all the things that we talked about in job seeking, the Marketing Playbook components probably get the most airtime, and they are absolutely crucially important.
Judy Panagakos:
We'll walk you through how we look at those work products, and things that you need to create at the outset as you're looking to do something. And then we'll talk about how you're using them in the whole ongoing method of job seeking.
Judy Panagakos:
So first, we'll talk about your resume and your LinkedIn profile. We know that people need to always have an objective way to look at their personal branding.
Judy Panagakos:
Usually during college is the first time you really take this seriously, but it's something that you'll do throughout your career. So you want to invest some very focused time upfront in working on that.
Judy Panagakos:
It's a professional document, your resume. It's not a craft project. So we take a very traditional view of how a resume should be structured.
Judy Panagakos:
We want to do that for a couple of reasons. One is, that the people who are going to look at and read your resume, have hundreds to look at and they don't have a lot of time to look at it.
Judy Panagakos:
There have been studies done that say people look at resumes for something like six to 10 seconds. So obviously it has to be well packaged and put together, but it has to deliver to the reader the key information about your education, your experiences, your skills and interests, so they can very quickly discern if you're going to make it to the next cut.
Judy Panagakos:
The second thing that we want people to focus on besides the human readers, are the machine readers, right? The artificial intelligence and the applicant tracking systems, that are processing for large companies the bulk of the resumes.
Judy Panagakos:
So you want to be sure that your resume will be able to be easily parsed into that environment. What that means is, you can just simply attach the resume file, and it'll extract the database elements that are needed to build your record.
Judy Panagakos:
Otherwise, you'll be stuck re-typing all the information that you already typed into your resume. So you don't want to be in that position.
Judy Panagakos:
And then make sure that your bullets are succinct, yet robust, really telling a story, using quantifiable metrics, and that the sections of your resume are divided up simply by bold fonts, and not by lines or funky graphics.
Judy Panagakos:
If you really, really feel compelled to have a resume that has some of those things, you might actually want to consider having two versions. One that you can use to parson, and one that you can hand to people or pass to them in an email or something in an interview setting.
Judy Panagakos:
But you'll definitely save yourself time, if you go for the simple, clean lines. Again, no graphics, no dividing lines between the sections.
Judy Panagakos:
And then once your resume is solid, and you've proof-read it and had friends take a look at it or trusted advisors, you should then make sure that your LinkedIn profile marries up to that.
Judy Panagakos:
So your LinkedIn profile is an opportunity to really paint an even more robust picture of what you've done. If you're not using LinkedIn, you absolutely need to be getting set up on that, and I'm sure most of you are already set up on that.
Judy Panagakos:
I use as an example here, my friend Ryan, who I worked with at J.P. Morgan. He's a very talented person. He used to work at LinkedIn as it turns out. He recently changed jobs.
Judy Panagakos:
And you'll see if you were to look at his profile, that it would certainly marry up to his resume and also give much more detail. Reading his profile is like interviewing him.
Judy Panagakos:
And your resume is not that, right? But you have this opportunity that if you've appeared in the media, or there's some video footage of something that you've done, like a project in college or something you did in your volunteer work, you have the chance to attach all of that, as well as obviously interact with people in the LinkedIn setting from a networking perspective.
Judy Panagakos:
So definitely spend time first on the resume, get that rock solid, and then do a sync up, and then think creatively about how you can expand on your presence on LinkedIn.
Judy Panagakos:
The next pieces of the Marketing Playbook are your correspondences. Again, for cover letters, it is our recommendation that you stay fairly traditional.
Judy Panagakos:
The cover letter should carry the same format and substance. Like in your header, it should look the same as your resume, so that they're a match set.
Judy Panagakos:
We also suggest that your cover letter accentuate key skills. Things that you'll see either across all the jobs you'll be applying for, or for the specific job that you'll be applying for, and have those skills bulleted or highlighted so that you're providing evidence that you actually have that skill.
Judy Panagakos:
So saying that you're great at project management is nice, but explaining how you got that skill and where you've actually applied that skill clinically. Was it in a class, in a group project, something you did at your current employer or during an internship.
Judy Panagakos:
And then having a strong closing that ties your interest and passion for the organization that you're applying to, back to tie it all together and have it bring interest in you.
Judy Panagakos:
Again, you're wanting to tailor this to the human reader. I've read hundreds and hundreds of resumes and cover letters, as I've recruited people. I don't enjoy reading cover letters.
Judy Panagakos:
A lot of large companies don't even want a cover letter, but smaller companies do, and it's absolutely essential that you take an actual company that you're applying to, and make that first cover letter become your template to speed up the production of cover letters going forward.
Judy Panagakos:
The other thing, and this is a very important piece in terms of the efficiency of your job search process, is we suggest that you build basically a little communications kit.
Judy Panagakos:
So these would be short messages that you would use either on LinkedIn, when you're trying to reach out and connect to someone for the first time, or when you're emailing someone that someone suggested you reach out to, that you already have pre-established content that you can use and recycle.
Judy Panagakos:
Obviously, with some tailoring, but just to not have it hold you up from reaching out to people as part of your networking practice, and engaging with people who might be able to help you.
Judy Panagakos:
And then lastly, it always makes sense to do a quick Google search just to make sure there's nothing wild and woolly out there on the internet.
Judy Panagakos:
If there's a way for you to put that in check or take it down, or at least be prepared to respond to it, it's very important because people will be looking at your LinkedIn profile and seeing what else they can find about you. And so you want to be able to head off anything that's a little rocky at the beginning.
Judy Panagakos:
And now we will move on to Skill Building. Our skill building approach at Early Stage Careers is something that we take very seriously.
Judy Panagakos:
We often at the conclusion of someone doing an assessment with us try to take a step back, and work with a person to understand the skills they have now, and the skills for the thing they aspire to become, and stage what do they want to learn next, and then we help them try to find their way to training opportunities.
Judy Panagakos:
So in terms of what skills do I need, there's a couple of different ways that you can gather that information. You can look at the O*NET which I talked about earlier, because there's ready-made skill information there linking to job titles.
Judy Panagakos:
We find it very helpful to look at some of the jobs in the category that you're interested in on LinkedIn, because there are these skill maps, and we have a visual of that here.
Judy Panagakos:
I happen to just pull a position in human resources, and you can see some of the things that they're looking for that are essential, and some that would be more nice to haves.
Judy Panagakos:
Another area or opportunity would be to speak to experts. I think it's very interesting. I've spoken to some people about roles I've seen on the O*NET, and they're in the field.
Judy Panagakos:
These are very influential people in their field, and they have a different spin on the prioritization of what the O*NET is revealing, because they're out there on the front lines and they know.
Judy Panagakos:
And that's a great way to network with people. You can say, "Oh, I'm thinking of learning these new things." Maybe you're in data science, and you're going to study Python or R. Talk to somebody in data science, see what pecking order they would lay out that skill building.
Judy Panagakos:
And maybe they have a suggested course to take, because they've been down that path before or have people on their teams that are learning that skill.
Judy Panagakos:
So once you know what you need to go after, then you need to look at where can I get this. So there are a whole variety of things. During last year, during the pandemic, many companies offering courses have provided free introductory classes, so you can get your feet wet and see if it's something that you like.
Judy Panagakos:
There are self-study options for things like PowerPoint, and Excel. There are courses, there are books, there are YouTube videos. And then as you're learning these skills, you should try to identify places that you can apply those skills.
Judy Panagakos:
So if it's volunteering to help a community organization that you work with get something done, it doesn't have to be an internship or a giant thing, but try to find opportunities to actually use what you've learned, so that you can talk about that in interviews.
Judy Panagakos:
I know that Jill mentioned it before, but you'll be receiving our job guides that are throughout. And so here's one that we have on skill building. There are others. So I hope you'll take time offline when we're not on this presentation, to use some of that material to help chart your own course from the skill building perspective.
Judy Panagakos:
Our next topic is Networking. And I want to say that of all the things that we'll talk about tonight, I hope you will keep networking as your primary focus for the thing that is the thread throughout your job search process.
Judy Panagakos:
I was just realizing this morning that the last three people that I helped find jobs all had a networking connection at the company that hired them.
Judy Panagakos:
And yes, the job was posted on their website, but all three of those people either also knew someone who worked at the company, who put the good word in for them, or helped them prepare for their interviews.
Judy Panagakos:
So having that connection... And they weren't all super strong connections, but they had a connection in addition to applying for the position. So networking is important, number one, because it helps people find jobs. It's proven time and time again.
Judy Panagakos:
The other reason networking is really important is that way beyond job searching, you will use people who are part of your network throughout your life.
Judy Panagakos:
It may be that you need to get, I don't know, work done at your house. Or you're a volunteer and you're trying to do some fundraising for an organization, you can reach out to people, and see how they've done fundraising for other organizations, or ask them for money for your organization.
Judy Panagakos:
What we find almost always with people that we work with who are early career, so the people in college, people just graduating, people who've been out just a few years, is that people are generally not comfortable doing networking.
Judy Panagakos:
They wish they didn't have to. They're uncomfortable, and so we always say this, "We need to get you comfortable with the uncomfortable." There are many techniques for networking, and our guide here just list some of them. There's probably 100 different things that you could do.
Judy Panagakos:
Using LinkedIn, whether you use the free version, which obviously you should use, or even sign up for the premium version of LinkedIn, which is very powerful, and you may want to consider it if you're in a very active job search. Use that as the place to keep score on your network.
Judy Panagakos:
As we mentioned earlier, plan some simple messages upfront, so that writing the message isn't what's holding you back from reaching out to people. And then also use LinkedIn to cultivate following companies, and following and becoming members of the Brandeis Group.
Judy Panagakos:
I'm sure BOLD has a group on LinkedIn. Your summer camp from back in the day. Your high school may have an alumni program on LinkedIn. Again, don't leave any stones unturned when it comes to using LinkedIn.
Judy Panagakos:
You should become a power user. There are tutorials on LinkedIn. If you know somebody who's already really active on it, and has a huge network, see what features they're using it to do job searching. It's a very powerful job board. And you should have alerts set up, so that you can be sourcing opportunities as well.
Judy Panagakos:
I was thinking of this the other day too. I've been using LinkedIn for 15 years. As a recruiting professional, you had to be on LinkedIn. This was just price of admission responsibility as a recruiting professional.
Judy Panagakos:
But it wasn't until I found out that I was going to have to leave the company, that I worked for, for a really long time that I actually got it. I got why it's so important, and I should have connected with far more people all along the way.
Judy Panagakos:
I always thought it was seemed odd to connect with people that you were currently working with. It seemed kind of contrived. And I'm telling you, I really regret that I didn't do that. And now I take great joy in connecting with people. They helped me in my volunteer work, they help me with my work currently, obviously helping people manage career issues.
Judy Panagakos:
So please, invest some significant time in your networking practice, and literally make it a practice like you would participating in an athletic sport or something. Grow your network and have some techniques to really dig in on that.
Judy Panagakos:
Now let's talk about where you're going to go find the specific job opportunities. I'm sure all of you have used job boards of one kind or another, whether it was the Monster board or using LinkedIn, which we mentioned is a very good one, Indeed, et cetera.
Judy Panagakos:
There's hundreds of job boards. I find new ones literally every week. We're often sharing with each other at Early Stage Careers, "Did you know about this one?" There are some that are very city specific. There are some that are very profession specific, like technology job boards.
Judy Panagakos:
But what we wanted to share with you tonight is that as you look at this vast array of job boards, try to find ones that make your process efficient for what you need. And obviously everyone's looking for something different.
Judy Panagakos:
You'll notice on the right-hand side of the screen, that we call out a couple of specific tools. And we brought these to the forefront. Mediabistro, Built In, whether it's Built In New York or Built In Boston or Built In Chicago, or Idealists, they all have a little bit of a different niche.
Judy Panagakos:
But what's interesting about all of them, is they all have these what we call winning features. They allow you to focus on a specific area, and again, for your search, if you're in marketing, Mediabistro is probably one of the key places you want to be.
Judy Panagakos:
They allow you to narrow down by geography, by level of position, and by how long the position has been posted. So if you're going in every day or every other day, you don't want to look at the same job postings over and over and over again, it's draining.
Judy Panagakos:
So you want to learn the fastest path to see the newest opportunities. So really be critical in making your choices, because you don't want to burn through your own time in trying to harvest these opportunities.
Judy Panagakos:
At Brandeis, I'm sure the undergrads who are at the school now are familiar with Handshake. It's something often alumni fail to use. Like I said, don't leave any opportunities on the table.
Judy Panagakos:
So if you're not set up to use Handshake, please later on, I know that Sandra will speak about that tool, make sure that you're getting set up and getting alerts set up, so that you can see things that have been specifically positioned for people in the Brandeis family.
Judy Panagakos:
The other thing is once you find a job opportunity, we always recommend that if possible, go to the company's own website to enter your application.
Judy Panagakos:
We do that for a couple reasons. One is, you'll see the most current information on the company's website versus on a job board, where job boards are constantly scraping jobs and things can sometimes get stale there.
Judy Panagakos:
But also, it's very important that when you're on the company's website, maybe the job isn't available any longer, but if they have a talent bank, which is just the chance to put your resume in and some of your key details, and have the company notify you when jobs you're interested in become open.
Judy Panagakos:
Taking the two minutes or whatever it would take to set yourself up on the talent bank is just a really good investment of your time.
Judy Panagakos:
And the last key point I want to make is that as you're applying to these various things that you find, it's very important that you save the details of the job posting offline.
Judy Panagakos:
We usually recommend that a client have maybe just a Word document, where they just keep cutting and pasting all the details of the job, on this separate Word document, not a hyperlink, but the actual verbiage, because if that job posting comes down and you get called to interview, you want to know what it was you applied to, right?
Judy Panagakos:
You're probably juggling so many different applications, it would be hard to recall the detail bullet points that are going to be really important when it comes time to interview.
Judy Panagakos:
Speaking of interviewing, that's the next topic that we'll cover. And we have two things that we want to talk about with regard to interviewing. First is you practicing your interviewing techniques and interviewing questions, so that you're literally ready to answer any question.
Judy Panagakos:
And when we train people to interview, the first type of question we try to work with them on is the behaviorally-based interview questions. So those are questions that begin with a statement such as, tell me about a time when you had to work with a difficult person, or tell me about a time when you had to lead a group through a challenging situation?
Judy Panagakos:
And so we arm people with a strategy, which may be familiar to many of you called the STAR interview technique. So in the STAR interview technique, you want to just first frame out the situation that you were in, when you were doing whatever this thing is that you're answering the interviewer about.
Judy Panagakos:
Don't start your story mid movie. Let them know what was happening, what was the context, and then go into what was the crucial task before you or before you and the team of people that you were with?
Judy Panagakos:
And then what did you do to address that problem, make it better, make it bigger, make it faster? What did you specifically bring to bear on that challenge? And then what was the outcome? And even if the outcome was bad, even if the outcome was that it didn't go so well, you're telling a story about a time that happened to you.
Judy Panagakos:
Then we often recommend that you add another R at the end. Maybe not on every answer, but where you reflect back on what happened in that situation. So you might say something at the very end in closing like, "If I had to do all over again, I would have done A, B and C in a different order."
Judy Panagakos:
It also gives you the opportunity to ask the interviewer, "Have you ever been in a situation like that? It's really tough." It's a good way to engage the interviewer besides just having question-answer, question-answer.
Judy Panagakos:
Again, you wouldn't want to do that reflecting back technique on every single answer. It would sound a little rehearsed. But to plan out that when you're asked those types of very common behaviorally-based questions, that you've really got a fleshed out answer.
Judy Panagakos:
So we go as far as to have people longhand out their answers or type up answers, and then we practice making them more punctuated and more concise, but still conveying all the key elements.
Judy Panagakos:
We also know that even pre-COVID, virtual interviewing was very much alive and well. People were doing interviews on HireVue, and other online platforms. And so we offer some tips here. I know it's a lot to read but really good information on our site, about video interviewing and how to practice.
Judy Panagakos:
And one thing that we do is besides doing mock interviews with people over Zoom, is I'll sometimes just set my Zoom up, and anyone can do this obviously with their own Zoom, to just pretend you're doing a HireVue interview, and have it record you and then watch yourself, and listen to your answers. It's very, very important.
Judy Panagakos:
In terms of practice questions, you can find behaviorally-based practice questions in books, online. You can find them also, practice questions about technical questions. So if you're an engineer or you're an accountant, you want to work on Wall Street, there are many, many question sets that you can find online.
Judy Panagakos:
And depending on what you're aiming for, you really should be just prepared to answer any question. Even some of the more esoteric ones that sometimes come up in quantitative interviews.
Judy Panagakos:
So you don't want to be caught off guard, but you can absolutely be getting ready and be doing this a little bit all the time, and also practicing with friends. On the flip side, besides being prepared to answer the interviewers questions, you need to be prepared to ask questions.
Judy Panagakos:
And of all the people I interviewed, I would say a lot of people at a lot of different levels in their career would come up short, on the asking questions of me, the representative of the company.
Judy Panagakos:
And that included meeting me at a career fair, meeting me in an interview, meeting the line managers and just not seeming as interested or excited about the opportunity that you just were fiercely hungry to want to know as much as you could about it.
Judy Panagakos:
So we offer this guide because it's good to get comfortable with the company, the industry, the competitors, the parent company of the company that you're interviewing for. That's a really big deal if you're talking to a small company, but it's part of a bigger conglomerate.
Judy Panagakos:
And then the job description. Dissect it, understand what's required, how would you get trained? And then have questions that present you as someone who would be planning to be there for more than a couple months.
Judy Panagakos:
I've worked at J.P. Morgan for over 30 years. You probably won't do that, right? That's completely realistic. But you want to present yourself to the person you're interviewing as somebody who's going to be in it for two to three years.
Judy Panagakos:
They're going to invest a lot of time in training you and developing you, and they want to hear that you want to dig in and hold on. So you should have at least five questions or so, and really practice this aspect, because you may be put into an interview situation on the fly.
Judy Panagakos:
You might be networking with someone, you think it's going to be a very casual dialogue, and suddenly they say, "You know what, we're posting a job tomorrow," and all of a sudden it flips. Casual conversation becomes a bit of an interview. And you should be ready to go out and flip the switch, and be ready to ask your questions when that time comes in the interaction with that person.
Judy Panagakos:
I'm almost wrapping up here but there's a couple of other things. As I mentioned, we often talk about building your resume and writing your cover letter, and a lot of airtime is given to those topics, but most of what you're going to do in your job search is the networking, the sourcing opportunities and the interviewing.
Judy Panagakos:
And in addition to doing those things and doing them well, you also need to make sure that you're cultivating your own resilience. Job searching is a lot of about being turned down, not getting an opportunity.
Judy Panagakos:
I was sharing a couple of minutes before the presentation started that, we know a young woman, she applied to over 100 jobs and got one. So she was doing cover letters and resumes and packages of recommendations and writing samples, and then she would interview and she didn't get it a couple of times.
Judy Panagakos:
And so when I would speak with her I'd say, "Okay but what are you going to do?" And she'd be like, "I'm going to go get a cup of coffee, I'm going to go on a three-mile walk, and I'm going to pick myself back up again tomorrow."
Judy Panagakos:
So whether you go walking, meditating, running, chopping wood, it doesn't matter, you should definitely make a plan, before it starts happening for how you're going to bring it down a notch and take care of yourself.
Judy Panagakos:
Another great thing to do is be accountable to someone. It could be a coach, it could be a professor that you're friendly with, that you've maintained ties with. It could be a family member.
Judy Panagakos:
When I was doing my job search a couple of years ago, I would just at noon every day, write this little note to my husband called the Noon Report. And I would say I applied to these three jobs, I got frustrated, this happened, I talked to these people.
Judy Panagakos:
He did not need that report, but he thought it was helpful to me to be like, "I have to answer to someone." And I know our clients often will say, "Oh, let's not meet once a week, let's make twice a week, because I want to have to tell you what I did." And it's very helpful to have an accountability partner.
Judy Panagakos:
And then the last thing is just supporting others. You have friends who are looking for jobs, planning a job search, trying to figure out what they want to do.
Judy Panagakos:
There are people that you could be pitching your skills to or pitching projects to. If you find a way to give back... And giving back to your college is a great way, right?
Judy Panagakos:
The Alumni Office probably needs help, I don't know, talking to incoming freshmen, helping recruit other alumni to be part of the alumni organization.
Judy Panagakos:
Again, leave no stone unturned and find ways to help others, because it really does feel good to help others, and usually you learn something from that, and can can forge that and play that back into your own search routine.
Judy Panagakos:
And just tying this all together, this job guide, we call our Seven Day Job Search Plan, and it's one of the most commonly requested things from our website.
Judy Panagakos:
And basically what we're saying is, not that you're going to find a job in seven days, it does not mean that, but that you should build a discipline strategy. You should come up with a variety of tactics for each of the strategies.
Judy Panagakos:
I'm going to just focus on Thursday. We say, "Make Thursday about networking." It doesn't matter which day you have be your networking day. They could all be about networking a little bit.
Judy Panagakos:
But have a day where you're stepping back, you're measuring how your network has grown. Then one thing I'm suggesting to people, is just make a list of 100 things you could do for networking, and this week do two of them, and then next week shake it up, mix it up.
Judy Panagakos:
You should constantly be reforging, and re-energizing your search by just popping in different tactics, or asking other people what they're doing in that regard.
Judy Panagakos:
And so as I've said probably 10 times already tonight, leverage every available resource. Don't leave anything on the table. Even if you're not sure it's for you, give it a try once and then put it on the back burner if that's the case.
Judy Panagakos:
So I hope this has been helpful, and I'm looking forward to answering questions later. But now, I'm thrilled to turn it over to Sandra from the Hiatt Career Services Office, who will talk to you about all the things that you can benefit from her team.
Sandra Sylvestre:
Hi. Judy thank you very much for all of that great information. I really appreciate that. My name is Sandra Sylvestre, I'm one of the career counselors at Hiatt, and tonight I'm going to speak very briefly about how Hiatt supports alumni.
Sandra Sylvestre:
The Hiatt vision is to help all Brandeisians know who they are, what they want, and how to get there. And Hiatt is pleased to be able to offer career services to alumni for life. So wherever you are in your career journey, you can graduate from Brandeis knowing that you're going to have support available when you need it.
Sandra Sylvestre:
We have an alumni website with a lot of great information on it. And alums are also welcome to schedule individual conversations, so you can get advice tailored to your specific situation.
Sandra Sylvestre:
We know that our alums go all over the country, all over the world, and so no worries if you're not local. We were happy to work with our alums, phone or do it over Zoom.
Sandra Sylvestre:
We all are generalist career counselors, so that any alum can come to talk to any of us from any background or discipline. But we're all people, and we have our own backgrounds and interests, and so we keep this information on the Hiatt website.
Sandra Sylvestre:
We strongly encourage alums to check out the counselor bios, prior to booking a conversation, so you can pick the counselor who would be the best fit for you.
Sandra Sylvestre:
Very briefly, the work that we do with alums basically can be boiled down into two categories. The first being the big picture stuff. Helping folks think about how their unique personalities, skills and interests, intersect with the world of work.
Sandra Sylvestre:
And then the other category is the technical skills of career. So helping people prep for an interview, or review application materials or to think through your job search strategy.
Sandra Sylvestre:
During these individual conversations, we start wherever you are. We want to help you identify what your goals are for the conversation, and that's what we tackle.
Sandra Sylvestre:
Sometimes things don't turn out the way you expect, and there are times that you just have to pause, and think about where you're going. And so we can help you reflect on those past experiences, to identify themes and patterns that can help move you forward.
Sandra Sylvestre:
Hiatt is really good at supporting bold alumni, to evaluate career experiences to determine next steps. And other common conversation topics we have with alums are prepping for grad school, certainly job search strategy, and insights on the application materials. So, that's us in a nutshell.
Sandra Sylvestre:
We have a few resources that I wanted to point out. We have a lot of tools available to alums. The main page that we use for career services and job platform is Handshake.
Sandra Sylvestre:
That's your one-stop shop for accessing career information, job and internship postings, scheduling appointments with counselors, lots of great resources.
Sandra Sylvestre:
You can access Handshake on the Hiatt website, or on the Brandeis portal. The screen grab on the left is the main landing page of Handshake, where you're going to be looking for those jobs, you can conduct employer research, you can sign up for events and gain access to the resource library. There's a lot of great job search tools in it.
Sandra Sylvestre:
The picture on the right-hand side is where you would sign up for appointments, look up career and industry information, job outlook, career guides.
Sandra Sylvestre:
We do encourage you to fill out your Handshake profile, so that the jobs that pop up in your feed are related to what you're interested in. And if you sign up for Handshake alerts, you're going to get emails that are tailored directly to you, regarding new job postings and Handshake events that are pertinent to your interests.
Sandra Sylvestre:
On the next slide, along with Handshake, we have a really great alumni website that our marketing and engagement department has done a great job in cultivating.
Sandra Sylvestre:
We want the information to be centralized for you, so you're going to find it all in this one place. The Hiatt Career Center website is going to link you to Handshake, it's going to show you those events, networking opportunities, and job search resources.
Sandra Sylvestre:
Also, on the Hiatt website are information on how you can get involved with us. And if you're a current employer, it gives you information on how you can connect to Brandeis talent.
Sandra Sylvestre:
The website has lots of information you can access 24/7, and one of our very popular pages is resources on how to begin and conduct a job search.
Sandra Sylvestre:
So between Handshake, between our website, between individual conversations, we try our very best to support alums, and to have that information for you in a centralized, easy to access location.
Sandra Sylvestre:
I hope you find that helpful, and I hope you reach out if we can support you. I believe Melissa has a few words to say about B Connect.
Melissa O'Karma:
Great. Thank you Sandra, and thank you Judy. So just very briefly, I know we have students and alumni with us today, but this is just sort of a sneak peek to a very exciting initiative that we will be launching in the coming months.
Melissa O'Karma:
So for the alums joining us today, you might be familiar with B Connect, which is our alumni directory.
Melissa O'Karma:
We are in the process of launching a new and improved B Connect, that will allow alumni to connect with each other for professional networking, allow a Brandeis business directory where alumni can post information about their organization and their businesses.
Melissa O'Karma:
And most importantly, it's going to be a space where alumni and students can connect with each other for career development. So really, a space for all Brandeisians to share insight, ask questions and support one another in the job search and career development process.
Melissa O'Karma:
More information will be coming on that. You definitely will hear from us. But very excited to preview that with you today. I think we're going to hand it back over to Jill, just for some wrap up.
Melissa O'Karma:
But before we do that, we do have some questions that came in through the chat, so I would love to try to cover some of those.
Melissa O'Karma:
If it is okay with everybody, I will just go ahead and read the questions that came through the chat, and then Judy, Sandra, you guys can just jump in, depending on who's best suited to answer the question.
Melissa O'Karma:
So first is, what is your advice for maintaining a professional connection, especially when you're no longer at the same institution?
Judy Panagakos:
Well, I mean, if you're talking about either people who work together in academia, or people who work together in a corporation or small business, I would say being connected on LinkedIn.
Judy Panagakos:
And if you're not connected, one way that I connect with people all the time, is I'll reach out and remind them of how we did something together in the past.
Judy Panagakos:
So you might be connecting with someone you worked with last year, and you might say, "Oh, remember that time we dealt with the blah, blah problem." Or I'll say, "I always think of you whenever this happens in my life," if it's someone from further back.
Judy Panagakos:
But I absolutely recommend connecting with people while you're working with them. I think I shared that anecdote earlier. But if time has passed, reach out. People are very flattered to hear from somebody from their past.
Judy Panagakos:
I mean, there's no downside to reaching out to somebody. If you don't hear back, give it time. Maybe you're hear back in a couple weeks. Sometimes people aren't as on top of their connection requests. That would be my recommendation.
Jill Tipograph:
I would just add to that Judy. I think you struck on something really important, which is compassion. And I think the greatest lesson we've all learned in the past almost year is compassion for others and empathy.
Jill Tipograph:
I know personally that when you reach out to someone with a real concern, a real thought about them, as opposed to just what are you doing professionally, you strike a chord and people remember that.
Jill Tipograph:
And you as a person, similar to volunteering, you feel good that you reached out, and you cared about someone, whatever it might be. I mean, I recently connected with someone over their son looking for an apartment, and some of my staff was posting something.
Jill Tipograph:
I didn't have to do it but I did it because I care, and that left them a mark with them. They were like, "That was so nice of you. You didn't need to do that." And it wasn't connected professionally.
Jill Tipograph:
So I think that's important to keep in mind that you just want to try to be personal when you can in appropriate ways, but when you have a professional ask, it's built on a foundation not just something that's like, "Oh, I'm looking for a job. Can you help me?"
Melissa O'Karma:
Great. Thank you both so much. I'll go to the next question. How does somebody know if they are qualified for a position?
Judy Panagakos:
I would suggest reading in the job posting. Usually they'll say what is absolutely required, and then what's preferred. It would be a leg up if you had those things. And then being objective with yourself about what you have and what you don't have.
Judy Panagakos:
And if you're not sure, that's actually a great way to network with people at the company to say, "Oh, I see you're also an entry-level person. I'm about to apply for this job. I just want to see if you think I'd be in the running."
Judy Panagakos:
Younger people, people who've not been in the workforce that long, are some of the most valuable people to network with, because they're empathetic to what you're going through. It's still fresh in their mind.
Judy Panagakos:
And so I think people have a much higher response rate, than when they over overreach on some of the networking outreach that they do. So that might be another way to help calibrate, if you're really in the running for that type of a position.
Jill Tipograph:
Again just to add to that, I think what Judy was saying, in terms of, how do you shape up versus what the job is? Really try to be conservative in the sense of, "Well, I don't really have those skills." And so use that as a motivation to build the skill and acquire it by action.
Jill Tipograph:
That's creating structure in this completely unstructured process. "Oh, I need to have an advanced level Excel. Okay, I'm going to sign up for a course. I'm going to have structure in my day. I'm going to build that skill, so next time I see that kind of job, then I'll be able to be a viable candidate."
Jill Tipograph:
So I would use it as a learning moment, in addition to an aha moment. And just keep this list of skills you need to build and then go after them incrementally, so you feel like you're making progress. Going back to what Judy said about the Seven Day Plan that we use with our clients.
Melissa O'Karma:
Wonderful. So being mindful of time, I'd like to just open it up if anybody has live questions or final comments, thoughts, anything that folks would like to share?
Jill Tipograph:
Do you want me to... Melissa?
Melissa O'Karma:
Sure.
Jill Tipograph:
Do you want me to just kind of wrap up for everybody?
Melissa O'Karma:
Sure.
Jill Tipograph:
So we hope that this is proven to be really productive and helpful for all of you. We want you to feel positive about moving forward. There is positivity more than we thought so before, and we think the steps we've shared here are really helpful.
Jill Tipograph:
As a reminder, you're going to get the email, I think from Melissa by tomorrow morning, so you can get feedback on the short survey, so that we can help you be productive. And maybe you can be one of the five people who wins a resume critiqued by us, which would be terrific. And that'll be by Friday, the deadline.
Jill Tipograph:
And then Melissa is going to follow up with the actual live link to the recording and the job guides. We have a separate link for you for these job guides, a few days later in the week. So you'll have all of that to look forward to.
Jill Tipograph:
There's a lot that was covered here, but hopefully when you watch it again, it'll start to resonate with you, and you can stop at certain points and learn about things further we had in the other slide. We had all of our contact information.
Jill Tipograph:
Follow up with us if you have some questions, and we just really, really wish you a productive, positive job search as you go into 2021, and we wish everyone the best, and thank you for coming.
Melissa O'Karma:
Jill, Judy, thank you so much for being with us. We so appreciate Early Stage Career sharing this wonderful information. And on behalf of the Office of Alumni Relations and the Hiatt Career Center at Brandeis, thank you to everyone who participated this evening. We appreciate you being here and hope that you took away some valuable information.
Jill Tipograph:
Thank you Melissa and everyone at Brandeis. It was great partnering. Bye-bye.
Melissa O'Karma:
Bye-bye.
Judy Panagakos:
Bye.