By Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter
Things are still complicated out there. My guest, DJ Lloyd, discusses the top things that you can do when times get tough including Covid tough. Yes, this was recorded a while ago, but includes advice relevant today.
Experienced Workers
So, my guest today is David E. Lloyd, Jr., a US Marine veteran with almost 20 years of experience as a consultant to the federal government. He’s the co-founder, let me restate that, he’s the founder of DJ the Career Coach, I don’t know where my head was at that moment, and the author of the job promotion manual. His work, well, what he does is help his clients with landing their next promotion, increasing their salary, and networking within the job market.
DJ, welcome. Great to have you on. Great to be here.
Yes. Thank you. So, here we are.
Times are, shall we say, complicated. You know, I’ve been through a lot of recessions, nothing like this. No one’s seen anything like this for which there’s no playbook whatsoever.
And we’re going to talk today about some of the things that people can do when times get rough, not necessarily like COVID tough, but like, tough in general. And you’ve got 10 things we’re going to talk about today. So, what’s number one? What’s the first thing that people should do in getting ready when times get rough? Well, my go to is always my resume.
So, whenever I am considering moving on to a new job, or considering this job I have is not working out, the first thing I do is update my resume. That’s the key thing. And making sure that it’s up to date, and just making sure that it’s a fresh look sometimes can give you some ideas of what to change and what to make better, and make sure that there’s no repetition as you begin updating those different sections.
I remember in olden times, when people had resumes in Times New Roman font, you know, back in the stone ages when dinosaurs roamed the earth, and it was the ugliest thing known to humanity, but that’s what people did. Times New Roman, ugly as all hell. And I go so far as I always tell people, try and make some time every few months to just update your resume, because if you’re out the door, or you’re afraid of getting fired, stress really hits, and you miss things, you don’t language them as well.
And thus, it’s always better if you just take a few minutes every couple of months, just update your resume to bring up to date so you don’t forget anything. That’s the key part. Not forgetting because sometimes when you’re training, or you’re learning something new, or you’ve given a training, and you forget about it, so you don’t add it to the resume.
But the more frequently you’re updating it, the more things you can add that are more relevant to the things that you’re learning, new things that you’re learning. And remember, folks, you can always take it out. It’s harder to remember at that time, but you can always take it out.
Yes. And with that, also, we have LinkedIn profile, because LinkedIn, of course, is where the headhunters are out prowling for people. And you want your profile ready and up to date, so that they’re reaching out to you because you can always say no.
Exactly. And it’s one thing that you also can do outside of just updating your resume is also update those profiles. And it’s something that as you’re updating your resume, you update your LinkedIn profile, or your Monster, or Indy, or CareerBuilder, going back and updating those profiles, keeping them current is a good thing as well.
Because I always say, like you said earlier about when you have those rough days at work, and it always motivates me to go back and update my resume and update my career profiles, my job descriptions. If you’re updating your resume on the day you’re feeling homicidal, it’s too late. You should have done it before.
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So, that was number one. Number two. So, number two, I’ve talked to people and some of them are, I remember I was talking to a client, and she asked me, she said, hey, do we still need cover letters nowadays? And I said, yeah, covers are still important.
It’s still important to create a cover letter. And especially if you don’t have a really lengthy work history, you definitely want to include that cover letter. And the purpose why I say that is because it gives it extra oomph to your resume.
Because the things you can’t put onto your resume, like your journey, or how you got to your current position, or how you got to your current state that you live in. I mean, most of us are moving around, moving in places that we didn’t live, were born and raised. But how did you get there? How did you get to this particular place? You can put all that in your resume.
You can put all those things you can’t fit, I mean, in your cover letter. All the things you can’t fit in your resume, you get to tell your story in your cover letter. And when you teach people how to do cover letters, what are your thoughts about it? Make it personal.
You know, make it personal. It’s a letter, make it feel like a letter. And sometimes people want to reiterate the things they said on their resume.
I said, no, don’t do that. We are, let the resume do what the resume supposed to do. Use that cover to be very personal, and be direct.
And so that you get to show that, you know, you’re a human being and you have experiences. You can mention your children, your kids, your family. You know, why did you relocate? Those things you can’t get in a resume, but you can get those things in your cover letter.
Interesting. How long do you think a cover letter should be? I would say no more than three paragraphs. You know, usually two paragraphs is about the length of the ones that I do help people create.
But, and then usually those sentences are no more than five to seven sentences, but then each paragraph. So you don’t want it too lengthy because who wants to be reading a dissertation during a cover letter, but you don’t want to be too short. You want it to definitely make it feel as though you put some time and energy into your into your cover letter, but not overwhelm the recruiter or the hiring manager.
Because they won’t be interested after a while. I see a letter that’s five paragraphs, I get kind of, you know, this is going to be long. So I wouldn’t suggest doing that.
Do you have people send it in as the body of an email as an attachment? Does it not matter to you? Well, usually I know monster.com allows you to submit a cover letter with your resume. So that’s the opportunity there. It just depends.
Typically, if a recruiter reaches out, I won’t typically automatically send my cover letter or ask the client to do that unless they really are trying to make an impression. It’s not always necessary to provide a cover letter, but if there are those situations where you really want to impress the recruiter, you want to stand out, especially if you don’t have an empty work history, you want to do those things. But if you have a five page resume, because you’re showing all the work history that you have, it may not be required to send a cover letter to them, email it to them.
It may be a little bit overwhelming to give them another page on top of that. So just be thoughtful about if you were receiving in of that, would you do that? Sometimes, you know, it’s five or six pages, and I’ve seen that five or six page resumes and added a cover letter to that. And even I’ve seen two page cover letters.
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That’s now a seven to eight page document you’re sending someone to have them look over. That’s not going to go over well when you have a recruiter who actually, you know, have interviews and who’s doing all kinds of other things in conjunction to getting your email. So just be mindful of if you’re going to do a cover letter, you’re going to send it, be mindful of how many pages you’re sending that individual and also be mindful of what is the story you’re trying to tell them.
It may not be necessary. Great. Number three, number three, avoid restating in your resume, in your cover, the things you said in your resume.
I said again, be careful not to just repeat all the things you said in your resume on your cover letter. So that’s another thing that I see people do. They will go back and just start putting a sentence form, all the bullets that they said in the resume.
And don’t do that. Make it personal. That’s the purpose of the cover letter.
You want to, as I say all the time to my clients, make a friend. You know, with your cover letter, your interview, try to make it personal. Try to tell a story that’s compelling and interesting in your cover letter.
So that’s a given insight into why you made certain career choices and hobbies that you love. So that way they feel like, you know, I’m getting to know a person. Gotcha.
Are we on to number four or number three? Are number four now. That’s what I thought. Number four.
So nowadays we have the ATS and for some people, this is intimidating for some, they like the idea. And this is the applicant tracking system. So what it does is it looks through once you put your resume onto monster.com, Indeed, Career Builder, it goes through a little crawl.
It goes through looking at all of those words that are on your resume and looking for what they call keywords. And based on those keywords, they will begin to fit you into categories based on the words that it comes up with. So let’s say you have a keyword, like engineer or a network engineer, then you’re going to start getting emails, maybe from those sites about network engineering.
And this is a great thing. That’s a wonderful thing. But let’s say you have things that you don’t want to get jobs for, but you still have some of those keywords on your resume.
You will start to get some of those listings as well. So those are some of the, I guess, the downsides of the ATS system. And that’s why we’ll get into the objective later about objective statements and why I feel that it helps the recruiter in his ATS world to definitely reach out to you.
They know exactly what position you’re interested in because that ATS can also sort of backfire in a way to send you down a road where you’re not interested in. I agree. With an ATS, I know if you position it higher in the resume, it thinks it’s kind of like currency.
It’s more current experience. And thus, if it’s in the top of the first page, if it’s in the first two thirds of the first page, it likes that, especially if there’s repetition. If it’s on the bottom of page two, less interested because it interprets that as being old.
So, the things you want to be interviewed for, you always want to have up high. The things you don’t want to be interviewed, you want to place low because even if it shows up as a keyword on one of these systems, it’s scored lower because these systems kind of score things like, this is a 32% possible match. Okay, I’m right over that one.
Let me go to the 87 first, and I’ll get to the number 32 sometime when hell freezes over. Yeah, and you’ll start getting those job listings. I had a client one time he was saying, hey, I’m getting all these jobs that I don’t want.
I’m getting all these job lists of things that I don’t want. And then he went back with his resume. He had like, okay, well, you have these keywords in your resume, so you’re going to get them.
So, we had to go back and sort of look at his resume and rephrase things and bring up the terminology a bit so that it was up to date. Gotcha. Number five.
Number five. So, strategy in salary negotiation. This is a scary thing for people.
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They do not like negotiating salary. They would rather just take whatever they’re being offered and complain about it later. Not the people I work with.
I meet some, and the reason why they feel that way is because you just wanted her, yes, you wanted her, I got you, you got the job. But that’s not good enough. I even had a client one time, she actually took, she knew that the salary they wanted to give her wasn’t satisfactory, but she was just trying to get a job.
She was trying to get back into the workforce and she was going to take whatever they were going to offer her. So, but then when she got the job, she had to go back to actually do what she should have done in the beginning. She had to negotiate a salary.
So, to do that effectively, what I believe is you need to really understand your budget. Because sometimes I think when people don’t have the conviction that they really need to say, this is how much I’m worth, it’s because they don’t really know how much they’re worth. They don’t really know what it is that they need in order for their life to function.
So, I would definitely recommend, go over your budget. Look at how much your vacation costs, how much your insurance costs, how much all your utilities, all your loans or your credit cards. Look at that and really come up with a number about this is how much I need in order to survive and save.
And then look at how much you’re asking for in terms of your salary. So, when you’re asked, what is your salary rate? You have that conviction because you know how much money you actually need in order to survive off of. And a lot of people are actually surprised when they actually go through that exercise.
I have this whole budget exercise they go through to really get an idea of how much money they need. Most folks go, wow, I’m not asking for enough. Or they’ll go, I’m really wasting a lot of my money that I’m getting for my salary.
Very true. I know, I had a situation a few years ago, where a woman I was coaching, she came to me after her interviews had started. She was moving from New Jersey to Seattle and really didn’t have a sense of cost of living in Seattle.
She thought she did until she was about three interviews in and said, I can’t afford to live there. And they’re about to make me an offer. And I helped her by just pausing the conversation with the firm and said, I made a mistake.
I suspect you know this, but I made a mistake. I thought the cost of living between New Jersey and Seattle was comparable. It really isn’t.
And she went through four or five different items where Seattle was significantly higher. And they said, okay, and they upped what they were proposing to her to get her on board. Now, things can be rectified sometimes, but not all the time, particularly when times are tough.
And employers think, I’ve got one over the barrel. I got one. She can’t argue with us.
She’s unemployed. Right. Right.
And they use that leverage. So, folks, be aware of what the market is for what you do. For real, not just what your friend tells you.
Exactly. Do your own research. And my whole thing is, know what you need.
That’s the thing. Know how much you need. Don’t depend on… I mean, there are lots of websites out there that will tell you what salaries are for a particular position.
But what do you need? How much money do you need to function and creating your budget off of that? Now, given you might go out and do all your budgeting, you look at all your finances and decide that, you know, I need… I still… I know that I can make more than that. That’s totally fine. But at least you still have an idea of what your operating expenses are.
And I’m also going to remind you that from the time they start asking you about what you’re looking for, what your current compensation is, they’re negotiating. Right. Job hunters think that negotiation takes place at the end.
No, it takes place every time they’re asking a money question. That’s negotiation. So, don’t be surprised.
And there are ways to duck off of this that I know I’ve done in other videos and other interviews. But for today, because we’re a little tight on time, let’s keep going. Number six.
Number six. So, what I ask people to do, especially in this particular time period where we’re looking at the whole pandemic and possibly heading to a recession, you want to take online courses. You want to show employers that, hey, I’m learning new skills and I have new skills to provide.
So, and what’s great is a lot of training that’s online is free. So, I go to Unimi, Coursa. I go to these places and look and see what are trainings that are available that I could possibly get a certificate for that is free.
Or I pay, I think at Unimi you can pay $13, $15 for a class and it’s really reasonable price that they have for me. They give you a certificate and that’s something you can put on your resume. And so, that’s an opportunity there for you to become more competitive.
Great. Folks, Unimi is spelled U-D-E-M-I. There’s Coursera, C-O-U-R-S-E-R-A.
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I was looking for a friend of mine yesterday. Heck, Harvard has classes online that you can take for nothing or very little, like really very little. So, there’s ways to continue your training and keep improving because that is a signal of someone who’s career motivated.
Yes. I like to see that someone who enjoys learning. And regardless of age, I talked to some people like, oh, well, I’m at a certain age, should I go back to school? And it just depends what your goals are, but you still should always continue on taking courses and learning something new.
Agreed. You may have noticed this face of mine is not 24. And I’ll simply say, older workers cop to ageism much too easily.
They think they’re getting turned down because of their age. Most of the time, it isn’t. Now, sometimes it is.
Most of the time, it’s skills deficiency, lack of preparation. Now, they’ve done nothing to upgrade their talents over the last few years. Their background is dated.
That’s the biggest issue or they don’t know how to present themselves. So, folks, keep taking classes. It makes a big difference.
Right. And I always say when someone who’s older, you have a ton of experience and that experience needs to be passed on to the younger generation. So, that’s one of the things that you show up with, that I have the ability to help others get better and help train.
So, I’m always looking at when I have a person who is older, I want to encourage them to include that training that they’re willing to train others on their resume. Absolutely. And I’ll also say, folks, if you get the question that basically translates into, hey, look, I’m 34 and you’re not.
How do you feel about working with someone older than you? I’ll just simply say, folks, the way to respond is to say something to the effect of, I’ve been in your seat. I don’t want to be in your seat. I’m happy to help you if you want it.
If you don’t want it, my feelings aren’t hurt. I’ll keep my mouth shut and do what you want me to do. And to say it with conviction, not just as though you’re going, well, and make it seem like you’re making it up on the fly.
Like you have to be real clear about this. I don’t want to be in your seat at all. If you want my advice, I’ll give it to you.
If you don’t want my advice, my feelings aren’t hurt. I’ll just do my job. I’m okay with that.
And people respond well to that. And I know that’s the big issue that a lot of older professionals have when they go on the interview and they see the older manager and their first response is to go, oh, I’m doomed. Seven, we’re up to number seven.
So be flexible. So sometimes when we’re stuck in a particular position and we, especially when you feel stuck and people want to get out of that particular position, they want to grow. They want to do other things and see other people who are moving ahead and they are not.
And how do you find flexibility? It may not be the answer is that I want to move to a different position or a different job or a different company. It’s just, I want to move to some greater responsibilities and greater opportunities. So if you’re in the government, my customers are government employees or they are contractors to the federal government.
I try to encourage them to look at what they call a TV wise, which is temporary duty training, which is what will happen is they will look out and see what positions are open or who can they shadow. And they will begin getting credit for that. They can put that on their resume for all that training they’ve gotten working in a different environment, maybe a different unit or division, or they may shadow one of their coworkers and the team they’re currently with.
But that’s all things that will, you can put on your resume and because they are tracking that the government actually tracks this, they will help you. Those items you learn will help you get that job. So if there are a particular job that you’re interested in that you want to someday, hopefully apply for, then you will find the person who’s already doing that job and begin to sort of shadow them.
And then what happens is when you’re ready to apply for that job, you can say, I’ve already done a lot of those duties already have already have already accomplished those tasks. And that makes you more competitive for that position. Interesting.
It’s an interesting approach that the government takes. Number eight. So number eight, prepare to interview virtually.
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So especially now we’re doing a lot of virtual interviews and people are finding out that they don’t interview very well on the Zoom meeting. They don’t have that connection. They can’t make that connection.
And I guess I’ve never thought about that until I started talking to individuals about, hey, I’m getting interviewed and I’m doing them in Zoom meetings, but there’s something that’s not clicking. And I’m saying, well, do you smile? And they’re like, I don’t know. I do, you know, do you open the conversation up with a, with an opening? So no, not when we first started this conversation, it was like, hey, how are you? You know, how are things going? I really just didn’t jump into, you know, the top 10.
We actually had a little banter back and forth. So you want to do that before the meeting. Sometimes everyone has conversations.
So the recruiter may not do that, but still it’s on you to do that. One of the things back here, you see behind me, I have a ton of books behind me. So if I was the interviewer, then what I would do is if I was you and I was the interviewer, then you would simply say, hey, you know, I see you’re a book lover.
You know, what kind of books have you read lately? My face would light up because I’m a book guy. So that’s a great conversational opener. So that when you’re engaging online, you don’t have an office to really look and say, okay, let me see what’s on his desk.
So I can start a conversation about that. Cause that’s something that I do in an interview. I try to find things that are interesting or are conversation openers in the person’s office.
But since you don’t have that ability, you want to have to really, you know, look behind the person and see, do I see any pictures or I see a fern? I think that’s a fern behind you. But that’s a conversation opener. Once you get a chuckle, you get a laugh that helps out in terms of breaking the ice.
Um, when you’re doing a zoom. Absolutely. Nine, sorry.
Nine. Well, my number nine suggestion I have send a thank you letter. So, uh, we don’t do this anymore.
I don’t, don’t send thank you letters anymore or thank you emails any, any longer. It’s sort of outdated, but it’s a great way to make yourself stand out. It’s superb.
So, um, uh, sending a thank you email is awesome. That’s great. Um, to say, Hey, I enjoyed the interview.
Thank you for meeting with me. Um, hopefully I’ll hear a decision, uh, in a certain timeframe. If you know, the timeframe is a great, but no one sends hand letter written, thank you letters anymore.
Thank you notes any longer. If you really want to stand out, then I would do that. If I really wanted to stand out.
So before I leave the interview, I would definitely try to get the person’s car in order to find a way to get in contact with them through mail. And then maybe immediately after the interview, um, put together a thank you letter. So that way, um, you will, uh, sort of surprise them with that.
And, um, it’s another way, if you know, the time period when they’re going to make a decision and say, it’s going to be two weeks from the day of the interview, then you can schedule that thank you letter so that they, so by the time they forgotten about maybe your interview, then they have a little reminder and say, Hey, remember me? That thing that can be scheduled, that thing can be scheduled so that, um, you can come up in their memory one more time before they make their final decision. If you know, around the timeframe, they’re going to make that decision. And it’s a little bit farther out into the future.
That was number nine, if I’m not mistaken, right? Number nine. Number 10. Number 10, the most important out of all of them, be patient.
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And that one’s interesting. Go into more about being patient. So one of the things that because we’re so busy, I get the job that I get the job that I do well, that I do well, and all the nervousness and worry about that, we forget to be diligent.
So instead of using that inner, that energy, that, that energy of worrying and trying to figure out, you know, why didn’t they just say, um, chose, choose me, or had they chosen anybody yet, or just sit back and say, what can I do right now? That’s going to help me to, um, possibly not get this job, but maybe another job. So whenever I, in the interview, I keep looking. I don’t just stop there.
You know, I don’t stop looking because I had a really good interview or a bad interview. I want to continue looking and searching for jobs because what makes it feel better when I am leaving the interview, I know that I have other opportunities lined up in the process. That makes it a lot easier.
And especially if you happen to get a no, then it makes it easier when you know that you have other things lined up along the way. So when I say be patient, I really do mean be diligent and don’t just stop looking, just because there’s a one or two opportunities on the table. I’m going to do this in a way that’s designed to be playful.
Job hunting is very much like dating. And when you think about dates, you know, for me, it’s been a long time.
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