Career Building from the Inside Out Trevor Calton

Managing your online identity means understanding that your presence in the world is bigger than just your physical presence. Your digital presence is worldwide and it's accessible to everyone. Know what's out there, manage it, and get in front of things that are negative.

Trevor Calton speaks to university masters students about job hunting and networking. (Live)

You're Not Applying for a Job hen you apply, you're actually applying for an interview, and then you interview for a job. 

This is an important distinction to make because we often think that the only way that we're going to get to the job is if we get to the interview through the application process. 

You don't necessarily have to go through the application process to get the interview. There are a lot of different ways to get an interview and through the traditional application process is just one of them.

So let's talk about how do we get more interviews and how do we do that without necessarily applying for them?

Any Interview Can Become a Job Interview

What is an interview anyway? Pretty much any interview can become a job interview. 

Anytime a job seeker is meeting with a hiring manager or someone in the network of the hiring manager, they can typically include the context of a job interview by just creating awareness that that job seeker is looking. 

The Power of the Informational Interview

An informational interview is different than a job interview. But what people don't realize is that almost any informational interview can very easily be turned into a job interview. Especially if the two parties identify an opportunity that or some sort of connection comes up during the informational interview process. 

Be Honest About Your Motivations

We talked about earlier about being authentic and being honest and being genuine. And it's important to know that when you're doing an informational interview, you always do it with integrity and never try and be deceptive or misleading about why you're there. 

An informational interview is probably the most powerful thing that you can do to build your network and to uncover opportunities in the job market.

If you do it right, there's absolutely no reason that you can't get five or more interviews per week. I think it's really common for people to underestimate how powerful an informational interview can be. 

Flip the Script

In the informational interview, you are flipping the script. 

In a traditional job search, people are trying to get others to interview them. But in informational interview, you flip the script and you are the interviewer, and they are the subject that you are interviewing. 

It allows the job seeker to gain information about an industry, a company, or a particular job. It allows the job seeker to expand their network. And potentially create rapport or even a relationship with somebody who is in a particular position that might know the hiring manager, or might be able to recommend them, or might steer somebody in a particular direction towards a company.

Ask Open-Ended Questions " Who's growing?" 

"Who's hiring out there?" 

"Which companies are the best ones to work for?" 

"Who dominates the market?" 

"Who's the most successful?"

"What companies are hiring?" 

"Who's growing right now?" 

"Who out there do you think would be looking for somebody like me?" 

Informational Interviews Are Incredibly Valuable

henever possible, think about creative ways that you can skip directly to an interview and recognize that interviewing other people is just as valuable, if not more valuable than trying to get them to interview you.

Once you have done that, then we can talk about how to go about conducting those interviews in a way that's going to help you expand your network, present yourself as a more attractive candidate, and arm you with better information to make your job search more robust.

Showing your personality is incredibly important.

If you try and water down who you are, what you're going to do is you're gonna end up diluting or masking all of the things that people, especially an interviewer, are looking for as a way to connect with you, as a way to get to know who you are and what type of person are you.

Because one of the things that hiring managers are always trying to do is evaluate whether or not you're gonna be a good fit with the organization on a cultural level. You know, are you going to be able to work with the people that are there? Are you going to bring some complementary personality to the organization?

Are you gonna bring some diversity? Are you gonna be able to gel? You can be different, but you still need to be able to fit. And so interviewers are often looking for those Interpersonal characteristics. 

So it's really important that you be yourself, be relatable, and let your personality come out in an interview or in a meeting or wherever you are.

Don't try and water yourself down and make yourself so plain vanilla that you become uninteresting.

What's really important to understand is that people do business with people they like. Not always, but when people have a choice between two different candidates that are relatively similar, they're often gonna go with the one that they like better personally, or that they feel a little bit more of an attachment, people that they feel more resonance with.

So just remember, be yourself and let your personality shine. 

The first thing a hiring manager does when they want to fill a position is look within within the company. Where's the second place they look?

They look within their network. They're going to reach out to people they personally know professionally and personally and say, "Whom do you know that may be a good fit for this job?” 

And only after that does the hiring manager then typically go to the public, which means posting the job online or publicly advertising the job. Most hiring managers would strongly prefer that they are able to find somebody that can promote or transfer within the company, or somebody in their network, before going through the process of posting a job online or making it public. 

The more you build your personal and professional network, the more people that you know will also know hiring managers.

So if you’re creating awareness, the more people you have in your network, the more likely that you are going to have people that will vouch for you with that hiring manager and say, "Yes, this person I know, [you], they'd be great fit. You should interview them."

How do people go about looking for a mechanic?
Let's say you're brand new in town. You don't know anybody and you have European sports car that needs a very competent, skilled mechanic who specializes in European sports cars.
You have a couple options. You could get online and let's say you find, 10 different mechanics that work on European sports cars. Maybe check out the reviews, but you don't really know how trustworthy those are. Or you can just roll a dice and try one of them. 
Or let's say one of your friends says, "Oh, you know what? I used that mechanic over there and they were fantastic." 
If you have those two things presented to you, nine times out of ten, human nature is going to make us go with the person that our friend recommended.
The reason for that is because of trust and risk and when somebody that you trust vouches for a mechanic, let's say, you feel much more safe about going with that person. 
Put this in the context of you as a job seeker.
As a job hunter, as an employee, or as somebody who is looking to make a move to another company, you are an opportunity for someone else to solve a problem, provide a service, or fill a need. 
A lot of people think that the job search is where they're trying to get something from the employer. The candidate, the job hunter is trying to get the employer to hire them.
But what's actually happening is the candidate or the employee is providing a service and solving a problem or filling a need for the employer and the employer is compensating them, through payroll or commissions, or however, whatever the pay structure is. 
So realize that you are like a mechanic, and the employer is like a person with a broken car. And they're out there looking for somebody to come in and fix their car or fix their problem. 
If a hiring manager is looking for somebody to fix their problem, and they have the option of putting the post out in public and collecting hundreds of resumes. Or they have somebody in their network saying, "My friend would be perfect for this job." 
If the boss is really trying to find somebody that other people they know can vouch for, then that's a great opportunity. 
It's important to understand how powerful word of mouth is. Word of mouth is much more powerful even in the 21st century when people have access to all of the world's information on the internet. If you create avenues for people to find you, you create association. 
Let's say that you are out there and you are looking for a job. Let people in your network know, whether it's creating awareness with the whole world or just certain people that says, "Hey, if you know anybody, if you hear of anybody that is looking, think of me."
And the more often that you do that, the better. The more likely you are that somebody in your network is going to be talking to somebody else and they're going to say, "I know just the right person." And then they're going to recommend you or think of you.
I can't even tell you how many dozens, if not hundreds of times I have helped people find a great job that they were looking for by just this one exercise. 
If somebody who's hiring and looking for somebody like you, if they can find somebody that knows you and can vouch for you, then suddenly you're on fast track to the front of the line for the next interview, and probably have the greatest advantage of getting that job over anybody else who just blindly submitted a resume.