Ep. 7: What To Do When You're Not Qualified

Career Design Podcast

Episode 7 Notes

Lindsay 00:42

Well, I am so excited today because I want to be talking to you a little bit about the illusions in job searching, specifically what to do when you're not qualified. So what I mean by that is that when you tend to see a job posting, you look at it and you go, “Oh, crap, I don't meet everything that is on this list. “, and it causes us to stop what we're doing, and to not take the next step.

So, a lot of you are telling me that I have this experience, I don't have enough, or I am not sure it's the right experience. And so I want to walk you through what this is like on the inside as a recruiter. So, I'm going to introduce myself. Hi, I'm Lindsay Mustain. I'm the CEO of Talent Paradigm. And I want to introduce you to one of my lead coaches, which is Nicole Evans. Both of us have a ton of time in recruiting and talent acquisition. And Nicole at one time was actually my intern, this was six years ago. She worked with me at one company, I took her over to Amazon. And now we get a chance to work together in Talent Paradigm. And so I am so excited to share with you from two different perspectives of people who are actually in recruiting about what happens here.

And so, a lot of times when we put up a job description, people take this as the Bible. And what I mean by that, is that this is black and white, there is no wiggle room, and this is what you must be in order to be qualified. Now, how many of you have seen some crazy job descriptions? I've seen a lot. Yes. And so this is where I'm like, okay, we use job descriptions. What happens when we use it? Okay, so what is the job description? Let's go to that part first.

A job description is essentially the duties and responsibilities or tasks that you will perform on the job in the role. Now, how companies do this is that job descriptions are used almost verbatim as job advertisements. And so we do that, because we want it to be compliant with a lot of EEO or OFCCP guidelines. And we don't do a lot of work to actually make it attractive and exciting for someone to apply. It is literally a bulleted list. And I'll tell you, what we use job descriptions for internally is one, aligning pay codes. And we also do it to make sure that you are doing the work that we say that you should be doing on your performance review. And then the other part that we don't tell you is that we use it to performance manage you out when you're not being effective. And so this is what a job description is really there for and I have a really big beef around it, because it doesn't entice anybody to actually want to work for your company, it's just a really good description of what it is that you would do as if somehow like “reporting as necessary” is somehow an exciting way to attract your ideal client.

But the government requires us and I'm going to talk about the United States in particular, so that wherever your location is, that might vary. But for a lot of businesses, we're required to post a job. Now , there's a lot of other things out there, that means that only 20% of jobs are actually posted. So I want you to really recognize that this is like when you look at the pool of all the jobs that are listed, I want you to think that that's just a tiny little puddle that you're fishing in. It's actually not, there's a whole ocean out there, but all you can see is a 20%. And then I want you to recognize that this is just a wish list.

Okay, so let's talk a little bit about that. When we actually have an opening inside of a company at a high-performance organization - somebody needs really top talent, we don't sit around and hope that you fall into the right job description, okay? Because it's kind of like, “Okay, I need somebody who's amazing and fantastic, and I'm just going to go over here and I'm going to set a trap, or some sort of something to catch something and, I'm just going to put in my backyard, and I'm just going to hope that somehow, (it's like trying to catch a Bigfoot) Bigfoot is going to walk by through this hole at this exact time, at this one place in the universe at this specific moment.”

It doesn't work, and it's why we actually don't use that strategy to find our ideal clients or our ideal candidates. We don't do that. We go out and we don't like the idea of being very passive, like “hope they like pie!” We call this the spray and pray by the way, like spray it out there and pray the right person comes along; it doesn't really work like that. High performance organizations and recruiting actually go out and hunt the right candidates. And so when people are like, “I'm not getting a call back,” I'm going to talk to you a little bit about the science behind this. But I want you to know that you're playing a game where you're destined to lose. Okay?

So on average pre-recession, a job description would get 250 applicants, it used to be actually a couple years ago about 150, so it went up. Just by default, 1 out of 250 meant that you had a 0.04% chance if you applied to get the job. Okay, 0.04% chance. I don't know about those odds, but if you were giving me like a medical diagnosis, and you said, “You know what, you have some sort of infection, and here's something that I’ll give you; it only works about 0.04% of the time.” I don't know about you, but that doesn't seem really good. Yes, it's not good. Not good. But this is how most people work.

I'm actually I'm going to go back to a company that's called talent dot works. They did an actual study on some of their job applications. The average applicant for them, 176 is what they estimated on this, and they said that they defined 77% of applications are spammy. So what does that mean? A spammy means that they have a mismatch of skills. All right. So let me tell you why this happens. There's that easy Apply button, and there are people who just need to get their numbers in, and they're hitting that button, so they dilute the pool of good people because they just need to apply and they're not interested in the end result. Which is why, Employers, if you are making an easy Apply button, you are literally making your job more difficult. Stop it. Make it difficult for people to apply, that way you can actually get a qualified pool in there. If you make it easy, you're just going to get a whole bunch of crap, and I'm all over quality versus quantity; and I know because I've managed over a million resumes in my lifetime. So that's the first one, mismatch skills.

The second thing is, and I'm going to say this is their verbiage not mine, dumb mistakes. Dumb mistakes, and this, I'm going to say 75% of people fall into the “dumb mistakes” category. Sorry, love you guys. There's a reason why I wrote a bestselling book about this. You don't include the basic information like your email, or your phone number, or any of the kind of contact information that we actually need to have that if you misspell things there, there's going to be some very obvious things are going to get you disqualified here. So mismatch skills, dumb mistakes, and then the last one was something spammy. Like you’re a recruiter and you're trying to submit somebody else, or it's just it's not viable. Okay, so 77% so now we're going to say okay, so for the recruiters job, immediately 77% of people are not even close to qualified, okay? Not even close to qualified. Alright. So that leaves somewhere around 23% potential people that are qualified. And then how many of those people that apply, actually get an interview? Well, the number is around 3%. Okay. And then the chance of you getting selected for from the interview is somewhere a lucky 10 to 15%. If these sound like shitty odds to you, it's because they are.

So here's why I'm telling you this. A lot of people won’t tell you this truth, and it's the one thing I got really well known at Amazon doing was to tell you guys this. I would just be willing to tell you the inconvenient, uncomfortable truth, because it is a losing game; you're going to lose at it. And then somehow you're going to say, because I was unsuccessful in a game that has been rigged for me to fail, that somehow I am not worthwhile, or my worth is diminished. And that story just isn't true. And that's why we're here talking about them. Okay.

All right. So, now we go to the idea of why don't other people apply who are more qualified, okay, so we created the easy Apply button, (guys, don't do that). Like, if you are job searching, you need to be intentional with this. So that's a whole other conversation. But when you go into this, I want you to remember that the list on our job descriptions is a wish list, right? And so we do something called required experience, at the very bottom. Required experience or competency. Sometimes we use those interchangeably. And the required experience - when you see these, usually the first three bullet points are things that we tend to need to have required. Okay. When I say “tend to”, I'm going to tell you a little bit of what that what that means. But we say it tends to need to be required, because these are the things that the government will assess whether or not we fairly screened people against, okay. And I‘ve had somebody ask me, “hey, how do you actually screen people?” Well, I'm going to tell you usually it's a first in first out, and it's totally subjective how many people that we screen. And the reason why is that just like every business is completely unique, so is every recruiting process.

So we have standard things that we do, but the number just depends on the quality. So if we have 100 bad applications, then we're probably going to go to 125 when we review them, but however, if the first 20 people are amazing, and we spent the time to create an actual job description, that's exciting for people to apply, then that may be all I'm going to do out of the 250 apply. Just the first 25 because that was enough, which is again, first in, first out. If you're going to play this game you need to apply first, okay, so it's not the most successful way to do it. I'm just going to say that right now, this is a strategy for people who want to play at the lowest odds of success. So if you want to do the spray and pray as a candidate, this is how you do it. And I'm just telling you, because I want to be honest about what happens

Here's how you get past this. So when we use the job description is just to cover basic qualifications. Now, as a high-performance organization, I'm going to go out and I'm also going to go look for that person on LinkedIn. Okay, I can also do it on Google. And we do something called a Boolean search string. And it just helps us define the parameters. If you've ever done this in a research paper, you might have gone to find content that you would put inside of like a paper and you would cite. The same thing happens actually when we go out and look for you all, which is where you want to pretend to be the candidate of choice. And when I say pretend, appear is more like the word, appear to be the candidate of choice. This means that you fit all the desired requirements for your ideal career opportunity, so that when a recruiter runs across your resume or your profile, they go, “Holy crap, we can't talk to Nicole, she needs to come here and work for us!” Okay. So that's the mindset here of this process. Now, if you are looking at a job description, and you're saying, “Well, I'm not qualified,” the first thing I need you to do is to check that assumption, okay? So, when you say I am not qualified, there's going to be some things on there that say a degree is required. Okay? So there’s going to be some people that will be upset with me about this one. A degree is not required. There is no company that I have been in where we say degrees are required. And we require 100% of the time.

Okay, there we go. That is not the case. Now, this is where I'm going to turn it over to Nicole. Because Nicole is going to tell you a story about being completely unqualified for the job that she ended up getting.

Nicole 11:51

That sounds crazy going back to it! When I had met Lindsay at Frontier, and she actually turned over to her next chapter into Amazon, I wanted to follow. A big part of that was because (a little backstory), Lindsay was someone who really helped me find my voice and my confidence, and really be able to shine out with my passion. And that's something that's so contagious and seeing where my next opportunity was, I had to follow that. That's where I landed with Amazon.

So when I interviewed with Amazon, I didn't have a bachelor's degree at the time. I had just been working through finalizing getting my associates, and my main focus was really on my career experience. At the time, I only had a little bit of retail experience with GameStop, and my first job was at KFC. So I really didn't have a ton of HR/recruiting, I only had just a little bit from working with Lindsay at Frontier. So going to Amazon didn't have a bachelor's, I barely even had the recruiting experience, but a big part of what I learned with my time at Frontier and with Lindsay is the power of your narrative. Really just believing in my passion and having my career clarity. So when I went into Amazon, again, I did not have my bachelor's degree, and that was one of the requirements, and I didn't even have the full recruiting experience, but what I did have was my passion, and I knew exactly what I wanted next. I wanted to be able to go out and I wanted to expand on my recruiting experience, really go into my passion of meeting with people, building communities, and helping other people find their voice, and that all went into my narrative.

So that's when I went in for the interview, I shared my passion and my narrative. And from there, I was able to land the opportunity. And I was able to really expand on my zone of genius. And I continued to expand on that as a recruiting coordinator, and I quickly led my own team as an RC captain. At that time, RC Managers were very new to my department within Amazon. There wasn't really a pathway for RCs to become an RC manager, this is actually quite a significant jump.

This is the passionate area for me, and so I ended up creating a role. I used the power of my narrative to show why we needed this, why this is so valuable, so important, how I can take this to the next level. And it worked. And I was promoted to be the first RC Lead, leading a small team of recruiting coordinators. I helped over 15 recruiting coordinators promote into their passion areas within the tech side, Executive Assistants, Recruiters, HR Assistants, Learning and Talent Development, there were all kinds of amazing opportunities, and I was able to be a part of their journey and help them figure that out. And I loved it. I was promoted again into an RC manager which is also known as a Talent Acquisition Manager. I ended up managing a team that grew to 23 Recruiting Coordinators, and I continued to thrive helping more RCs and even new recruiters find their confidence and doing what they love.

So I was really able to thrive and the power of that is all through, again, I was able to fuel my passion because I knew exactly what I wanted to do through finding that out with Lindsey. And I was able to carry that forward. Did I need a Bachelor's? No. Did I need all the experience? No. I was able to speak to that. I was able to find my way through and able to prove that. I've had my own amazing journey since then, and because Lindsay is so contagious, I had to continue to follow her, which is why I've ended up at Talent Paradigm.

Lindsay 15:29

So this is where the belief that somebody, and I don't want to diminish Nicole, because she is amazing. Like, there is a reason why we pick as we call it the best and brightest at Amazon. You really have to be the cream of the crop in order to come in. So the process - I like to say, unless you feel like you walked out without being run over by a Mack truck, at your interview process at Amazon, you likely didn't get it because they will interview you at an extreme level. So you do have to perform when you get in there, and Nicole's the perfect example of somebody who performed under that.

So let me be really clear that hunger and enthusiasm beat qualifications every f**ing time. That's what it beats, every time. Okay, so there's a reason why Nicole was able to beat other people because she was enthusiastic, and she was willing to learn. And then the other secret is, she had a referral. She had an “in”. And so in fact, Nicole, you want to tell about your referral of inside of Amazon?

Nicole 16:33

Oh, it was you!

Lindsay 16:35

Oh I know, I meant like, you referred other people into Amazon, didn’t you?

Nicole 16:38

Oh, that's right! My brother, actually. So fun little story about my brother (Sorry, Lindsay. I just I love you so much, my auto response was you!)

So my brother actually went in to interview with Amazon and I was able to provide him a reference. But the thing was with him is he had that hunger as well, and that power. He became a Software Developer. And not to discredit my brother, I love him, but he came from a startup company and barely had a year. He also doesn't have his bachelor's, and he became not just an entry level Software Developer, but he was at mid-level, someone with three to five years of experience. He went in and, he showed them why he's passionate, why he was meant to be there, why they needed him.

Lindsay 17:31

I love that. So that that is exactly it. You’re going to hear me talking about narrative a lot because it is your story to tell your place of power. Now you can tell the blooper reel, like, “I've been laid off, I've been fired, I've been this, I've been that,” or you can say, “I am this person with this amount of experience with these kinds of qualifications. Here's what I want to look for in my next job. I've had the luxury of having lots of opportunities to make the decision of what's best for me now.” That's a very different power position than somebody who comes in and is applying and hoping for that 0.04% chance of success.

This is where the secret is around how you get inside of this process. You don't use applications, okay? So, take that time. Take that time and invest it in actually being very intentional in your career. So you can use applying as part of your methods, but there's some rules around that. Okay, so one, first in first out, you want to apply in the first four days. Ideally, you want to apply first thing in the morning, somewhere between 6 and 10 am. And the reason why is recruiter workflow says we tend to go for like, (this is what I teach my recruiters, how to go through is the first thing in the morning), and we go through them, and then we disposition them. That means we give like a, pass/no pass, and then we move on. We do this every single day.

Now, they say you know not to apply, these are just stats, okay? So everybody is going to have something different. I'm talking about the entire entirety of all applying. You don't want to play on weekends, and you don't want to be at the tail end. Because again, first in first out, there's no reason why if you're the number 300 nobody's going to look at number 300. Okay, so you want to get in there very soon. Okay.

Lindsay 19:06

Now, the other thing I want to say, inside of the job descriptions is that the number one reason people don't apply. So there's a whole group of people who are amazingly qualified, and didn't even bother to put their name in the hat. Well, one, I would say, maybe you've gone and done the strategy of what I would tell you, which is really intentionally deciding what it is that you want in your career and then going for it, or perhaps you lacked confidence. So this confidence effect means that when women see a job description, if they are not 100% qualified, they tend not to apply. Alright women, knock it off. Men, if they are 60% qualified will apply. I'm just talking about in the industry with research, so that doesn't mean for individual people. I'm just talking about the entire data set. And the number one reason why they didn't do that is that they felt like they would not be qualified based on the job description. And they knew that they were going to fail, so they didn't even bother. Which I'm going to say that last part might be true. But here’s the deal, women, I'm just going to give you the pitch here. There's a reason why there are more men than women who apply in the pool. That's just in general, we know that. And it is because if you have greater than 30% of the qualifications, women, I'm giving you this in particular, this is what the study says, is that if you're granted 30% of qualifications, it's just as good as if you had 90%. All right, so men, you can take it and run with it too. But women in particular, you have an added advantage here, you need to go and really think about applying even when you are not perfectly qualified, okay? And let me just tell you, the amount of times that we find somebody who is exactly qualified with everything else, every single thing in a job description, is none. It's none. No, it's completely bespoke to the person like when we come in, we will up level, we will down level, we will find a place for the right candidate, even on a whole other team in a different job. If we find the right person, and that's the one thing. I think people really think it's black and white, apply, hope to hear back interview, hope to hear back and you're in limbo land, and then get that rejection notice. And they do it hundreds, 1000s of times in some of the cases, and it just doesn't work. The reason why is it’s not your fault, the system has been designed for you to fail. And I'm going to be honest, it's in my best interest for you to fail, because then I will pull down from all the people who are grossly under qualified to just get to the cream of the crop. But it's why your recruiter is exhausted, because they have 1000s of applicants who are not quality.

But when you just apply with no rhyme or reason, that's diluting this whole process for everybody else. So you actually are hurting everybody in that, which is why you don't want to take the traditional approach and job searching. What you really want to be doing is appearing is what we call the candidate of choice, okay? This is also called the purple squirrel. Okay, so what is a purple squirrel? A purple squirrel is a term we use in recruiting all the time, and it's kind of like trying to find a unicorn, unicorn Pegasus, in fact we're going to go really extreme on this. It means the absolute perfect candidate who is the perfect fit for the hiring manager who will come in and be a slam dunk, and we would be stupid not to do everything in our power to get them on board. Now, how does that sound from a place of career power? Very high. So when somebody is really high up on the career power level, that means that they can demand just about anything they want. Because guess what? The people who are in high career power, they don't have just one option, they have multiple options. This is really what I teach people is how do you create this? How do you become the candidate of choice? How do you truly ascend to this place of career power, where opportunities are just at your door knocking? How do you do that? That's what we're working on in this process. So you need to really ascend to that place of career power. If you truly want to demand top dollar for your skills, if you want to completely create your dream job, if you want to be sought after by the highest talent or highest caliber companies that are out there, and you want to be the highest caliber candidate for them, that's what this process is.

Thank you again for your time everybody. It was so wonderful to see you! Please like follow, share. Send me your friends! Bye!