My Positive thoughtful inspiration for today is for those affected by layoffs or unemployment in general. This may or not be in any particular order but here are Chaz’s general thoughts 🙂

1) Breathe – Panic Sets In, Take a breath count to 20 ( Close your eyes, no cheating)

2) Breathe – The reality is You will now need to work ( Work Hard) to get work.

3) Take a day or 2 to decompress ( initially being let go) If you have kids or a hobby, enjoy it for those days. Sometimes we are always working so hard that we neglect the things that will never get our time back. ( Kids being 1 big one)

4) It is overwhelming losing a job and then the anxiety that you now need to find another one. I think we get lost in endless applications submitted all day. This is NOT HEALTHY. I find it helpful like many others to divide an unemployed day. For example :

1) When applying for jobs, I start to research and apply for jobs at night. That way, I can get my submission in, and use the fresh morning to do some snooping on the company and people. Find connections to these places. Search for the company on LinkedIn, click people, sort by the HR folks, and pick out a few to see if you have any mutual connections. If so, reach out to mutual connections and ask them if they don’t mind introducing them to you or a referral.

2) Always do your homework on actual companies that you are applying for Funding, Employee Reviews, and Google Map reviews, you need to get a sense of what the company is about, positive and negative and if they are financially stable.

3) Set aside a break period, I find that maybe 2 hrs. of mind-numbing applying for jobs I need a break. When I say a break, get off the computer or whatever you’re doing to search for a job and leave it. ( I am guilty of NOT doing this though)

5) RE-DO YOUR RESUME ( Hot One)

Before I go a few steps down into this rabbit hole, let me say this. For most of us who are at a place for a while, we do get comfortable with what we do, and what we have accomplished but sometimes that is not reflected in our resume. Until you can slow your mind down and think about what you have accomplished and learned, I am sure we can add new experience to our resume. You don’t realize all you have done at a job until you’re let go, you sit down and say to yourself: “Wow I forgot I completed that Project” or “ I did this new thing that is hot in the job market now”.

Do yourself a favor before you pay someone to do your resume over. Sit down and reflect on your tenure and ponder these topics:

• Successful projects ( Try to give recent examples of such, meaning don’t pick a project that was 20 years ago)
• Projects that were not successful ( Be very specific on your learnings, I think it’s more interesting why a candidate thinks they failed at a project, it may not be the same for the hiring manager)
• Details of what specific results you were individually responsible for delivering on past projects
• How do you approach solving problems and driving toward solutions
• Think about the “Culture” of what you want in a job. The employer will be identifying your culture fit guaranteed. ( Sometimes they will outright have certain people that will be on the interview panel just to find out if you are a culture fit) I have been honest with what I am looking for as far as culture fit and thinking I was not selected for some of the things I said. One example to be transparent: When asked what type of manager I am, one of my responses was related to not being a Micromanager. I trust my employees to do the work assigned and reward them accordingly. The response I got was to the effect that our manager is in the know of everything and when he asks me something I don’t want to respond with: “ I don’t know”. I think this means that they are micromanagers and I wasn’t selected. Open to hearing feedback about this 🙂

6) Now that I got that out of the way about resumes, I am new to the term “ATS” formatted resume. This and AI resume parsing seem to be the devil as I know that some of us are being missed because of a computer doing the “Sorting”. I don’t want to have to curate a resume for each job application that I apply for so I leave this last sentiment open to hear how to fight this part and win. In short, your resume needs to be ATS Formatted for it to even remotely get a human eye on it.

7) I know there are different tools that we can use as far as job searching here is my short list:

1. Chat GPT – I use this for all types of things related to job search.Prompt chat gpt to curate a cover letter based on giving it the title of the company, title/name of hiring manager ( If Found, This is a paid service which gives you access to chat GPT 4 is a requirement ( Paid Service) ex) “Type this into the chat GPT Prompt” Please create a cover letter for the company: XYZ company, Please address the hiring manager with this name and based the letter off my experience from my resume ( Attached) and compare it to the job description here: XXX, make sure to be professional. The same thing can be done for following up with a hiring manager. For the linked-in mail approach type something like the following:

“Please create a follow-up linked-in message for the Company of XYZ company, address the hiring manager ( name of the hiring manager) Please curate a professional message that highlights your resume against the job description.

Ask chat GPT to curate a list of interview questions per job title and/or job description. ex) Type this into the chat GPT Prompt” Please create a list of job interview questions for this job title: XYZ title and this job description.