networking 101

full transcript

auto-generated from the audio, so expect a few typos. the audio is the source of truth.

Hello, hello. Thanks for listening to guidance counselor 2.0. Listen, I want to give you a quick rundown of what this podcast is and what you're about to get into as you listen to these episodes. We had guidance counselors in middle school. We had guidance counselors in high school, but we didn't really have guidance counselors in college and now as professionals. We don't really have anybody to turn to to ask a quick question to learn something about the job search or to navigate your career. And so that is what I want this podcast to be for you. I want it to be a tool for you to navigate the job search and your career.

So that being said, I hope you enjoy this episode. And if you need to reach me, Taylor at vacovac.com is how to get in touch with me old-fashioned email social media at tdsintdessey. And finally, please rate and review this in the app store because I want this to be discoverable for others so they can navigate their careers. Hope you enjoy the episode. We're getting tactical here. We're going to get tactical. So again, Twitter spaces. I know you can't see it, but at least you can listen on. I'll try to communicate Allison. It's great to see you. I'll try to communicate to where Twitter spaces can see it or can at least visualize it.

But I want to go ahead and start sharing. I'm going to go and start sharing my screen to poly work. So I wanted to have been to poly work first. I want to do a refresher. I know I've talked about this a few times, but again, I can never talk about this enough. So let me go ahead and share my screen now to poly work. Let's see here. Let's see here Chrome tab. Poly work. All right. Cool. So just want to make sure everybody can see it. They can see it. This is wonderful. I love it. Let's see here. Josh got a question as we dive in.

Taylor, friend of the data and analytics industry is doing a lot of analysis for a community. What resources do you recommend as a recruiting professional? I would literally. I would get that person to ask five recruiters in their area what they see for their jobs because I will tell you this. Any things you research are going to be lagging indicators, which aren't going to be the best case. So honestly, Josh, I would just get your friends to talk to a bunch of recruits and ask questions. Arthur, it's great to see you, Dev. It's always great to see you, my man. Can't wait to see you in October for my minimum.

Yeah, screen share finally worked. Yeah, seriously. All right. So we're going to go over poly work here. So a few things about poly work that I love and I want to get into kind of the specifics here is the badges section. So for those of you who haven't checked out poly work on how they recommend doing so, but there's something called badges on poly work and badges are clickable things under your name and your profile picture. And what's amazing about this is that instead of doing a search on LinkedIn, instead of doing a search on LinkedIn, where you have to filter out stuff, basically poly work does searches based off interest, which is so much more valuable.

Right. So if I'm on LinkedIn and we'll get to this in a second, we're going to do quick hits today. It's not going to be super long in each platform, but I want to type in the badges feature. I want to hold it on the badges feature on poly work for a second. The reason why poly work is important is you can network with similar interest. Right. So if you set up your profile, there is going to be a prompt for you to set up your badges. And those are the things that you're interested in. And so, you know, for example, hiring, right. If I click hiring, there's 784 people that are hiring right now.

Right. There are for software engineering in poly work, there are 27,000 people in poly work that are literally in a software engineering space. Right. My favorite on here, corgies, or I have a big corgier lover, there's 18 people with the badge, corgi lover. So I can message Sean, I'd be like, yo, what up, Sean? I saw where you love corgies. That's chat. Right. And so that's so that's incredibly incredibly important. And that's one of my favorite features about poly work is the badges feature. So go do your badges, network with people. The other thing I want to do too, that's just added that I love about poly work is there's an opportunity section.

So if you scroll through the opportunity section, again, opportunities, top of the page on poly work. There's an opportunity section where literally there are people that put job postings, freelance work. You know, literally if I were you and I was looking for a job, I would, this is, this is probably in my opinion from a poly work perspective and really any social media app out there. This opportunity section is so huge. Like for example, so Twitter spaces, if you're listening right now, fewer the titles were some opportunities that are open right now. Awesome guest on my podcast. This person is looking for an awesome guest on their podcast.

Right. First is looking for an investment on an AI app for short form video creation. Right. There's multiple people looking for podcasts. So if you really want to jumpstart your podcast career, go on poly work and do this. You know, there's, I built a service to Rose landing pages. Can you roast its landing page, right? Design feedback. So again, it's so huge. And what's again, what's so amazing about poly work and there's another badge section. So literally you can click freelance and you can go to the freelance opportunities that are open right now. So incredibly important section right now. I'm going to go back to, to hear, let's see here.

Yeah, going back, Josh seeing a lot of lagging indicators. Sorry, I'm sharing screens. I have to go back and forth here. Rama happy Tuesday to you to Randall never seen this great. So yeah, again, right. So here's my issue with poly work. Here's my issue of poly work. Is it's not LinkedIn yet in regards to attention? If that makes sense, right? So when we talk about attention, I'm talking about the people that are on the app, on the website all the time. The issue in my experience with poly work is there's no app or at least there, it's not out yet. And so, so people just aren't on the app as much as LinkedIn.

So your response time may be a little bit slow, but in my opinion, if you can go on poly work and literally just crush out a bunch of DMs and there's no DM cap limit either, right? So poly work isn't necessarily so, so, so you know how I talk about network. working on LinkedIn, our networking on social media is three things, right? The documenting, posting content, liking and commenting and DMing. So poly work is really just the third option in my opinion and that's the DM's, right? So what makes poly work so powerful is that there's so many ways to find people and the DM feature and the messaging feature is crazy good because if you search on badges, if you search on opportunities, you already have, you already have like what they want to talk about, right?

So the DM game is really, really important on poly work. Um, so your Nathan comes in, do my poly works. I've been sitting vacant from when you set out that beta code way back when going to have to check it out. Yeah, again, if you want to, I don't know if it still works, but GC to dash zero for poly work. Um, I interviewed the co founder on the show. Um, but yeah, so check that out. GC to dash zero Erica. It's great to see you Ricardo, Mr. Consistent. I love it. Omar, JC, it's great to see all this morning. All right, so that's poly work.

So I'm going to go ahead and stop sharing on poly work. Um, so that's all I want to talk about. The next thing I want to go to is LinkedIn for a second, right? So I'm going to go and share my screen real fast. Uh, share screen, window of Chrome tab. All right, hold on. Hold on. Got to find it linked in. All right, cool. So y'all can see y'all can see my LinkedIn now. So we're sharing LinkedIn today right now. So here's the one thing that I really, really impassioned about. When it comes down, when it comes down to interest, right, the whole thing about network and I want to get across is interest, right?

There's two things I'm passionate about. There's two things I'm passionate about when it comes to networking via social media. And that is not making sure it's a cold DM, right? It's not the, hey, it's not high or hello. And that's it, right? Like I really want to help you create a really thoughtful DM. Remember my three steps to create a good DM is what? Admoration, flattery, a specific question, a specific number, a specific amount of time, right? But another thing, another thing that I really, really want to point out is two ways to strike up a conversation with people on LinkedIn that I really don't talk about that much.

And that is using your interest, right? So if you see at the bottom of the page, there's the interest portion, right? This interest portion is a way for you to strike up a conversation off of potentially something that this person is interested in. So if you, I don't know why I'm following Sarah. I'm going to unfollow her. Nothing against Sarah. I just, if the Spanx is not a product that's really resonant to me. But Gary Vaynerchuk, right? If you messaged me like, hey Taylor, I saw, I saw where you're, you're interested in Gary Vaynerchuk on your LinkedIn. Tell me more about your interesting Gary. I am going to respond to you 10 out of 10 times, right?

If you take the opportunity to look at my interest on LinkedIn and message me about them, I am going to respond back to you 10 out of 10 times, right? Same here. Companies, right? Groups, schools, right? All that. So again, leverage this, right? So, so you can see all five. So if you messaged me about Ruben Harris with career karma, Alex Lieberman with the morning brew or guy, Ross, with how I built this, I am going to respond to you 10 out of 10 times. Another thing that I want to highlight is the activity section. So literally, you can see all of the posts that that person has done recently.

What I would do is first off, I would see if this individual posts a lot, right? So that's incredibly important to literally see if this person posts, if this person is not posted in 30 days in the activity portion, you may need to move on, right? You may not want to message this person because this person probably is not super active on LinkedIn. But if you come across someone's profile like mine, where it's like, all right, you can, obviously very, very well see the fact that this person posts mentioned somebody's post, right? Hey, Taylor, I saw where you posted about the summary on your resume.

I thought that was an insightful video. I would love to chat about it more, right? Incredibly important. Leverage the activity part to strike up a conversation. So activity and interest part incredibly incredibly important. So that being said, that's, that's all I want to get to today. That was it. I just want to hit it really, really hard, real fast, poly work, badges, opportunities, LinkedIn activity and interest. Use those to leverage your DM to start another conversation. If there's any questions, please ask them now as I wrap up your tray. The problem is most devs and recruiters in my area aren't active on social. I get it.

Understand, most of us aren't, right? I would still send the DM's still send the DM's still trying to network. But in my opinion, I would make sure that you're checking all that stuff, right? But if they're not active, you got to leverage a way to get in the DM's and that's the interest and activity. Cool, y'all. Well, that is it for me today. I just wanted to be super short, super to the point. And, and, and hopefully you guys got something. If you did get something and you feel like somebody in your network needs to hear this, please share it. The reason why I do these lives every single day is for people to try to get something out of them.

Um, Allison comes in. I love Reach Out's fellow NSS students. Most of us love how to commit, right? Exactly. Right. Allison brings a great, great point here. Allison talks out the, the importance of community. I always talk about starting your job search with your community first, right? So if you went to NSS, start networking with NSS grads that graduated recently from NSS. If you went to a big large university like me, the University of South Carolina, I should have started there, right? So incredibly incredibly important to lean on your community first. The next thing, uh, Aaron comes in, Aaron's great to see a buddy. Sorry I couldn't hang out with you in Louisville.

It got crazy per usual. What can we do to deal with the level of recruiter spam on LinkedIn? Like I can't count how many times I've been asked to interview for a senior job of developer position, Texas. This is always going to happen, Aaron. So my two tips for you would be one put an emoji in front of your name on LinkedIn. If that person, if the bot or that person includes the emoji, it's a, it's a bot. So don't respond. The next thing is go to my website, vaco.com backslashtaylor and save the 10 questions I created to stump a recruiter and just say, Hey, thanks for this.

But go ahead and answer these questions first. And those are my two ways. But at the end of the day, you're always going to get spam. It just, it just is what it is. I'm sorry. Allison, thank you. Sweet. All right. Yeah. Well, that was it today. Thank you so much. Share the episode if you want tomorrow morning. I'm going to be live tomorrow morning with another job seeker who actually no really well. Seems well, John's going to be great one Thursday. Unicorn finders are going to be live with a, with a VR company part two that's helping in the physical therapy space. And then Friday, it'll just be me again.

Friday, I'm going to talk about discord slack networking. It's like Josh brought up. So that's Friday's episode about how to take advantage of these slack and discord channels. So thanks y'all. Appreciate it. Love y'all. Me and it. See y'all tomorrow. Peace. Hey, you did it. You listened to an entire episode and I am very grateful. Cause you know why there's a lot of podcasts out there. There's a lot of episodes and I myself rarely finish an entire episode. So I appreciate you so so much for listening. Quick reminder, please rate and review this podcast in the app store. I want this to be discoverable to others and the only way that happens is if you take the time right now and rate and review it, please like right now, unless you're driving it, then don't do it.

So thank you again. If you need to reach out to me, Taylor at vaco.com or at t-test and on all social media handles. And I hope you have a fantastic day.