ai resumes, ghost jobs, & the state of the market w/ sr. recruiter steven evans

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Somebody posted about a bot on Reddit yesterday and it's my buddy's company's bot. Are you serious? What does the bot do? So when someone applies, it immediately starts trying to call them and then have a quick, it's an agency, so like a quick little conversation like, oh my God, what skills do you have? And let's get some rate and some work status information. And then if you don't answer, it calls back like twice. And then if you never answer it, send you just like automated email, like, Hey, like, please answer this email and then text you. And somebody was like, can't like some just idiot recruiter just call me that and doesn't know what they're talking about rather than just a robot.

Yeah. You know, and I think that's like, so we, we said it in our group chat and my boy was just like, Oh yeah, that's ours. We built that. That is absolutely hilarious. and i mean we're live now and so i think it's i think it's just good like jibber jabber for people you know people tuning in i i think i think that's the hardest part about the recruiting process is i think there's a lot of administrative tasks that can be automated using ai but i think at the end of the day like i don't think people i don't think people are going to want to talk to a bot no that was the person's response they're like yeah just call me like Can it not be Riley the recruiter calling me?

That's AI. And I think it's just a bad vibe. Because I think there's ways to do AI in the staffing space, for sure. I mean, I think one of the things we're doing at Torque is our internal thing is like, hey, join Torque. and then our AI is gonna match you to jobs in our ecosystem. I think that's a great way to do it. But I think if you're trying to automate even the initial like outbound call, like, I just don't think that works. And I think from a, it's like a negative connotation where like, you know what I'm saying? Like, I just think it's a bad vibe.

Yeah, it's, I made a joke. I was like, why don't you guys just do a power hour and call with six hundred people in an hour? And then you can have the same stupid little simple lockup call of like, Tell me about X years of experience with Y technology. And that's literally what the email was. Right. They're not even getting interest. It's just overly simplified. I mean, I get it trying to cut to it faster. But people don't want to cut to it faster. And good morning, everybody. Good morning. We just went live. I told people to take a few minutes to chime in, and everybody's already here.

So people obviously want to hear this. But good morning. Welcome. Welcome to Guidance Counselor. I am back from Raleigh, Durham. Durham. Not Raleigh, Durham. I keep getting corrected. I'm back from Durham, all things AI. It was a great, great three days. For those of you who live under a rock, Roxy, who's in the chat, is our new hire. That's replacing Jason, who's also in the chat. Jason, miss you, love you. And so Roxy just came out on a dime. She was like, I'll be there. So it was great to have Roxy there. It was a really, really great three days in Durham. Had the opportunity to speak in front of about three hundred, three hundred fifty people around how to leverage.

It was it was kind of a twofold thing. It was like I gave a bunch of facts to start to talk about how the market is still really good. And then we kind of got into some practical uses of how to use AI in your career. So that was a great conversation. How to talk meet up where we. we were at capacity. Um, so basically now, you know, I, I talk about it and Steven, we'll, we'll get into your, your swim backgrounds. Uh, but, uh, you know, my background is being in a band and I tell people all the time that like, basically at this point, like building community is being in a band.

So basically every time we go to Raleigh, now we draw, we draw about to people, which is pretty cool. So, um, so that was a great event. I had a developer come up to me. They're like, man, no company is doing these type of meetups. Um, and, uh, you know, just like bringing people together, you know, catching a vibe, um, you know, and not shoving, you know, cause my whole thing is like, you can go to YouTube, you can go to chat GPT, you can go to Claude, whatever, and find technical stuff. I think people just want to meet people. And I think like meetups have been so focused on cramming technical knowledge.

I think people just want to hang out, hang out, eat, eat a cheese plate that we provided, have some bevs and talk to people. thoughts on that yeah I I you've heard me say it's like networking is just making friends like you're not going to go to one networking event and find a job or get some business within the first like thirty-five seconds is like just hang out people like eat some mozzarella sticks and yeah just talk about whatever Yeah, eat some mozzarella sticks and catch a vibe. That's it. It's pretty simple. It's pretty simple. So it was a great time. Got back yesterday morning.

Then jumped into a slew of calls. So I'm crazy busy today. But had to make time for Steven. Steven, is this just like a LinkedIn relationship? Is that it? Is that our relationship? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So again, right. Like, you know, Steven's comment on my stuff. I'm commenting on Steven stuff. We kind of started to, you know, like each other and, and I kind of our vibe. And I was like, yo, let's just, let's just catch up. I've been trying to get Steven on the show now for, three a long time yeah yeah steven's like oh i just totally forgot to book something so i'm excited christmas you get it yeah yeah yeah so excited for this talk it's gonna be good again kind of my focus over the for for for the show is is really bringing on i was telling steven backstage that like what people really want right now is career stuff and ai stuff like i think like the latest javascript framework conversation is is exhausted um and i think people just want to hear about ai and job search so kind of my core focus um you know moving forward is to bring on recruiters like steven um who i trust um and who do things the right way and then also uh ai practitioners like nader um and like aaron francis and i'm looking to pull more on over the next few months so Before we dive in, a few housekeeping things.

First and foremost, go check out Torque.dev community. We got a lot of things going on. We got our calendar of events on there. It's great. If you want to sign up to be ambassador, most of the ambassadors have gotten their Torque swag. It's pretty sick. I have to say. So go check that out. If you want to be updated when I go live, I text this. I don't spam. I just text it when I go live. So if you want to be kept up to date when I go live with future guests, shoot me a text. We'd love to have you. Jump into our Discord.

We got a laid-off lounge today with my buddy Dan Thompson. Dan and I recruited at Vaco together for years. He's kind of in a sales recruiting space. He's going to be a great, great session today in our laid-off lounge. So jump into the Discord. I think that's at What, one thirty today or twelve? There was one thirty Eastern today to do that. Also want to give a shout out to the unofficial official coffee sponsor of the show. Seek coffee. You get fifty percent off. I'm trying to work with them. The founders in Nashville. I'm trying to work on kind of like a community sponsorship. But most coffee, Stephen, I didn't realize this has mold in it.

so uh he's created yeah that's what he said he so supposedly it's like a family-owned business his mom was suffering from autoimmune issues she was drinking a ton of starbucks and he and she was pretty sick he like pioneered this his mom's symptoms healed up so um yeah all that being yeah all that being said try to see coffee it's great uh also final thing too is before we dive in uh newsletter sign up for it so many people like i can't keep up i don't know what you guys are doing there's too much going on there is a lot going on join the newsletter you you get everything we we promoted this episode on on the newsletter last week um so please jump into that all right enough with me yapping and yes what jordan said the cheese was fancy we had great cheese uh i ate a lot of cheese uh i don't know it was a lot it was good i don't know i didn't put in the order uh brianna i love an adult lunchable Oh, dude.

Adult Lunchables are great. Really good. All right, Steve. Enough of me yapping. Let's get the people what they want, man. Who are you? What do you do? We'll go from there. Well, yeah. Steven Evans. I've been in recruiting for probably over a decade now. Stopped counting. Started an agency. Kind of slowly migrated out of that. Now I'm internal with Marathon Consulting and hiring people for us but yeah and then i've if it's happened i've seen it i've been on the ball yeah and then you've worked both and i want to set the tone you've worked both corporate and agency right yeah i grew up in agency setting and then like slowly moved out of that Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So so we'll we'll touch on that today. So a lot of topics to get into today, Steven. First off, I want to get into and I think it's kind of the the topic. The hot topic right now is ghost jobs. right you and i were chatting a little bit backstage i said hey i want to break down what ghost jobs are why companies put up jobs that may not be real why people don't get callbacks how you should approach them just give your general thoughts on ghost jobs again we were kind of talking about this backstage how far back do you want me to go go go back dude we we got it i know way back in the day um when i was an agency they were building out a database for erp talent and they did literally put up ghost jobs just like source people into their database um but like now i think my personal opinion is like i don't think there are ghost jobs where the job doesn't exist i think there's jobs out there where companies are seeing stupid amounts of applicants and if i mean it goes down the list so like if they find their top person i'll Resume two and your resume like one thousand and forty.

Yes. And that may not be there. Like and like those close it. And if they don't have like the automation or the process is there to like close said loop, it seems like a ghost job. Yeah. But he was like, we hire the same three or four people like jobs. But like because we know we're doing that, we just keep the jobs up nonstop. Like the jobs technically never close. Yes. They're just always up. And there's no like, cool, this job closes in the next day. He's like, cool, we always need .NET developers. But when we might be able to bring them on or not bring them on is really...

Depending on timing. Yeah. Right. So what would you tell job seekers, folks on the stream right now, on how to navigate ghost jobs, how to apply, why they shouldn't be as frustrated as they are? I mean, for me, if someone pings me and says like, hey, I applied. What's the deal? I was like, yeah, we're going forward to people who are further down the pipeline with you. And like, once that wraps up, then we'll come back to you. Yeah. Like I just, that's my, that's all my, my whole thing. But like, again, I don't see thousands of resumes for one application. I know there's companies out there where it's like thousand, two thousand resumes and they just have to like slough through all of it.

Yeah. Yeah. Kind of feels like an AI applicant thing, but yeah. So your advice to job seekers is, and this is gonna be a little crass, but get over it. apply and just start to, cause, cause I feel like people, I feel like, I feel like job seekers, equivalent job open, submit, going to get a call back. But I think there's this kind of this whole process and timing loop that I don't think people are necessarily aware of. Like, can you give like, can you give an example of like how somebody would apply? Like, can you give an example of like maybe, maybe at marathon where like somebody applied to a ghost posting, which again, it's not necessarily a ghost posting because you need it, but can you talk about maybe, I think, cause you said it backstage, like somebody applied.

There's been a couple. Yeah. Like there's been a few times where like somebody applies and it's like, cool, this person's a fit. I'm not going to tell them no. Sure. But then they just kind of sit there and like, I know like a month later, they're like, Hey, we need like, well, we need it. oh, look, I don't need a C Sharp developer. I need somebody who's done Unity that has worked with C Sharp. And I was like, oh, someone applied like four weeks ago that had that. And now he's working with us. And we had an architect, same thing. He applied and I hit him up.

I was like, hey, man, we got a job. He was like, I applied to you guys like three weeks ago. I was like, yeah, my bad. Things were slow. But I need somebody like you now. Let's push the envelope. Yeah. Let me ask you this, right? So one of the biggest things that I preach in the job search for job seekers is the follow-up. Yeah. How do you recommend people check in with you, follow up? What do you think best practices should be, especially if they see a job and they post and they haven't heard anything? Send an email. It's super simple. It's like, So like friends, like we all have that one friend where like you text them to make plans and they respond internally and then never actually send them a text message.

Yes. Follow that. Yo dude, like are we meeting up for drinks or not? Yeah. Oh my bad. I forgot. Like just super simple. Like in my mind. Can you talk about, and again, just trying to open up the playbook for people who don't understand how much recruiters are having to balance at a time? Can you kind of shed some light on that? From an agency perspective? Okay. Yeah. I'll go down two paths. Yeah. Agency, you're doing stuff where... You're having your manager send out some call report to you to make sure you're making X number of calls per day. Well, some are not doing that.

Some are. Some are. Some are. They're monitoring how many submittals are going to each open rec on your plate. How many open recs on your plate is really dependent on the company. You're having to follow up with candidates. You're having to chase down BGI and drug screen stuff. You're having to follow up with the interviews, make sure people get on interviews. You have to make sure somebody shows up the first day. But that's just all encompassing on the agency world. Agency world? I remember leaving the job every day and it was like my brain, you know, like your brain's fried. Yeah. Just completely gassed. Like living off like six energy drinks a day.

Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, there's a lot of admin stuff like monitoring, like, you know, scheduling interviews, making sure people show up. Like now it's like a lot of, it's like, after this call, I'm going to like a AI summit conference thing where I have to, I say, have to go socialize, but yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's a lot at one time. Um, let me, uh, we, we got two questions here. Where, where do you see the main broken piece of the process between candidate and job opening? I think there's, I mean, I don't know if it's broken, but I think I posted about the other days.

Like it's people, like people are people like it's, it's hard to know like what people are thinking. And I mean, there's a lot to go in there. Um, I don't know if it's really like, it's just, everybody wants to have their cake and eat it too. Like job seekers want to have control. Companies want to have control. And it's trying to figure out like where that middle ground is like, like, like twenty, twenty, twenty to twenty, twenty two, like pure job seeker market war on talent. Everyone could say if you're looking for a job, like you can name your price, name your and then it slowly started coming back the other way.

And now some companies are trying to essentially get back their control of like, yeah, no, like we're going to push these these salaries back down, make a fair market. I mean, it's it's all a business and I guess Maybe some people just don't understand the business side of it and you kind of have to put that hat on to like swallow the pill. Yeah. Does that make sense at all? Yeah. Yeah. Talk about, especially with, you know, one of the things that I keep seeing is that companies are risk averse right now. What can a candidate do in terms of what you just said to make themselves the least risk averse in your mind?

So, I mean, I think a lot of companies have kind of shrunk the circle of like where they are looking. Um, I know we've seen it from us is like, we have a very flexible hybrid work set up. Like there's no expectation, but the people who are in like our geographic areas tend to stay longer. than somebody who's in out there so like when i have friends that are looking and they're like i can't find anything shrink your geographic search area okay and say like i'm cool coming in because then companies get like that warm and fuzzy like yes i can see you in the kitchen eating cheeses yeah and i can talk to you about like and make those in real life connections with people which theoretically makes it harder for them to leave which is what companies want they want people to stay for a long time yeah yeah even if yeah what about what about approaching you as a recruiter what can people do because i have an answer to this and so i'll chime in after you say something what can what what can it can't do for you and you're like ah this person is dialed in they understand what are just some key things that people can do just i say it's like simple like have some concept of like the company Like, Hey, I saw you guys won this best place to work award.

Like, that's cool. I'm like, cool. Like you, you have some idea of who we are. Like, that's great. Versus like, what do you know about this? Oh, nothing. Then it, then it becomes a very transactional relationship. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, I put this in my talk. at the conference, like with AI now, there's no excuse for you not to be prepared. Run a quick, Hey, I'm about to interview for marathon consultant and Steven Evans. Can, can, can you do a quick web search on some things I should bring up? Right. Literally I have some AI thingy. I messaged Steven this, it did the research.

Yeah. Like, like, like it pulled that Steven was like a swim coach. I didn't know that about Steven. And it literally prepped our meeting for me. So if you're not using AI in a simple, hey, give me the rundown of some things I should talk to you about. Because, Stephen, let's role play here, right? As most staffing companies did back in the day, right? If I'm a candidate interviewing, dude, for the record, I don't know if you're going to do an agency. They would get you up in front of everybody and you would role play in front of people. We would do it on the headset with your mentor in the desk right next to you.

Yeah. I mean, literally like people don't understand like the amount of people like Taylor, you're so good at public speaking. How do you do? I was like, dude, I can't begin to tell you the amount of stuff that I've been put on the spot for back in the day recruiting. So yeah, for me if if i would have done a research and steven correct me if i'm wrong if i'm like hey steven did some research on you saw your swim coach i actually grew up swimming i did this this this and this i'm sure that will drastically change the conversation with you yeah you go off like yeah you go off on tangents of stuff that's completely unrelated to what you're having the conversation for and i feel like it kind of goes back to what i was saying where it's like you're building some in real life relationship stuff where you learn about somebody that's not hyper transactional like oh cool you're a senior application developer how many years of experience do you have with java okay cool how many years of experience do you have with react cool how many years experience do you have a sequel cool check check check versus like having like a real conversation like oh, you played hockey.

Oh, my best friend plays hockey. Like what? And then it's kind of like this down those walls and you kind of have a more open conversation of like, cool, you did Java. What did you build Java? Yeah. What applications have you built? What I think, too, I think the way recruiters work as well is if you talked with me and you're like, hey, I like you. You have the skills. And let's keep that swim thing that I said. If you get a job for me three weeks later, you'll be like, oh, the swim guy. Yeah. That's how this stuff works in the recruiting world, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The dude I talked to about XYZ, like, yeah. Talking, actually, I talked to a web developer last week. We wanted a tangent. He told me he likes to make jerky in his free time. There you go. Now he's a turkey guy. Right. And now he's a turkey. That's how recruiters associate people. So like, if you can bring in, you know, like, like for like, like, like I know Seth, Seth's on the chat, like Seth, Seth's the pest control guy in my mind. Right. Like, like when he worked in pest control, he's trying to break into tech. Like he's, he's the pest control guy.

Right. Like Naz, who's one of our ambassadors for torque. Like she's like, she's trying to get into Python and like AI and computer vision, all this stuff. Like, she's like the computer vision girl, right? Like that's just, that's how recruiters like to put you in buckets. So if you can show up and do the research and make that commonality, it's gonna help tremendously. It's, yeah. And so you meet so many people, you have to have some, it's like a name game. You have to. Like when I was coaching, people were like, Steven, how did you learn a hundred kids' names? It's like nicknames, word association, like.

Yeah, absolutely. Emma comes in. What if I apply? And the recruiter and or dev senior hiring for that position, what if I apply and email the recruiter after applying? Says, hey, I saw you're looking for so-and-so. I bring so-and-so. Would love to chat. I think this is great. Steven, would you like this? Yeah. If I hadn't queued up the resume, I'd go back and look at the resume again. Yep. Yeah. Why? Why haven't I talked to this person? They're reaching out and be like, oh, cool. Like, oh, we need someone that's worked with X and they haven't worked with X. Yeah. Yeah. And well, and I think, too, I think, again, going back to Stephen's comment about hundreds or thousands of resumes in a pile, let's say let's say M.

were, let's say she was number, and I've talked about this. It all depends. Yeah. Let's say she, I'd immediately go to her resume and be like, oh, cool. Like what's going on here? Yep. Yep. Now I, and so what I would always try to do, I would always apply because then the recruiter is going to be like, well, have you applied? Because you got to get in their process. But I would also try to follow up. Now on LinkedIn, a lot of times you can see who posted the job. So message that person. Hey, Steven, saw you posted a .NET SharePoint consulting role with these skills.

I actually have these skills. This is what I've done. Let me know if you want to talk more. Steven is gonna go, thank God you did that. Do it every time. Every time. Yeah. My wife's friend was looking at career switching and I was like, if you can see who posted it, reach out to that person immediately. She was like, I don't know how to do it. I would go through and I would find the entire TA team for her and send her every single name. Exactly. Exactly. I would use my, I would use my, uh, my skills for evil. Yes. Um, I'm going through the comments here.

A lot of comments. All right. So let's, let's, uh, let's talk, let's touch on resume writing a little bit, right? We do a resume writing session in the, in the torque discord. Um, had somebody come up to me at the conference about, he got an internship because of it, because of the way we did it. Yeah. Yeah. That was really, really cool. Talk to me about how you like a resume to see, to read. Does the length, does like two, three pages matter to you? Just give some general state, and then I have some other follow-up questions on resumes. So generally speaking, I do not care about length.

I mean, in the electronic age, like, granted, you don't want it to be like fifty pages, but like most people aren't going to look past a page or two. Right. But yeah, how it looks like I'm weird, like I could care less, like PDF, Word doc, whatever. As long as I can open and read it, it's fine. As long as the content's there, really, it's all that really matters to me. One of the things I'm big on, I'm interested in your thoughts. You and I haven't, you know, workshop this. So one of the things I always say is it's very difficult and it's not really feasible to edit your resume online.

with every single job that you apply to. But I say, have a professional summary at the top and outline your main skills, years of experience, because recruiters ask that.

So it's like, if you apply to one of your jobs in the .NET space SharePoint, and you're like, hey, we need somebody with fifteen years of .NET experience, ten years of SharePoint experience, three years of Unity, two years of React, you have those skills i would take that job description the nice-to-haves and must-haves and put it in the professional summary portion of years of experience thoughts on that yeah like like i mean i'm sure you guys had a picture it's like you have your summary yeah and then you have your tech skills box yeah and then just put the years in the tech skills box

that's it and then everything else underneath yep yeah i mean recruiters recruiter's job is to is is to flesh out the resume at least fifty percent of the way there is i would say and so if you can get the recruiters being able to flesh out your resume quickly because i mean realistically how long are you looking at a resume i mean i think that seven seconds is real i'd be like twenty seconds maybe but yeah yeah but so you said it um like the nice to have so prefers we always start there yes and I would say in this market because a lot of

because you know a lot of clients and a lot of companies like and a lot of jobs like cool here are requirements are basic requirements the nice to haves and the preferreds are sometimes requirements but they just don't want to say it right and especially if you're working with a recruiter like Steven They hired, or I know you're more internal, so let's talk agency.

They're engaging the agency world to find the people with the nice to haves, if we're being honest. They want the cupcake with the icing and the sprinkles and the cherry and the chocolate. They want everything. They want everything. So if you're not addressing the nice to haves and must to haves in your resume at the very top, you're already going to be behind. Right. Control F. This is very hard to find skill. That's it. I always tell people, stop bolding words on your resume because recruiters are just going to control anyways. Control F anyways. Yeah. And now you have ranking tools with AI. Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. So there's no need to bold. A lot of bolds. We go through a lot of bold. If you bold the first thing, control A, control B, unbold everything. Yeah, yeah. Let's kind of move into, I guess, kind of some general stuff. The state of the market. Again, you're one recruiter. I say this. Steven is one recruiter in one specific space. It sounds primarily in the .NET space. What are you seeing? Are we picking back up? What are you seeing? Small picture, I think it's picking back up. Big picture, I think the general like hurt people feel is that like, if you think, you know, in the last five years, what the market's been like, it's just not as hot as it was the first two and a half years.

And that's something that none of us can control. No, it's just not the same. It's just, yeah, just companies are being more risk averse. It's just, I don't think it's good. I don't think it's bad. I think it's better than it was last year. For us from a net growth perspective was probably slow, but from like an overall like business perspective, it was good. Yeah. It's just for us to wear. Yeah. The projects was like cool. Person's rolling off a project. All right. Now we have a new project starting and there was no need to bring in somebody new, but overall I think it's better.

I think a lot of companies, especially the bigger guys are drawing lines in the sand on. RTO versus work from home and trying to filter things out that way. Yeah. What are you seeing? I mean, you're, I mean, you're in the.net space. What are you seeing with companies? And again, I, I'm not looking for you to get technical here, but like our company's wanting developers with co-pilot. I think that's like the Microsoft AI thing. They're exploring it. I think a lot of people are, exploring ideas on like how they can do it and do it. Well, I think there's some companies that just don't understand what it is.

Um, and they're still in that whole space that they think can do more than it really can. Yeah. Do you think that could separate people right now? If it's like, even if you don't have like real world experience, but you've, you're doing something on the side to be able to put that on your resume and show like, Hey, I know. Good. A lot of our developers I know are using, um, AI to work faster. Yeah. Like one of our team leads on the data side, he was telling me, he's like, yeah, like I use AI to write SQL queries because I know how to write them.

But whatever bot or agent I'm using can literally spit it out faster than I can physically type it. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, why would I not save that forty five seconds? Yeah, because that forty five seconds is going to build on itself pretty quickly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So so I think being able to showcase that, you know, what I've said is I said this in my talk. And again, I'm going to have to keep editing my talk because this this changing so fast. I still think you're not late, but I think I could see in six months where you go into an interview and people are going to ask, how have you used AI?

And if you go, I don't use it, that could be a red flag. Yeah. I think it's a concern if you're not even like exploring it. Yeah. Yeah. Do you have any of your clients like asking about AI things in an interview yet? Because I'm trying to ferret that out on where the market is. No, I think they do. I know we do. Like when we bring someone on, like we always ask like, what are you doing with AI? Yeah. And Almost everybody says they're using it as a tool in their tool belt. It's kind of what I said. If you're not messing with it, why not?

Why wouldn't you? Yeah. It doesn't make sense. Absolutely. So you primarily recruit for more senior type of roles, right? Yeah. I would say so. what would be i mean again like you know again i ran some stats from my talk at all things open i'm gonna call it what it is the junior market's getting squeezed right now yeah it's hard do you have any advice for those folks uh like like like what do you get something somewhere huh it's like try to like depending on where they are in their careers like they're coming out of school like Try to get some kind of internship somewhere.

Get some kind of real world experience. You could say the same thing like someone transitioning career-wise. Yeah, get your foot in somewhere. I think that's the easiest way. I know for us, we use our intern program as our junior hire program. That's- Oh, so you guys do have an intern program? I mean, we hire three to four interns a year. That's awesome. And out of the four we had last year, I think two are already back with us full-time. And I think we're hoping one more comes back. Really? That's awesome. That's awesome. Yeah, I mean, one thing I've said is that I think now, and I think there's huge opportunity for people transitioning.

Like, for example, I went to Nashville to do music, right? Let's say I was trying to transition into development right now. I would be trying to build something using AI to do something in the music industry, to fix a problem in the music industry. I think that's another thing people kind of forget about is pet projects or fun projects. Those count. Yeah. yeah there's a real like yeah like when we talked like college kids like all right cool like you've taken cs four hundred and all these classes like what have you done like that is like applicable oh i made a dungeons and dragons dice rolling application that can like predict like how many times x numbers show up like sweet yeah tell me more I don't play D&D, but let's go down the path.

Yeah, and we'll go down the path. We'll go down the path as a recruiter. But I think that's what you said. What have you done? Let's kind of go back to resumes. Don't just tell me for resumes. One of our juniors, he had to do up his resume, and I was like, dude, don't just tell me what you've used. What have you built with us, and what did you use to build it? Yes. built this application using xyz not just i used a bunch of techie buzzwords yeah i think right now i think companies are looking for people who understand how to solve business problems because the code is commoditized yeah that's what we say the code's the tool the brain is the brain is what you need like how can you solve x Yeah, and I want to give a shout out to Jeff here.

Jeff's one of our ambassadors, super active. Love you, Jeff. And Jeff, I put this idea out months ago. I was like, I can't get into the Discord as much as I want to because I'm in meetings all day and streaming and all this stuff. But I still would like to know what's going on. And so Jeff's like, bet, I got you. So Jeff went out and developed a bot, like a Discord bot that summarizes the activity. Summary? I just found an ex handle of this dude who posts once a day and all he does is summarize all things sports. It's amazing. It's great. I was like, I know what happened yesterday.

Yeah. And so like, again, like for us, like again, Jeff saw a problem and he's fixing it. Yeah. And I think that's what companies want right now. Yeah. And now Jeff can be like, yeah, like I have this, I built this bot for this. Yep, yep, absolutely. And there's like three thousand, four thousand people in our Discord. So if he says built a bot summarization for four thousand people in a community Discord, I'm calling you. Updates daily or biweekly or what have you. Yeah. Yeah. So again, solving problems. Yeah. His, his, his, his nickname in the community is bot man. So I love it. I love it.

Let's, so I, I, I want to go back a little, I kind of rewind a little bit, but I want to talk strategy for job seekers. Right. So, you know, I tell people, finding a job is like building a house you can't just build a house with a screwdriver you can't build a house with just a hammer right and i think a lot of people you i'm going to code apply and that's going to get me i think the general sense now in the market is like that's not going to go anywhere i think people are realizing that but i think one of the things that people don't talk enough about is just networking with recruiters yeah yeah it's Yeah.

Strategy. Huh? I feel like if you need a job, you can't not apply. Correct. But the easier pathway is through referrals and networking and like, Hey, you are friends with my uncle. Like, can you just like get me in the door? Yeah. Getting that first conversation is the hard part. Yeah. And any good, like recruiting team or talent actually as a team, like if there's a referral, like they're going to get a fair shake. Yep. Or more of a fair shake than just like, it sounds bad, but like then like John Smith, who just applied, like John Smith, I don't know you heads from tails, but Oh, Taylor gave me this person's, uh, Taylor told me this person's legit.

Cool. Yep. Yep. Absolutely. Um, Colin comes in here, goes, this is hyper-specific, but would you say solving problems is a stronger resume point than optimizing something existing, perhaps framing it as fixing a bottleneck? Aren't they the same thing? I don't know. Are they? If you're optimizing a bottleneck, aren't you solving a problem? Yeah. That's kind of where my head is. It's like, as long as you like, can like, explain it the right way within the resume shows itself. Yeah. Like you don't have to use the keyboard solving problem. Like that's, that's one of those things that like, you can't, it's not like a searchable phrase.

Interesting. Yeah. That's just something you have to discover. Talk about searchable phrases. Why did you say that? Like Boolean, like think about Google. Like you, like, I know you know, Boolean logic, for those that don't know, it's like and or statements. If I'm running a Boolean logic search for a .NET developer, it's going to be period net in quotes or .NET with dot spelled out for whatever reason because people do that. And then and Angular or React and Cloud or Azure or AWS. I'm not putting solving problems into my Boolean search because not everybody has that on their resume like that's that's a waste in my opinion i guess tangible you search tangible words i guess is a good way to put it yep yep absolutely tangible words and then through conversation you figure out oh this person solved x problem or common salt or to this company and they had this bottleneck and he wrote some api that fixed said bottleneck But I, and I think, but, and Colin, Colin goes, makes sense.

Kind of answer my own question. No, no. I think the question is good because I think, I think Colin, your head's in the right space. This is how you write your resume, period. I think going back to what Steven said, a lot of resumes that I'm sure Steven looks out, I've looked at my career is I used React. I used AWS. I used Node. Yeah. It's just – but it's like – Root applications with React on AWS. That tells me literally nothing. That tells me nothing. Nothing of what you did. No. So it's like I solved the Discord – going back to Jeff's thing. I'm a part of a community.

There's ten thousand messages going a month. People wanted a summary of it to keep up with current events. I used XYZ technologies to fix that. Yeah. That's how you should do it. I don't even know what star stands for, but they call it the star methods, but like, I don't even know what it stands for. I should know what it means. I know. Um, so yeah, so that's that. Um, I know what you're talking about. Yeah. What? So as we, as we, I have, I have a, I have a different way to end up the pod. I literally just used AI, use chat GPT to come up with some questions.

But, but, but, but before we slowly wrap up here, if anybody has any questions, please ask them for Steven. Is there anything else that maybe have popped into your brain that we haven't talked about? Uh, no. I mean, I'm sure there's lots. I know. Is there anything you're seeing people mess up on a lot in interviews? I don't think people are messing up. It's just, and I know you talk about it. It's like just being able to tell a story. How does somebody get better at that? Talking to people? Yeah. Like, I mean, I mean, I talk to people on phone calls where like their story or their origin story is like well, well rehearsed.

me i like like free wheel freelance a lot of stuff like i just i don't like very i guess structured conversations i like i let my brain take over but yeah like talking to people like hey like like kyle i'm like cool you did this bottleneck thing tell me more tell me more tell me more and then being able to fill in that tell me more without someone having to fill in to tell me or ask to tell me more is like part of the storytelling Yep. Yep. Jeff, Jeff out here. Situation, task, action, result. Love it. Yep. That. Jeff the bot. Got it. Jeff the bot.

Yeah. Jeff the bot man. Yep. Absolutely. Absolutely. I'm trying to think if there's anything else. What would be your biggest words of encouragement for job seekers right now? Keep on keeping on. I mean, I mean, it sucks. I mean, I know a lot of people are like tough places, but like you kind of just, can't like i said like you can't not apply yeah especially if you need something yeah get something like it's okay to take it just to take it and then keep on keep it on i would get into communities that's another thing i've talked about i think yeah i i think i mean people are posting so i i one of the things that i encourage people and i'm actually starting this up in my i'm creating more work for myself but i'm i i'm gonna start putting jobs on my sub stack that I see in my network from on X and on LinkedIn.

Well, I also think there's jobs out there that like are never posted. Exactly. Talk about that real quick. That's kind of where I look. Okay. So I know for us specifically, like a year and a half ago, we had a lot of people, a lot of people leave to go chase government jobs because of stability, which you know how that went. Yeah. Some of them ended up coming back to us. So they filled a hole, which is why last year was weird for us. Like we didn't, We didn't have met new people, but we had people come back to us who like had worked for us before.

Like, cool. You want to come back? You did it the right way. Like, we're cool. Like, let's find you a home. Yeah. But that job is technically never like I never sourced for that job. I never recruited for that position. Yeah. And I know it happens like jobs are out there. Just again, it's always timing and it's always hard to do. It's like you just have to stay out there. You have to. like dating like you can't you can't find you can't find someone if you don't date that's literally that i said that in my talk i said you you literally can't find a significant other by sitting on your couch unless it's a bot unless it's a bot unless it's unless it's claude uh ai but yeah so again i mean you know i i think there's because of the massive amounts of bottleneck that's happening with these auto-appliers and whatnot that's out there, a lot of people are just posting to their LinkedIns.

Like a lot of people are just posting on X. Like my entire X feed is of people hiring. And that's kind of what, you know, I wanna give a shout out to two resources. that I have in my talk notes. And if you're interested in seeing those talk notes, email me, taylor.torque.dev, and I'll send them to you. But one of them is called the Anti-Job Board. Literally, that's their Twitter handle. And I've connected with this girl, and she posts jobs that she finds on X from high-growth startups. And then there's another one. I think it's called open to work. I have the sub stack. Um, and I subscribed to her sub stack, see how she does.

And that, that spurned me onto wanting to do my sub stack like this, but she just takes jobs that she sees on X and, and just posted. So like you need to follow and like network with these people to find like you, like you gotta be everywhere. And also get out of like the traditional job wars. Like, yeah, it's not all LinkedIn. It's not all indeed. Like there are some really, there's a lot of, Like do a Google search on like, if you want to work for like startups, Google search job boards for startups and then get on there. Yep. And again, if it's ed tech or health tech, like whatever.

Yep. You don't have to be on LinkedIn or indeed or. I don't even know if monsters is thing anymore, but no monsters, nothing anymore. Yeah. Yeah. Like, it's kind of like the old traditional that I used to recruit on was career builder monster. Indeed. And dice. Those were like the OG four that I used to recruit on. But now there's like, there, there's so many jobs. That's why, I mean, obviously plug torque, like go create a profile and torque. You may not get a job with us, but it doesn't hurt. You gotta be everywhere. Why not throw a line? Why not throw a line in the water?

Yeah, take thirty minutes, go create your profile and tour and maybe you get matched six months from now. Right. But like it's like you have to have that activity going all the time. Which can get exhausting and I don't and I understand for sure, for sure. All right. If anybody has any questions. Yeah, a bit of investigative work. Yes, I would say your entire job search is investigative work for sure. I always do background checks on companies before I would ever apply. Yeah. Yeah. When I was looking, I was like, oh, this job looks good. I was like, what's the catch? And then if anything squirrelly popped up, I just wouldn't apply.

Yeah. Yeah. Seabass is good to see him. All right. As we wrap up here, let me know if there's any questions. So I want to do underrated, overrated. So this is a little bit of change on what I've done. So I'm going to do, I'm going to say something and you just say overrated, underrated, and you are more than willing to give some thoughts on it. Okay. College degrees. Overrated. Boot camps. Ooh. I'm neutral. Okay, that's not a choice, but okay. Well, I've seen, I know people have come out of boot camps that are really, really good. And I've seen people come out of boot camps that think they're really, really good.

Yeah, that's true. That's true. That's true. LinkedIn personal branding. Overrated, underrated. probably underrated. Talk about it. Again, it's like, well, this is like, why not? If it's, if LinkedIn is the professional website, why not get things out there? Whether you post silly stuff or not. Yeah. Like, like last year, my goal was like, last year I did a bad job because of twins. But yeah, anyways. But now the goal is like, just be more present. So more people can find me versus me finding people. Yep, love that. Networking events, overrated, underrated? Depends on the event, but mostly underrated. Yep. Cold outreach. Overrated. Or from whose seat?

Did you say what? From whose seat? Yeah. Remote work. Oh. For me, it's overrated. Yeah, yeah, yep. Office culture. I think it's underrated. Okay. Job hopping. I think people put too much stock into job hoppers. Granted, if it's too often, it can show something. Yeah. But so overrated. Yeah. Staying five years at one company. Overrated. Side hustles. Underrated. Mentorship. Mentorship. Underrated. Career coaches. Underrated probably for most people. Certifications. Overrated. All right. Last little bit. Resumes. Probably underrated. Cover letters. Hands down overrated. This is the trash. I'm in the trash. Yeah. Technical interviews. Uh, interviews or assessments? Let's let's do both interviews. Um, I think they're underrated.

I think you can run a lot on those assessments. Um, depending on the assessment, there's so many, like there's assessments that are just like stupid hard. And there's those, those are overrated. Like they're designed to make you fail. Yep. Yep. It's putting code down so people can see you code. yeah referrals underrated uh recruiters oh probably underrated because they're essentially gatekeepers i love it i love it sweet awesome all right steven thank you my friends uh coke for for sea bass Coke. There you go. There you go. I love it. I love it. All right, y'all. Go, go. There you go. Go connect with Steven.

He is on LinkedIn. He is a great follow. Please go connect with him. Tell him we found him on Guidance Counselor two point oh. Steven, thank you, my friend. That was great. Thanks. I appreciate you. Have fun at your event. Stay on so I can say bye to you backstage. Y'all have a good one and we'll see y'all laid off lounge. One thirty Eastern with my guy Dan Thompson. We're doing two streams today. So your boy's going to be fried this afternoon. But y'all have a good one and we'll see on the talk discord piece.