hacking linkedin

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What's going on podcast listeners? Thank you, thank you, thank you for tuning in to Guidance Counselor 2.0. The point of this podcast is to allow individuals a resource in their careers when they need it the most. We had Guidance Counselors in middle school, we had Guidance Counselors in high school, but yet now in the real world, we don't have anything or any resource to listen to, to turn to, to learn from others. And so that is what this podcast is for. I interview real people who have had real challenges in their career in hopes that you can take a little bit out of it and to apply within your own career.

As always, please rate, review, and subscribe to this podcast. I really want this podcast to become discoverable to others. And so they can use this as a tool. And the only way that happens is if you rate and review it so it climbs the charts. If you need to reach me, all social media handles for me at TdSNTDSSEYN. I do a ton on Twitter and LinkedIn. And if you need to reach me the old-fashioned email way, shoot me an email, taylordatnebaco.com. Again, I know there's a lot of podcasts out there. And I really appreciate you taking time to listen to guidance counselor 2.0. I hope you enjoy the episode.

So let's start with kind of the basics. So I'm going to go ahead and screen share. Most of my most of this is probably going to be a screen share for me. So let me go ahead and do that now. Sweet. So can you see my screen? Yep. All right. Awesome. So first thing is first. Let's talk. So we're just going to go top down from a LinkedIn perspective, right? So how to leverage certain parts of a LinkedIn to kind of your strength. So the first thing we're talking about this picture up here, Right? So the picture is it's an interesting way to leverage it.

I am not leveraging it the way I need to probably leverage it, but that's also because Vaco wants us to have kind of like, you know, picture the Vaco brand stuff on that cover, cover picture. But I would leverage this as a way to share your information with people immediately, right? So one of the guys that I follow his name is Danny Thompson. Danny Thompson is in Memphis. Danny, I would highly advise you to follow him on Twitter. He spits out some great knowledge, fun little fact he's actually joining. He is joining my other podcast unicorn finders next week live over LinkedIn live. So that's gonna be a lot of fun.

But he actually changed his title, which is one thing we talked about and we'll get to. But the first thing is this picture, right? So obviously you come to Danny's profile. What do you what do you look at, right? So Danny looks super involved, right? Even if these are staged friends, he looks at least super involved. And so, but I think the most important thing as well is that, you know, he outlines what he is, right? Developer, community leader, speaker, trying to help many, as many people as I can. I think that's a huge. Danny actually has changed his cover picture since I came to this profile, but Danny used his cover picture to list his contact information.

So I'm gonna go to another one of my buddies, Dan Thompson, not to be confused with Danny Thompson. Dan Thompson is on unicorn finance with me. He is in Vaco Tampa. I think Dan does a really good job with his cover photo. It lists his Vaco or his email. It also lists his Twitter handle. And it also lists what he does, right? He's an advocate, relationship builder, connector, and a wine guy. He's hilarious talking about wine with. I would highly give him a follow as well on Twitter. So that's how you use, in my opinion, an effective cover picture. Now one of the tools you can use for this is something called Canva.

Now Canva is kind of new on the block to me. I had not really heard about it until recently. And so that being said, you can also customize your LinkedIn header with that, if that makes sense. So I'm going to stop the screen real quick just to see if anybody has any questions and also just to see if there's any participants try to get in. So any questions specifically, yes, Kristen Ashley can hop in on a call. Go ahead and share my Zoom with her. questions on the cover picture. I'm gonna go back to share my screen now. What was the name of the tool that you said?

Canva? Canva, yeah, and there's actually a way, which I didn't realize this, there's actually like different, they already pre-make banners and headers to the dimensions. Yeah, thanks, Bettina. I appreciate that. Yeah, they already make dimensions, so it already takes the graphic design work out of it for you, so then you just pick your font and stuff like that, which is kind of cool. So, let's go ahead and keep talking. Again, so this is me a lot of information, right? It's me running my mouth. So please ask questions or have comments or anything, because again, me running my mouth for this long, it gets a little tiring.

So let's talk about the picture, right? Picture is very important. I think from a picture perspective, You need to start thinking from an icon perspective. So this world, everything is moving to icons and on Twitter, you see just tiny pictures and LinkedIn, it's tiny pictures and everything is tiny, Instagram is tiny pictures. And so I would find a way to make your picture unique. I think I'm gonna give a shout out to Austin Cumberland. He was an NSS graduate. He has a red, I'm pretty sure has a red top on and a white background on his picture. And it's crazy that I know his name because of that red sweater he is wearing.

Like that's how much like brands, like that is how much brand and like just visual, I guess visual context matters, right? That's why I try to go with the purples and the reds and the yellows. Cause I think from that perspective, people, let's face it, we're in the TLDR culture right now and that everybody just wants to skim, right? How many times you get caught on your phone at night and you're just like, why the hell? I'm literally just, I'm literally just scrolling. I'm not even paying attention. And so the way to kind of stand out is to kind of have a picture that's more colorful, right?

And so Dan's is good, white background, colorful shirt. You know, obviously, you know, with mine, you have the purple, my Twitter is yellow. And so that is now, that being said, I'm very fortunate. I'm married to a professional photographer. Dan's picture is taken by my wife when he came up to visit, right? So again, I'm very spoiled and fortunate, but I think there's a way, I think there are ways for you to get creative, you know, with what top you choose, make sure you're taking the picture into the sun, right? make sure the sun's not behind you. My wife talks about all this all the time.

So that's why I know this, right? And so I think there's ways to make sure your picture is lighted properly because I wanna see your face, right? There's a few people that engaged me on Twitter where it's like black and white, you can't really see what's going on. Like it's not very visually appealing. So any questions from a picture perspective, that essentially is kind of pretty self-explanatory, but I wanna see if there's any questions on the pictures. I got a question for you. You can hear me. Yeah, ma'am. OK, so how important do you think your tire is when you're making these pictures? See, you got all the time, your Hawaiian print t-shirts and things like that.

And I wondered the old hat way of looking at that would be like a suit and tie or some kind of semi-foule tire. Is that matter anymore? To me, it depends on how you want to be known, right? and depends kind of what you're going after. For me, so when I was in Raleigh, when I worked in a Raleigh office, when I met Patrick, again, shout out to Patrick, from Tuna from Raleigh, North Carolina. So, Vaco Raleigh was a little bit more, was really buttoned up when I joined. Like, came from Nashville, basically wore just like buttoned up, still business casual, moved to Raleigh, I had to buy like six suits, because like Vaco Raleigh was extremely buttoned up.

And then like I started going to the dining, user group, I went to Patrick and like, it was kind of, it was like, oh, like no one's gonna talk to me. Like literally no one's gonna talk to me if I'm gonna roll in with the suit. So I kind of like just ditched the suit. The Hawaiian shirts came in for me when I went to code conferences and everybody was like Patrick wearing black shirts. And so I realized I needed to wear something to stand out. And so that's where the Hawaiian shirts. Also I just love the beach and I love a good Jimmy Buffett song, right?

So that obviously does not hurt at all. But so I guess, go with your clients, right? Like, like if you're a big four consultant and you're in like E and Y and you're going to these Fortune 100 clients, like yes, it's probably not best for your persona to be a Hawaiian shirt, right? But if you're hanging out with devs like I do, if you're hanging out with people that are a little bit more relaxed and laid back, then that's what it needs to be. But again, you need to tailor it to who you're going after. But that's a really good question. See, I love this already.

I love the zoom. We're asking questions. This is so much more fun than last time. Cool. Any more questions on that picture side of things? Taylor, what was the name of that software that you said you used? Hanva. Hanva? Yeah. C-A-N-V-A. The teeny looked like, yep, she posted it in the chat section as well. Thank you. Yeah, absolutely. So, yes. So I just changed my profile on GitHub. I have a picture that I took with Hat. So in my case, I need to be able to resonate well sort of across the board with somebody who may hire me to be a business translator or a bank translator, need to look like a belong in tech and look like I belong also talking to a board member.

And I want, I have come from a counting payroll, where you kind of have to be very conservative looking for people to trust that you're not screwing up their paycheck. I'm trying to get out of that. So hopefully the picture that I just threw in there is up. I like it. I dig it. I dig it. It's you. It's your personality. I love it. It's clear, right? Like it's just very clear and clean. I love it. I love it a lot. Okay, good. Great. Thumbs up there. All right. So let's kind of dive in. So go back to the screen share. So, all right, so let's talk about the title, right?

So right here, recruiters against recruiters joined my community, text me. So this is incredibly important. And so I'm going to pull up, well, I'm just going to do this. So I'm going to search. So this is what recruiters do every day. If you really want to peel behind the onion of what recruiters do, this is what we do. All right. So this is called LinkedIn recruiter. All right. So LinkedIn Recruiter is how LinkedIn makes their money. Recruiter's pay for this. And this is why you get hit up. Literally, I'm showing you the behind the behind the scenes of how recruiters operate. And so we're talking about this to kind of reverse engineer, kind of how you do things.

Because I want you to view your LinkedIn profile in the eyes of a recruiter, which is going to help boost your engagement. So this is literally all recruiters do every day. We search on a keyword.net developer. And then what we do is we search. So right now, there are 1.6 million people in the United States, I think this is the United States, that have the word.net in their profiles. Who says.net's dead? And so from a location perspective plug in a Nashville, so there are 1,300 people right now with the specific term.net, just a specific term.net developer, right? So they could be a software developer. They don't have the search string.net in the resume.

They could still be a.net developer. Does that make sense? So we'll get to this as well, but this is why I select open the opportunities. That's why you need to make sure you have that checked because when I'm a recruiter, I go to this section first and I hit up all these people first. Cause I know these people are specifically looking, right? So, but the title is incredibly important, right? So the title is right here, right? Joel, software developer, Naveen, senior.net developer at Evacore. You know, Shrinivas, .net and Angular full stack developer, Will Thompson, SQL developer, so that's his current, so yeah, SQL developer, DBA, ETL developer, right?

So the titles, so recruiters aren't even gonna pick up or select your profile because all we see is the title and just your position titles. Right? So if your title and your position titles are vague, software developer, software engineer, senior developer, senior engineer, senior architect, like we don't know like we need to know like or you were.net architect or you JavaScript or you cloud architect, right? We need to know that information. So that's where for me, I would plug in specific tech within your title. Does that make sense? Specific tech within your title. So that way I know Joel. So Joel only has a software developer, but I like this because he put .net developer at Sarah Cannon, right?

So I know he's a .net So if I have a .NET job, I'm going to message Joel. Right? And so again, recruiters, if I'm a recruiter, if I'm a new recruiter and I need to hit numbers, I'm not even going to message Joel if I didn't even see, if he did not have .NET developer here and he just had software developer, I wouldn't have messaged Joel. I wouldn't have because I'm not going to waste my time and click through people's profiles. Like, that's how lazy recruiters are. And that's why most of Mr. Terrell Waterjobs. So the title is incredibly important. I think we lost you for like 30 seconds, Taylor.

You lost me for 30 seconds? Am I back? Yeah, you're back now, but you said the title is and then you paused. The title is my wife's idea, not mine. I'm not that clever. Gotcha. Yeah. So any questions on titles? If you want me to look at your title on your LinkedIn, I can pull it up real quick. If you want me to, you want my employers up, Patrick? So yeah, like as you were talking, I was thinking about it and I used to have just like AWS certified Solutions architect, but then once I got my second one I just put two X AWS certified and that's probably killing me because if I actually specified Like solutions architect and AWS certified developer, I'd probably get more hits.

You would absolutely I'm gonna be honest I wouldn't message you with that title. Yeah I'm going to be honest with you. Most, um, most individuals who put that don't have a lot of real work experience. I'm going to be totally honest. Like, like, if you hide, it's more more thing. If you are junior in your career, you want to get the certs. You want to get the experience, right? So you want to highlight the certs more, right? If you don't have the experience to back it up. And so this, if I didn't know who you were, Patrick, I would think you're more junior in your career.

Also, Patrick, with the different tiers of AWS certifications, please put the specific, especially if it's a specialty. Yeah, yeah, I had that before certification. Please put it out there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So no, but like if you scrolled down, I know like, that's how I exactly how I used to have it. You know, I said the specific one that I had, but you're kind of right because now to find out that it's the associate level, you'd have to scroll all the way down to where my certs are, which is down near the bottom of the profiles. And then even then with the title thing, you said Solutions Architect, that's super vague to me.

Within what vein attack? Like JavaScript.net? that's more speaking towards the AWS people that are specifically looking that's like a specific AWS certification that's a chumf. Solution architect is a lot of yes gotcha. A lot of different more detailed AWS certifications. So that just specifically speaks to that platform and that's good to know. So yeah, I'll just I'll just throw what I'm thinking about in chat and then, you know, yeah, there was a chat. Yeah. That way you can continue and, you know, yeah, man, let's do it. Throw it in the chat. I love it. All right, cool. So we've gone over, cover picture, cover pictures should be an immediate, immediate way to get your contact information, in my opinion.

Again, your picture needs to be colorful. If it's not, if you don't have the resources, make it clear, make it good lighting and have a shirt or something in your profile to make you stand up right. So stand out the guy that I work with Chris Spinsick, Spinman, Spinman's been in the market forever. He has a cowboy hat right. So let's just let's just go to it Chris. Spin. Ah he changed it. So we had a cowboy hat but he's changed it since then so that's a bummer. So let's move on. So the about section. People hate writing bios. Mine, I wrote mine bios, is working with recruiters about as awkward and terrible as writing your own bio.

So here we go. So the bio needs to be pretty quick and concise. You know, it's again, all of this is drawing specific. Like your LinkedIn profile needs to scream what you do, right? So if you are Patrick and AWS solution architect certified, you know, I put that here, right? See senior, senior engineer with AWS start solution architect and whatever, you know, open to consulting direct hire opportunities. DMs are open shooting a DM. Right? Like I need to know in the about section, also to the about section. It only shows about two or three lines, right? Let's go to back to my boy Dan. Right, so Dan right here.

Well, if it isn't your old pal Dan, that's, he's awesome, he talks that way. Your resident starched white shirt wearing country music listening wine, shout out to white burgundy and bourbon drinking technology aficionado with great socks. Right, like if you see that, you're like, I like this guy, like this guy's funny. Or maybe he's weird, but he's a really good dude. Right? So the way he wrote this is really good. And it's longer, right? Mine's longer too and I'm fine with that. But I think if you're specifically getting to the point, again, you need to reverse engineer, LinkedIn is only showing like two or three lines.

Right? So really you don't want people, no one's gonna click for the most part. So you need to make sure that your summary is just two to three lines and gets right to the point. I mean, really, your LinkedIn is now your website. I mean, I was talking to my marketing guy who does all my video content. He and I were chatting yesterday about kind of, you know, the next 30 days and whatnot. Watch out, Lori's interview and I are gonna be, it's gonna be out soon in probably the next 30, 45 days. But like we were talking about it, like it's so funny how marketing has kind of shifted from like the website being like the place to go, right?

You're like, you know what? I'm gonna go check out this person's website. Now it's like, you know, I'm gonna go check out this person's Instagram. Like, like my barber that cut my hair recently, she was a new barber. I was like, hey, I really like your haircut. Like let's stay in touch. She goes, hell, here's my Instagram handle. Not phone number, not any like Instagram handle. So we're going to people's, what I call micro platforms. And so your LinkedIn really is your professional website, which leads me to my next thing, which is incredibly important, is this the featured section. Right, so the featured section in my opinion is the single most, there's anything you get out of this talk, and it is the single most important part of LinkedIn.

So this is a way for people to connect with you on other platforms, to see maybe your GitHub, to see if you're a junior developer, maybe some side projects that you've taken on, right? If you've developed, like if you're in a mobile side of things or you're in the UI, you excited things, like if you develop things that people can actually tangibly see, right? Like you can't necessarily see logic code, but if you're like a normal person. And so like here's a way to highlight your work, right? So for me, I put an intro video. Now I cannot wait until LinkedIn doesn't get in videos.

Like remember MySpace days where you like, you went to your MySpace page And like you had a music playing in the background. Like I want LinkedIn to go there, but video, I think that would be a pretty cool feature. So what I did is I click here, you can click to it and it's about me, right? Here's my Vaco blog, right? You can go here and find out all the videos and the blogs and where I've been posted in the news, right? And then finally, there's something called Linktree. This is pretty cool. If you have a lot of things going on, here's all the things I have going on that you can find me if you wanna find me on other platforms.

So again, it's a way to redirect your audience to something else, right? And so, you know, if you wanted to have your, for me, GitHub, absolutely. If you're an NSS, maybe a capstone project or a code school, your capstone project or two, And then, you know, obviously those are the two most important things. Now, some people put the resume here, which is interesting tactic. You can if you want, I just never click on people's resumes here. I just go down here, right? And so, but again, it's not going to hurt you. So any questions on the featured side of things? Nope. Cool. then let's continue on to really kind of how to write a LinkedIn, right?

And so I've talked about this time where it's like, what do you include, you know, how do you write something, right? Do you dump your resume in? Do you, like what do you do? do. And so for me, my two cents is your LinkedIn is a summary of your resume. Now, if you listen to my podcast, unicorn finders, one of the first episodes, we talk about what to do when you're laid off and we kind of break down how to write a resume and how to write a LinkedIn. The two guys that do the podcast with they both said your LinkedIn should be your resume.

I disagree. Your resume is a long form piece of content that you're going to submit to a job. This LinkedIn is a way to entice people to talk to you. If it is very long and hard to read and just a bunch of word vomit, that person probably isn't going to connect you. And so what I would do is I would get your LinkedIn about three to four bullet points. And most of everybody on here is a developer. Even if you're not a developer, you can still look at my profile because I'm not a developer. And you can get an idea of what's going on.

So for me, if you were a developer, I would have three bullet points. One, tell me about the project you did, like you're talking to your family member. Let's be honest, we all talk to our family differently than we talk to people in our careers. That's just kind of how it works. We, like my mom still thinks I like fixed computers. It's like, mom, I find people to fix software in computers. And so you need to talk, you need to explain what you do in a super high level from that perspective. You know, like, you know, I work at Facebook and I develop the notification when you get somebody to click on your profile, like the dot on the globe, the red notification, I developed that, right?

Very layman's terms. Then what I would do is I would include one or two bullet points you did to help solve that, right? We leveraged React with hooks for the front end and we leveraged Node.js to write APIs on the backend on a NoSQL database using CouchDB. And then what I would do is a third bullet point is basically listing your entire tech stack from front to back. So your entire tech stack that you've touched. So we use Cypress for automated testing we use, you know, I came and I'm drawn a blank, you know, entity framework, right? So one of the guys I really like, his name is Justin Hoover.

I think Justin's a great dude. I love the way he has written his LinkedIn. So one thing he included was buzzwords. PHP, JavaScript, MySQL, leadership, mentoring, recruitment, training and development. So remember, if we're gonna go back to LinkedIn recruiter, We search on keywords, right? So as a recruiter, if I was going to try to find a candidate like Justin, I would probably look for something like leading leadership. You know, if I was looking, if I was looking for a team lead and a PHP shop, I'd probably look for lead, right? So lead would catch with leadership, right? So it would catch the lead part and it would catch the PHP.

So Justin's profile pop up into my search. Any questions here on that? Again, reverse engineering, getting really specific on how recruiters find you. Now, if you're not in tech, again, kind of like mine, right? I laid it out where it's like, hey, listen, I'll put out content on social media. I can get you a team of 12 recruiters, I speak at conferences. That's what I do. Right, you get a really specific idea. Now, what's cool about this? If you have a hard time writing a resume And I have a resume template. I think I've shared it with most of you, but I have not, please email me, TaylorD at Vaco.com.

I will share it with you. But this actually generates into a resume. So you can do, build a resume, new resume. There we go. It built a resume for you, which is kind of cool. If I, if I, like Taylor shoot, are you kidding me? I got to write a resume handling then. Are you kidding? I don't have that type of time. First off, Labor Day weekend, you're going to have that type of time. Second off, here's how you do it. And then you can edit it out, right? You can obviously, because the pictures won't transfer that well, but you can edit it out that way.

So, cover letter, make sure you have details of how people can find you. Picture, bright, colorful, great background, title, very, very specific. The about section, you know, again, it's three lines, right? So three lines within this needs to be specifically what you do, featured sections to draw people to you and other platforms. And then writing your resume, again, so I'm going to talk about this too. My brother and I got in this conversation about writing a resume. And I've gotten to some conversations over Twitter about this. And I'm not talking about falsifying your titles. I'm not talking about that. But what I'm talking about is writing your titles on your LinkedIn on your resume about what you do specifically and not necessarily your actual title.

So my brother, if you look at his resume, my brother has two, two and a half years of actual product experience. Now, I know him, obviously, when you uncover a little bit more about his background, he's actually been doing product development or product ownership for five years. But his actual title at his previous company was the count manager. And so for me, I'm like, listen, just change your title to product specialist, right? Product specialist to product owner to product manager, right? And again, titles, again, I tweeted this today, titles are kind of bullshit. I mean, they kind of are, right? I'm a managing director at Vaco, managing director at Vaco.

And so for me, I don't even know what that means. I don't even know what managing director means, but that's what I am. But I've changed it to the senior recruiter advocate role because honestly, I got that out of the dev community with these developer advocate roles because it's a little bit more what I do. I don't manage directors and I actually had a bunch of developers move away and not work with me because of that title. So, um, Bettina, how are you making yourself interesting for a recruiter when you're in the middle of a full career transition? Yes. So, I think, yeah, to the chop title conundrum.

Yeah. Because the past chop titles since you're in a career transition and tried to chomp trip will have nothing or little to do with your the new role that you're striving for. So that's so yes, write that down that alley. Yeah, it's I mean, it's, you know, for me. So can you give me, so what were you doing before? Um, health and safety administrator and transportation coordinator. Yeah, I mean, here's the, you can't spend a ton of ways, right? But for me, that's where you need to have the title, right? Aspiring.net developer, right? As or aspiring react developer, right? graduating from code school in May 2020 or October 20 because like I need to know as a recruiter all right well when it when is she like so if you put your graduating as like December 2020 like you're you're not going to get messaged so maybe I would just do aspiring you know aspiring dot net developer in your title and then just but there's ways to write your resume and there's ways to write your LinkedIn to what you are currently doing, right?

So let's, so a few things, and Bill, maybe you can chime in with this because you're kind of in a lead role. Like, I'm sure you want to know about problem solving. I'm sure you want to know how you work well with others, right? What are some other traits somebody can highlight, Bill, in their LinkedIn or their resume if they're not in tech? For me, I think communication and how do you handle problems? I mean, I mean, I've got a pretty good BS detector. So if I'm asking you a bunch of questions and you're gonna give me answers to every question I ask, I'm gonna think that you're BSing me because nobody has all the answers.

I'd rather have somebody say, well, I've never done that, but I'd like to learn more about it or whatever. But I think communication is a good thing because even internal IT communication is something that can always be improved on between users and even between your own peers. I think that's where a lot of problems always start is the communication aspect. I love that. I also think too, is get quantitative and also get, give me like a comparison, right? So like, so when I was serving tables at Outback Steakhouse, shout out, Outback Steakhouse, love that place. When I was serving tables there, it was an incredible night when you hit over $1,000 in sales.

Like that means you're really, really good. This is hitting $1,000 in sales. Now you would not know that as a normal human being, not working it out back. Now, so if I wrote in my resume, sold $1,000 or hit $1,000 in sales, you're like, great, that literally means nothing to me. But if I said hit $1,000 in sales, parentheses, average is three to $400 in the night and hit $1,000 in sales 15 times. What do you think sounds better? Right? And so for me, that's how you need to write your resume if you're not in tech. So that way if Bill's reading your resume and Bill's like, Oh crap.

But Tina's, Bettina was able to do something 15 X then it's normal than the usual bill. I'm probably certain you're probably going to be interested in probably speaking with others. Yeah, because Taylor, I've told you this before a lot of times, I mean, I see all kinds of resumes with all kinds of technologies on it. I don't really care about that because my feeling is if you know one technology, you can either learn another technology or whatever. I'm more interested in how do you fit into the culture of the company? How do you fit in with other people? Are you somebody that needs your hand held on everything?

Or are you a go-getter? Yeah. And exactly, I think, you know, if you can provide real life examples of what your interests are and what your accomplishments are, and, and as Taylor said, quantify it, because I'm, I'm, you know, if you're talking about food servers, I'm not going to have a freaking clue what you're talking about. Yeah, no, exactly. I mean, you know, you might, and you might say something like that. And as you're, as you're like Trump card, but if I don't know what you're talking about, or I don't have anything to relate it to, it's going to kind of fall, fall short. So, you know, I love that.

No, I mean, I think that makes perfect sense. But soon, does that answer your question at all? I mean, does that help? Okay. Awesome. It definitely helps a bit. I have at least now a direction. all to spin my recipe. That's all it is. It's spinning, right? And again, it's not lying. It's sales and it's spinning. It's not like. It's like, yeah. But again, right? It's being comparative because at the end of the day, like I don't know anything about the health administration side of things, right? So give me an example. Also, too, so I've been editing people's resumes. I put on Twitter every now and then that I'm open to receiving resumes.

And I've learned a ton from this because I'm literally adding resumes across the world, which is really cool. And we'll hit on Twitter briefly in this conversation. But with writing the resume, you need to let your resume brief. So I literally set the email to a guy today, because he's junior dev. And he's trying to cram everything on one page. But he's got a lot of good skills. Like, dude, just the font's like eight. Mike, dude, let your resume breathe. It's okay to go on to two pages, but make sure that you're putting the tech stuff at the top and not putting a lot of information in non-tech related stuff.

I had another guy who messes me from NSS. Ton of experience, he had dual columns. By the way, stuff at the dual columns. Like for me, I know there's different opinions on this. For me, dual columns, I'm not a fan. I think it distracts me from really what you do, but again, I know there's difference in opinions. The cool column style comes from academia. That's more, that's how the journal papers. Gotcha. Some big journals look that way. That's how it's done. Yeah, well that makes sense. That makes sense. So yeah, single column, like everything flush, you know, at least 11, 12 point font. And again, just give me three bullet points.

Like, like, don't stress about your resume. Like if it's a small project, you're going on three bullet points worth of work, just do three bullet points, it's okay. Same thing with writing a resume. So let's continue on with LinkedIn just because we're not quite done yet. So here's the big thing, recommendations. Please get recommendations. If you don't have recommendations yet, get recommendations. I look at them as a recruiter. I think most recruiters look at them as well. If I am evaluating a developer for a role, and I found two profiles for a role that look good, that two developers for one job, but one developer has 15 references, I must say you need 15 references.

Let's say one developer's got two references, the other person doesn't. Like who do you think I'm gonna probably reach out to first? It's the one with recommendations. So give the recommendations, even if it's non-technical, right? Like Bill and I were just talking about, but Bettina, ask for like, hey, Can you go over how my people skills are and like how well I work with others, right? And then now if you are like volunteering to develop like a payment site for a church and it's like three hours a week, like get somebody on staff there to be like, hey listen, like can you just write like, that I hit deadlines and you don't have any issues with me, right?

Like, you know, what I've learned from guys like Bill is like a lot of times they want to hire junior developers who are like very competent, great communicators and can take on things on their own, right? So even if you have a small time project, three hours a week, they can still write yes, actually never have any issues with Latino. She shows up, does her job and she does great. But recommendations are huge. If some people don't know how to ask for recommendation, here it is, ask for recommendation. Who do you want to ask? I'm gonna ask Patrick Steiger for a recommendation. And then it just, and then it notifies him.

I'm not actually asking him for a recommendation for good that. But, I know you're getting one all right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's up? Taylor, do you also look at recommendations given? Do you pay attention at all? I don't. I don't, but again, that's just me. That's just me. I got a quick question for myself. So like if somebody, you know, if two people look relatively the same and they both have a high number of recommendations, like say, what has 15 and one has 10. Like, does that really matter if they both have a decent number? I'm probably gonna call both at that point. Yeah, so again, I mean, it's, but I think the recommendations of what I want, what I wish LinkedIn would do, and I'm sure it's coming.

I think LinkedIn, like this is what I'm saying, I think LinkedIn, I'm gonna say this now, and I'm recording it, so when I'm historically correct, it's gonna be great. I think LinkedIn is gonna become like a square space, like an about me, like a Gatsby, like just like something, like basically a way to set up and to customize and you're gonna eventually probably be able to move these tiles. Like if it were me, I'd put my recommendations like up here. Right, but you can't move these tiles yet, but it's coming. So I would absolutely go ahead and start that. And I think LinkedIn's gonna get more customizable to where, I think this is gonna be the next website for sure.

Like a next, it's gonna be awesome. And I think over the next year, you're gonna really need to stay active on it. Final things, accomplishments, you can put it, I don't really look at these, I just put a few, and then interest, some people have said that if people are following certain interests that they align to. It could be a good starting point, but not for me, it's not a big deal. So I just said a lot in regards to that as a crash course on just making sure to get certain things on your LinkedIn profile. We're not quite done yet. I'm gonna hit on a few other things, were there any major questions at the moment?

But I would say we're probably not gonna go two hours, which is great for everybody in the vault, which is nice. So let's talk about how LinkedIn works, right, and a few hacks, right? So first off, I would be so I would create a YouTube channel if you're going to do a video. YouTube channel is really simple. I can do it. Anybody can do it. I think it's just through your Gmail. But for me, I would have two videos and videos are uncomfortable and they're very hard to do. But I would have two videos. I would have, hey, thanks for stopping by my page. Cheers a little about me.

I'm a junior developer graduating from the Nashville Software School, targeting.NET opportunities. Would love to work with you. Please let me know if you have any questions, slide into my DMs, I would love that. Something very simple. I would also, and I've been really big about this, and no one's done it yet. No one has done it yet. And I am waiting for the day to someone do it. Laura, I'm looking at you. No one has done a mock phone interview with themselves. Now, when I say that, I've talked about this a ton, but all initial phone interviews are, hey, Bill, tell me about yourself. What are your biggest accomplishments?

What are your biggest weaknesses? And of course, we always turn around and weaknesses to a positive, right? So it's like, for me, why not just put that on video? Selfie styled up, right? Look at the camera. Hey, listen, this is weird. This is as weird for you watching. This is for me recording it. I'm doing an interview. If you're interested, we'd love to hear from you. I'm actively looking for a job. So here's one of my strengths. I'm a great, I'm a punctual person, right? Things like that. Somebody just notified chat. Great idea. Thanks, Kristin. I appreciate that. So, yeah, for me, like that's, I would put that on the featured section.

I would also post on LinkedIn and here is why. So, I'm kind of going through here. All right, so Derek Williamson, I don't know Derek. I am not connected with Derek. Do you see right here the second? That means I'm connected through Derek to a friend. Eric Bouchard, Eric was on the drum line with me in high school. You know, I have not spoken. Eric, if you are randomly listening to this, hello, hope you're doing well. Eric, light Derek status. So surprise, I am seeing Derek status, right? So let's do another one. Here it is, Lori Butler. Look at that. Look at that. Not even planned.

Lori Butler, like Dan Price's post. I don't know Dan Price. See second profile or second connection. So Dan and I are connected through Lori or associated. Lori loved that his post so I'm seeing it. See a trend here? So for me, if I were you, if two things, if you want to be on the job search, I would spend an hour of your day, get a big old cup of coffee, sit down when the house is quiet, and go through and like and comment on every post that you find interested. That's all I would do. That's it, an hour, every day. I will tell you the amount of attention that is gonna be drawn to you is crazy.

So I'm gonna pull up, so another guy, his name is Danny Morris. I have a lot of Dan's in my life. Danny Morris, Danny Thompson, or Dan Thompson, Danny Thompson, it's just a lot. So Danny Morris, Danny and I played music together. So he and I were in a band, Danny, if you're listening to this, hello, Danny has obviously moved to New York now. He has two kids. He was a fantastic guitar player by the way, like could have made it Nashville, wish he moved with us, he did not. And so, doesn't surprise me, he got into the data science, by the way, he would build a Zodamps, very engineering mindset.

So Danny has started to be incredibly active on LinkedIn. So he's a part of my texting community. If you're not a part of that sign up. Danny had sent me a lot of text messages like, hey, how do I start increasing brands? What do I do? And Danny messes me up and goes, guess what? I said, what? He goes, I got an interview because of a post. I go, you're kidding me. He goes, no, the manager saw my post on LinkedIn randomly because somebody liked it and messaged me and said that they wanted a phone call with me. That's, it's crazy. It like gives me chills.

The fact that this platform can do something like that. And guess what? We're all at home. We're all scrolling miles on Instagram as it is. So just spend your entire time on LinkedIn. Danny also too, Danny posted something the other day and it went viral, like it went nuts. And he's been at this forever. So look at this, so Danny posts almost every single day. So it's this post right here, look at this. Here's a breakdown of how I spent my time on a recent and successful data science project. He broke it down. This is normal for me. And it's the reason I don't devote too much time to sharpening my statistics and ML skills.

I believe it takes so much more than that to be a successful in data science. Look at this, 140 likes and 22 comments with people like founder and CEO, AI platform manager, director, like you're having people with manager titles comment and engage with him. I mean, literally it's crazy. He just started doing this recently. all of his posts, 28 likes, 24 likes, six comments. And you need to comment with everybody. Every person you need to engage, every single person. Any questions from a posting perspective? If you have a blog, stop blogging. Start blogging on LinkedIn. Just start a post. That's all I need to do.

So it's incredible, which is gonna lead me to my next thing. So any questions here? I think I just probably showed the powerfulness of posting and liking people's information. So let's talk about Twitter real quick. So Twitter is the same way. Twitter is the only place, Twitter and LinkedIn are the only social media platforms now, aside from TikTok, but I'm not even getting into that, probably because it's not gonna be around much longer. But so Twitter is the only place where if you like something, I see it, right? So same thing here. So a lot of people are like, should I use Twitter? Do I need to have it?

What's, you don't have to have it. But I think it's an incredible networking tool. I think it's an incredible networking tool, especially within the development community. Because Twitter, you can curate and develop a following based off what you want to follow. Right, so I'm gonna put out this podcast and some videos. I had a call with dot net engineer. He wasn't national. He's now in Houston. His name's Scott Maisti. What up Scott? He and I talked about Twitter. Literally we talked 30 minutes on Twitter. Why do you need it? How do you use it? Right? And so for me, a few quick highlights. Again, cover picture, right?

Boom. Go to my website. Right? I would use emojis for whatever frickin' reason I follow more profiles that have that have emojis in their title than not. And I don't know what it is. I'm sure there's some psychological breakdown of it. But for me, I like it. It's fun. It looks like you're fun. So I follow you. That's all it is. So, but again, right, I put in this, this is a way to find me on another platform, right? always if there is a possibility to link in a profile link to something else, right? And again, another video, right? I would absolutely do an intro video about yourself, right?

Everything right now is very text heavy, right? Instagram is pictures and text. You know, Facebook for the most part is political articles and family pictures, right? So like, like that's Facebook, you know, LinkedIn is pretty heavy on written, right? My videos have done very well because people are getting a little tired of writing of all the written content. Twitter is all written for the most part, right? And so I think you need a video of yourself as an instruction of who you are and you can pin it, right? You can pin to the top of your Twitter profile. And then you can build out lists.

If you can actually go to my profile. You can follow, if you wanna merely follow a list of people, right? Twitter's come out with ways to follow communities. You can follow my most important tech people, which is about 70 people that I just kinda keep up with. You can follow that group. Scott Micely followed that group after we got off call with each other. And again, same thing here, right? So, love ads right here. I don't I don't follow Juan, right? I don't follow him But I follow Francesco and Francesco liked it. So now I'm seeing it same thing right Chris Marlar Chris Marlar is hilarious.

He is a sec football pundit and he is freaking hilarious. I Don't follow Paul as you can see I I don't follow Paul. Chris Marlar liked this and now I see Paul's post. The LinkedIn and Twitter are the only two platforms right now where you can get, you can literally start with nothing. I have seen developers, I'm telling you this, I have seen junior developers post something that they have found a job. They have a hundred followers and I've seen negative thousand likes. It is the craziest thing ever. I got in a conversation right for I had my newborn about dad advice or parenting device.

It blew up. It got 60,000 views and I was engaging with CEOs and CTOs across the world and people followed me in the tech community that like I would never be on the radar. And they followed me because my tweet came up because of kind of the whole like follow up a follow up a like of a like of a like. And so I have people I never would have thought have followed me, I follow me because of that tweet. Any questions? Yes. If I interject here, I actually got a job interview via Twitter. Yes, back in me up. I love that. I'll send you money later.

Thank you for saying that. No, but that was a data scientist that I'm following on Twitter. He was like, hey, I'm currently hiring senior data scientists. So of course I looked him up on LinkedIn, sent him a direct message and went like, Hey, I'm not senior yet. I love it. Yeah, go for the ask. I mean, literally Twitter. Go for the ask. The reason why I think LinkedIn is more powerful for networking is because when you send, like if I send Jonathan and invite on LinkedIn, Jonathan will for the most part accept my invite. And then both of us are connected then. But if I follow somebody on Twitter, they don't automatically follow me back.

And so that's why LinkedIn now, If Twitter was like LinkedIn, oh man, I think that, I mean, it basically almost is, but in the connections perspective, like I would just, I would go gangbusters. And I'm already going gangbusters on Twitter with following people because the only way people really follow you back is if you follow them, right? There's this whole like Twitter ratio where it's like how many followers, how many people following you. And I got in a conversation with my financial advisor who's big on branding and all this stuff. And he goes, the only thing that's keeping you from a big follower count and your following ratio is your ego.

And so I was like, ooh, that's good. So I just started following everybody. So that is Twitter at a high level. There are specific strategies I can dive into, but it is a little bit more of a volume play, right? Because Twitter, it's just scroll, right? I mean, it's just, it's refreshing. It's refreshing, it's refreshing. And so you have to tweet, I, I scheduled tweets every morning. I sit down with a cup of coffee. I've drank a lot of coffee since, since, since my kid came here. And I just tweet, I just come up with ideas. I, and I tweet every hour around the hour.

So I have eight or nine tweets a day. And honestly, I really need to do double that to be totally frank with you. And it's crazy after doing it for a year, like how much engagement I've gotten and how many people I've met. So, any questions on LinkedIn or Twitter because I think we're pretty good. Sweet. Well, y'all, thank you. That was a blast. I appreciate that. Thank you for showing up on a Friday afternoon for Labor Day. If you have any questions, email me, text me, whatever. But I appreciate this. I'm gonna do this again. It was a lot of fun. This was great.

Thank you very much for having us. Oh, it was great to see you, Taylor. Yeah, buddy, absolutely man. All right, well y'all enjoy your weekend. Get the long weekend started. Appreciate y'all. Thank you. Bye. Bye. I'm going. Bye.