Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep78: Getting hired with ZERO full-time experience.

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the Corporate Survivor Podcast, where we talk about how to grow your career confidence, build your skills and value, increase your salary, and the many lessons we learn in the corporate world. For more career support, click on over to www.mayping.com. This is Mayping, your corporate leader turned career coach. I hope you enjoy, like and subscribe. Hello and welcome back to another episode of my Grow Your Career online and offline podcast. So we are in the last week of my 30-day client success story series, where in this week, we'll actually deep dive into some client success stories for job search.

Starting point is 00:00:43 So today's story is a client who took a gap year, he took a career break after completing his degree and he took a one-year break and when he came back to look for a job, he really, really struggled. So this episode is for you if you are one of those people who have always wondered, should I take take a career break how can that actually impact my career and more importantly what can i do should i want to get back into the workforce right how can i really maximize my chances if i choose to take a career break and when i come back to um to consider a position in the corporate world, I am not shortchanged. I am still being valued, right, as that skilled expert professional that you are. So if you're any of those things, make sure that you listen on to today's episode. All right, so back to the story

Starting point is 00:01:38 of my client. So this is a client who is actually based in Canada. And for those of you from, I guess, more Western countries, taking a gap year after completing your university, college or degree is actually quite common. So for this particular client, he took a one year gap year and he went around traveling in Southeast Asia, which was a really enriching experience for him. However, when he returned to the, I guess, the business world, right, the corporate world, he really struggled to get a full-time job. So what he did during the interim was to take up a seven-month traineeship. So it's pretty much a long apprenticeship, but it didn't pay well, of course, right, Because it is not a full-time job.

Starting point is 00:02:26 And when he came to me, he was actually at the crossroads because the apprenticeship company offered him to prolong his contract, which sounds attractive, but didn't quite align with his long-term goal. Because again, right, it's not a full-time job and it didn't actually give him a lot of the employee benefits per se. So he came to me and asked me, what can he do without wasting more time in more apprenticeship, trainee program or internship programs? Is there something that he can do or what is he actually doing wrong that he's not actually getting full-time position? So for this particular client, I actually worked with him for three sessions. So the first session, we actually went around career clarity and identifying job search mistakes because he has been quite conflicted on whether

Starting point is 00:03:17 he should move on from his apprenticeship company because he had a really good relationship with the founder and they are somewhat personal friends as well so that was a little bit complicated for him to make his next move but at the same time he also shared with me a lot of strategies that he tried for job search for the past few months but seems like he's not getting results or he is constantly being ignored because he took a gap year, which was a little bit frustrating for sure. So when it came to me, quite a few frustrations also. So the first session, we really focus around a long career clarity and really what is his career plan?

Starting point is 00:03:59 What would make sense for him, right? Whether he wants to continue in this sort of like contract roles, which is a little bit more guaranteed, at least for the short term, but in the long term actually would affect his career, or he really wants to give it 100% in the job search to make sure that he actually lands a full-time job. So those were some of the things that we discussed in the first session. Then once he's very clear on what exactly he wants to commit to which for him is definitely the full-time job given that he is just really kick-starting his career right so in the next session we actually went through resume review so i think one of those things that

Starting point is 00:04:38 people don't always recognize is that um in most instances you always think that your resume looks really good right you always feel like your resume looks really good, right? You always feel like your resume sounds the fanciest is the best, but looking at it from a hiring manager's perspective, like how I would look at it, I saw that quite differently. So the biggest issue with this client's resume is that it's not that it's not well written. In fact, like language-wise, I mean, he had like really good English english so that wasn't the problem but it's just some of the the way that he he had wrote it i would say that it's not very suitable for the corporate world there were a lot of um what i call flowery language which it sounds fun when you write

Starting point is 00:05:17 it on you know online or you use it in an online blog or when you chit chat with your friends like those kind of language it's okay but in a formal resume where this document is going to be read by hiring managers hr recruiters those languages were um i'd say not professional enough so that was one of the core issues that he had in his resume obviously there were also other minor things um such as like helping him reposition his summary section because his career story needs to be very clear because otherwise, he had consistently been asked like why did he take the gap year and how come he couldn't land a full-time job. So, because we knew that these questions were consistently asked, so we had to address it very clearly in his career story, in the summary section, and even in the education section, the experience section.

Starting point is 00:06:08 We really had to position it a little bit better to focus on some of the key skills that he could bring to the table, including his technical skills, rather than getting people distracted on other stuff, which are not so favorable for him to improve his chances. So we really focus on the key points to really draw his career story up front, position his value up top and really pump all his technical skills and make sure that those are very, very clearly articulated. So that's that. Of course, we also worked on removing all the flowery language because it's just ineffective. So that was what we did in the second session. So when this client came back we did in the second session so

Starting point is 00:06:45 when this client came back to me on the third session we had another look at his resume and i think he really did a good job in terms of like removing all the fluff but so what i did for um for him in the third session was just helping him be more precise in some of the words that he could use particularly in the summary and experiences section. Then the third section, we actually spend most of our time for his LinkedIn profile and LinkedIn strategy. So I think sometimes people underestimate the power of a LinkedIn profile, particularly the banner, like the top part of the profile. Actually, the top part of your LinkedIn profile is really, really important, particularly the banner photo.

Starting point is 00:07:25 And I think people don't realize it, but it's really, really critical. So we went through in very detail on how he can reposition his LinkedIn profile, obviously utilizing a lot of information that were already cleaned up in his resume to begin with. So I also helped him fix some of the algorithm, some of the content to make sure that it actually helps

Starting point is 00:07:46 the algorithm to pinpoint him to jobs, and of course, also taught him the networking engagement strategies as well. So three very, I'd say, power-packed, intense sessions. So what I was actually really happy about for this client is that he eventually landed a role quite quickly after we worked on perfecting his resume as well as perfecting his LinkedIn profile. But what was actually really, really good about this client is that he managed to land a role that was actually looking for two to three years of experience. But remember, because he only did an apprenticeship technically, he only had about seven to eight months of trainee apprenticeship experience.

Starting point is 00:08:29 But because we actively pulled out his technical skills, his career story, his career summary was really very clear, coupled with his LinkedIn profile, eventually he managed to attract attention from recruiters who really understood his value. He received multiple interview calls and eventually he was offered a position that was initially posted for a two-year working experience minimum requirement so i was really really happy for him and he was also really excited about it and he also texted me that um uh the the linkedin strategy work he got multiple interviews and he was actually really excited that he could even negotiate and got a pretty good salary. So basically he was not given a

Starting point is 00:09:10 fresh graduate salary because they gave him a role that had minimum two to three years of experience. So he also shared his salary with me, pretty good pay to be honest, a lot more than what he had expected to begin with. So was really positive and in fact just i think about seven or eight months after that after that he was actually headhunted on linkedin again um because he had a strong profile and that was like the new company was actually a lot closer to the company that he actually wanted to join in terms of scope so he thought that it was a really good opportunity and he texted me telling me that um he has actually still been getting messages from recruiters even after joining that

Starting point is 00:09:51 first company and after consideration he decided to take the leap and join the second company and right now he's just directly joining as a senior analyst so basically remember in his story instead of like starting as a fresh graduate he basically skipped the system right he skipped the levels he directly joined as somebody with you know minimum of two years of experience and seven eight months after that he was again headhunted on linkedin utilizing my linkedin strategies linkedin engagement strategy and so forth he was again headhunted and now he is in this new company, basically doing a role that requires a minimum three years experience. So

Starting point is 00:10:29 yeah, he managed to bypass the steps because we managed to actually position his value very well in his resume as well as his LinkedIn profile. But I think what was very important is that in the first session, we really clarified what he's looking for and making sure that he's also very clear on what he wants to do. So that's why in his job search, in his value proposition, in his conversations with HR recruiters and so forth, he is very, very clear on what he's looking for. He is very clear on what he's good at.

Starting point is 00:11:01 And we really actively sold his career story together with all his technical skills. so this is the client success story i'm actually really proud of this client so this client was um one of again one of those clients who worked with me last year uh which was my first year um i guess as an official career coach so definitely really proud of him and i think he's one of those's one of those clients of mine who really managed to bypass the ladder and actually was immediately offered a position that is more senior than what he applied for. And of course, the salary was a lot better as well.

Starting point is 00:11:37 So that's it for this client success story. But as I said in the other episodes as well, you will notice that the foundation of a successful job search, the foundation of planning and growing your career from a new job or career transition standpoint, actually it is the same process. So even for this particular client, we actually went through the first four steps in my six-step get hired strategy and that is the first one, finding career clarity. The second one, positioning his value in a resume.

Starting point is 00:12:10 Third session, we went into his LinkedIn profile, helped him gain more visibility around that. And the fourth session really is about networking, engagement strategy, and effective job search strategies on LinkedIn that really goes beyond the time that we work together. And continuing to apply this strategy, he managed to get even better career opportunities many months after we have worked together. So again, I'm really excited for this client and I think he can really do

Starting point is 00:12:37 a lot more in the future. So with that, I hope that this client success story of mine really inspires you and empowers you that even though you took a career break, right, even though that, you know, you took a sabbatical and so forth, you can always bounce back and looking for and you know what is your value proposition and then you get it very very clearly articulated in your resume and linkedin profile so those are really the foundation and i teach my clients all the same thing and it has worked really well for them the only difference in a one-on-one session is that i can really pinpoint a little bit more specifically your situation compared to a group training and so forth so with that i hope you enjoyed this client success story and if you if you're inspired by it by it right i hope that you also you can share this episode with somebody else maybe a friend or yeah maybe a friend who is a struggling job seeker and maybe facing any of these problems so if you want to share your story directly with me you can always tag me at mayping on linkedin and if if you enjoy this episode and this entire series you can always like and subscribe to my podcast so with that i'll see you in the next episode bye

Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep78: Getting hired with ZERO full-time experience.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.