Embedded - 265: What’s Your Superpower

Episode Date: October 26, 2018

Anita Pagin gave us an insider’s view of being a recruiter. Anita recently started at Carbon3D and is recruiting for software and hardware. Anita also does career coaching on the side. Given the advice she gave us for free, imagine what she could tell you if you paid her. Finally, Elecia’s favorite list of resume keywords.

Hello, you are listening to Embedded. I am Iliasia White. My co-host is Christopher White. And if you're searching for a new job, we understand it's tough. So we wanted to talk to a real live Silicon Valley recruiter to get some advice from the other side of the table. Our guest is Anita Pagan. Hi, Anita. Thanks for joining us.

Thank you for having me. Could you tell us about yourself as though we just sat down together at a conference and it's lunchtime? Sure, sure. Well, I'm a generalist recruiter. As I like to say, I handle all the software, all of hardware. And when I say generalist is I don't focus on just one kind of engineer. Sometimes recruiters focus on just one specialty, like a UI engineer. So I handle all of the above from the UX down to the metal in the stack. So I'm a full service recruiter. So candidates would see me from the first initial

contact to the very end with offers and onboarding. And you have a sideline business. I do. I'm a career coach on the side. Okay. Well, we're going to ask about both roles, but first we're going to do lightning round where we ask you short questions and we want shortish answers. And if we're behaving ourselves, we won't ask for a lot of detail. Chris, you want to start? Sure. What's your favorite interview question? I guess that means either that you give or that you've heard. That's a tough one. I could tell you which one I don't like is tell me about yourself.

I like asking the question from every single one of my candidates. I'll explain, you know, hey, Joe, this is the toughest part of the role is X, Y, Z. Tell me when you've done this before. And I really could get in depth with that type of question, hear all about the project, what kind of skills were required, the tech stack, what were the potential challenges and results. And I just keep asking probing questions on top of it. And the enthusiasm in the answer. Yes, yes. That's always kind of telling.

Yes, yes. What is the most interesting animal that you have ever touched? These are hard questions. That's a hard one. I actually, I used to own some geckos. I had a leopard gecko and two fat-tailed geckos at one time. And the fat-tails were Lucy and Desi. And I had a Sebastian was my leopard gecko as well, King Louie.

And they're fun. They're fun. The most exotic one I've ever touched is a four-foot-long monitor lizard. Oh, my goodness. So I totally get that. Do you know any facts about lightning? No. That's all right.

Neither did our previous guest. Do you have a job or life tip that you think everyone should know? Everyone should know how to scramble some eggs. I agree with that. It's not the scrambling part that's the hard part. It's the cracking them and putting them in the thing. Yeah. Like when you're not feeling good and that person's like, what can I do to help?

What can I make you? Scramble me some eggs. Yeah. Like when you're not feeling good and that person's like, what can I do to help? What can I make you? Scramble me some eggs. Yeah. Everyone should know how to do that. Okay. Now you all know what you should be doing while you're listening to the podcast.

So going on to the more normal parts. I want to ask you just to head on about recruiters and reputation. Mm-hmm. Sometimes recruiters have a bad reputation. How did that come about?

That's a sticky one. I like to say recruiters are not created equal. And I like to compare it to realtors. There's just too many realtors in the market. It's just oversaturated. And not all of them are good. You go after the top 1% to 10% in terms of sales volume. Recruiters are similar in that about 90% are not doing their jobs adequately.

And they're kind of cannibalizing the market. I hate to use such a strong word, but that is actually the way I see it as a recruiter who I feel like is in that top 10% is that there are a lot of recruiters who are not putting together the effort to properly read a profile, understand what that person's doing, maybe perfecting their Boolean string,

and they're maybe just sending out mass emails. And they're just kind of throwing a dart and hoping it lands in the right spot. And that's not recruiting. There are several different kinds of recruiters, so you can't all put that reputation into each as recruiters as a whole. So that's the tough thing too. But unfortunately, that is the vibe that recruiters get. It's equally hard for us because we're already going after candidates who have a perception of what recruiters do. Ill as it might be, they've come away with lack of trust because they've been working with recruiters that may not have suited their wheelhouse.

Or maybe they've been working with a recruiter who's new to the market and just learning how to build their wings. And there are in-house recruiters that work for a company and what I was calling freelance recruiters, but I think that's the wrong term. So there's a number of different kinds of recruiters. I'll start with in-house. In-house is like what I am. I'm a full-time recruiter for an organization, but in-house recruiters could be a contract recruiter or full-time. A contract recruiter is going to be paid by the hour and a full-time recruiter is salary. So they're not motivated to make X amount of hires. They're motivated to make the right hires and to work operationally with their business partners for the business. So their performance is reviewed from a different scope than an agency recruiter.

An agency recruiter is commission only. If they have a salary, it's really a draw against their commission. And again, like a realtor, they are maybe having really awesome months and then some lower months. And so it's kind of feast or famine. So they have to hustle to get their recruits. And probably the biggest challenge in our reputation is that candidates don't understand we don't work for them. We work for our hiring manager. And I think that's probably the biggest thing is that candidates are like, how come they're not responding like lickety split. Well, because we have 12 other hiring managers that we're also working with, or 15 other hiring managers, and all these different roles,

and maybe something's moving. There's a lot of moving parts. But things just shift so much, and we're not paid by the candidate, whether you're on the agency side or on the in-house side. Now, there is something called like a freelance recruiter, but they're more so that type of recruiters maybe working from home. They have maybe two or three select clients that they kind of fill the gaps in between and they're just working for themselves. An agency recruiter might work for an actual search firm. You might know them as an executive search firm or some of the well-known agencies out there. And they could be like Manpower, CyberCoders, Top Tech, just to name a few. And it's the agency recruiters that end up being paid a percent of your hiring salary.

Yes and no. Again, it's like a realtor. They only get a very small portion of that. So the rest of it goes to the house and they have to share it with the account manager. So the most savvy recruiters out there are the ones that really own a full desk, meaning that they bring in the customer and they recruit the candidate. That way they can actually get half of that allotment of that commission, and then the other half goes to the house. So you're saying our evil scheme that we came up with

once upon a time isn't going to work. Where we just hire each other to various companies. Yeah, six months, I hire you as a recruiter, and then we switch, and then we just collect each other's salaries for that time. Yeah. Yeah, you know, from a hiring manager perspective, it's really costly.

And even as an in-house recruiter, it's mind-blowing how much we spend for these recruiters to get these hires. It's really expensive. But on the flip side, and I started my career on the agency side, it's pennies. You're living off of nothing, essentially. You're having to make maybe 10 hires just to break even against your draw. So the ones that are kind of making a lot of mistakes in the markets because they're

working really hard, they're hustling for this job that may be open this day, but the next day it's filled because their own recruiter is also working the same job. That's a much different impression than I had. So that's very interesting. Yeah. It's very tough. And I do feel that people need to start their career on the agency level because it really teaches you that you can't run around in circles and taking shortcuts. But on the other hand, those agency recruiters that could do this for 10, 15 plus years, those recruiters are making bucks. They are making probably like a million dollars. I know some. They don't even have to pick up the phone. Their phone rings for them.

Their following has grown so much just because they've put the time and effort in that first couple of years. But for a good recruiter, it takes a couple years on the agency side to build it up and to build that desk. Sure, because you're going to build both sides of the desk. You're going to build the people who hire the people you know, and you're going to build your network of people who are hireable. And every few years, you'll just check in with them. And since it worked out last time, of course, they'll work with you this time. Exactly.

And if you're doing your job well, and I really stress this, the best recruiters are not talking to you for today's job, but maybe one that's open in six months or a year or even two years from now. I've really have always had that mentality because I've had hires where I literally will say, oh, I talked to this type of person three months ago. Let me share with you, Mr. Hiring Manager, their resume. They're ready to go. I already know what they need in terms of salary. And the hiring manager will look at the resume and say, oh my gosh, bring them in. And I, boom, done, do that, and I made my hire. But that's

only because it took the time three months ago, six months ago, a year ago to actually do that when I didn't have that role open. So how do you actually find people? You mentioned search. Do you also go to meetups? Absolutely. I personally love meetups. I love hosting them, and I love doing all kinds of creative avenues. To be honest, most recruiters don't have time to do a lot of those. I also participate in a lot of professional forums, different associations. I follow like the Women Who Code or some of the type of meetups that have the larger populations or followings.

And so it's really also a lot of referring. People say, oh, have you heard of this meetup or that meetup? And have you followed them? So a lot of times it's just literally keeping up to date. Maybe I haven't gone to a particular meetup in several months, but I'm touching base with the board. Usually the board doesn't move around that often. And if they do, they say, oh, I'm no longer in that capacity, Anita, let me introduce you to the new one. That happens a lot. But there's not as much turnover on the board side. On the board of the meetups?

Yeah, there's usually like a board of like four or five people who typically run the meetups and run the membership, things like that. Cool. So as an internal recruiter for a company you work for, I don't get to choose that as an engineer coming to you. It's kind of whoever my resume lands on their desk? Not necessarily. As a process, when a requisition opens, that head of talent or head of HR is going to sign that rec

based on whichever recruiter has the bandwidth to take that on. Or even as maybe a hiring manager asked for that particular recruiter. In my experience, a lot of times I was personally asked or requested by a hiring manager. And so, yes, I made the time to handle the rec, but didn't necessarily mean that I had a lot of room on my desk to add to it. So the leader will kind of look at whose specialty is what, who's the hiring manager, is our recruiter has a special bond or partnership with that person,

what is their typical workload like right now, are they close to some offers that they're going to have room on their desk very soon, so forth. So if your resume comes through, let's pretend it comes through LinkedIn or a referral, and it lands in my lap, but I'm not the assigned recruiter, then I just make an introduction or forward it on to that recruiter. So we work hand in hand like that. We just basically know who's working what, and we share the resumes. The end of the day, as an internal recruiter, you're a team. It should be on the agency side, too. And the agencies that I've worked with, we were always good about saying, oh, hey, you're working on this one.

I'm going to share a resume that came through. Or, hey, I have a candidate that's eligible for this customer. Yours is probably also eligible. Let's cross-sell it. And that might happen too. What do you mean by cross-sell? So it might work that you have a candidate who comes to your desk, but they're maybe eligible for more than one role on the agency side.

And that's actually, if I can give a quick plug for the agencies, why you should work for an agency recruiter. As a candidate, why would you consider an agency recruiter? Is that they could actually, maybe you're not just eligible for one job for ABC company, but maybe also XYZ company and LMNOP company. So all of a sudden, maybe you're not just going to interview at one company, but maybe three to five. And you're going to have to do less work on your end. You just interview. That was one of the issues with the agency recruiters is they would just slam me with a hundred job recs and ask me which ones I was interested in. And I'm like, I'm not qualified nor interested in 90% of these.

We talked about this. My skills are pretty niche. Yeah. If they're sending you that many, then there's a problem. They're not reading your profile. They're not reading your resume. They're not listening to what you've already talked about.

So that's a great example of a recruiter who's at 90% that's oversaturating the market. They're kind of throwing a dart to the wall just because they're thinking, okay, if I could get my candidate at one of these customers, I'm going to make her a hire or him a hire. And then they have guarantee. Yeah, I get both sides of it from both arguments. But what they need to be doing is listening. They need to be looking at your qualifications and really being realistic. Yep. You mentioned a moment ago, if my resume lands on your desk and you are not the recruiter for that open requisition,

you might pass it off. What if you are the recruiter? What is the process? Yeah. So I'll look at the resume. We always recommend that it's an email form so we could parse into our applicant tracking system or if we get through LinkedIn or get through some kind of medium that we could attach it. So just like a paper copy. It's so old school. That used to be like you go to a career fair, you drop off 50 copies of your paper, of your resume. And that's just really hard to parse into the applicant tracking system. I can scan it, but it takes so much more steps that's involved. We're in such a high-tech society here, and time is of the essence. So we will parse into our applicant tracking system.

Typically, we'll put a note as to how we know the candidate or how did we source them, what avenue, what not. Did we kind of come across that candidate or were they referred by somebody? Then we kind of just review that resume. I always like to say we have a 30-second attention span. Just imagine how many resumes we look at in a day. I've never counted it, but it's obscene. It's a great number a day. And I'm not complaining because I always like more resumes than not. But it's an art form where we skim through it, look for what we need to have.

And then if it catches my attention, I'll take a little bit more time and really read the bullets and kind of what they're doing. And if I say, gosh, I want to have a conversation with this candidate, then that's when I will reach out or pick up the phone and do so.

If I feel like it's an obvious not fit, I turn them down, give them a rejection email. So if you're that candidate who's getting that rejection email, you're wondering, why was I not suitable? That's typically it, that your resume just did not cover that 30-second skim. Maybe it's already that we filled that position, so it could be that reason too. But typically, the not, it's that 30-second skim. Do you look at the cover letters at all? Cover letters are so yesterday. Only reason I think a cover letter is suitable is if you're going for a finance and accounting position.

And even still, I rolled my eyes because my VP of finance at Meta, my old company, will chuckle at this. She asked for a cover letter. And when I worked on an accounting position for her, I got only one candidate with a cover letter. And I said, well, why don't you just allow me to do this? Let me preload like three questions on the application. That way we can actually test their communication style, but also get a little bit more information. She was really agreeable to that. But that's the thing too, is a lot of candidates don't even answer those questions,

even if they're required. And guess what? Then you're going to get the rejection email because that's there for a purpose. You are being tested. You are being tested on your communication style plus the content. Even if it's a silly question like, who's your superhero? We want to see kind of some personality. Or, you know, like I think one of the questions I had asked was, what's your superpower? You know, I want to know. That's something kind of cool.

And I want to share that, you know, with the hiring manager. But I also want to keep it light from finance and accounting. Okay, so as an engineer, my resume is landed on your desk. It's the right one, and you like it. And so you call me, you email, do schedule. Typically I email first, just because most people don't even answer their phones anymore. Not in an unrecognized number, no. Right.

Even voicemails. Unless I have a conversation with them already, then I want to text them. Then I will actually text them, then I will actually text them and say, hey, trying to get in touch with you, then that works. But email seems to be the best practice. I think people appreciate that kind of softer approach. And so you set up a phone screen. And this really is a phone screen.

If people bomb it. Oh, yeah. I hold the power if you move forward or not. So I might do 15, 20 or more phone screens. And then I'm going to sit down with my hiring manager and do a resume review session. And I'm going to recommend only five to seven. How many resumes did we start with? Hundreds, maybe thousands.

And so at each step, they get winnowed down. Yes. And let me just make a point here. Only the good recruiters in that top one to 5% are not going to be in mailing thousands of candidates. If they really read your profile and they really take a look at what is there, then we're only going to send it to maybe a couple hundred or a few hundred. Usually I start with 20, 30,000 in my batch and I keep cleaning it up, cleaning it up, cleaning it up until I get to about 200. Then I nurtured those 200, send them an email, then try to find their email or phone number through web scrapers. I try to find them in other avenues, maybe professional forums, until they start to respond. Okay. So now we're doing a phone screen. I mean, it's hard because I am really good at my job and my job is very

odd and it's not always easy to understand. So when I talk to recruiters who don't have a lot of time to understand the different jobs that they're working on, it's hard for me to really express why things are good or bad. I mean, I talked to a recruiter last week for a big company, and in the emails, I thought we were on the same page. And when we talked live, it turned out he wanted me to do phone software for mobile and Android. And I'm not, no, my skills are different. That's a perfectly fine job. I just, my skills are weird. And if I'm not touching hardware, it's no fun.

And he was very nice about it. But it wasn't, if I had gotten the job rec instead of a general thing that he sent me, or if he had read my resume more thoroughly, it wouldn't have happened. So how do I help the recruiters understand where I am? And what kind of questions do you ask to make sure that I am a good fit for the job? Yeah, so there's a lot of reasons why that could happen. One is that they just did not take the time and effort to properly read your resume, properly look and screen from your guys' conversations and match it. Or maybe that role was actually then filled and he or she are trying to put you into another role that was lacking the

hardware. This was half my fault. I applied for a job. Gotcha. And I read into it what I wanted it to say. I got you. Okay. And that happens a lot and that's not a bad thing. And I could talk about that later. But the other thing is, it's partly on the responsibility of the candidate to talk about their technical breadth in a non-technical way that's understood. It's also important for the recruiter to ask questions to understand better. We're not programmers. We're not engineers to be able to fully understand it. Some actually used to be, but even still, it doesn't completely correlate. Then there's all these technologies that do different things. So it's a very complex way. I like to ask questions like first and

foremost to an engineer, like what part of the stack do you identify with? So if they are claiming full stack, does that mean that I assume UI to the infrastructure? Probably not. Maybe they're probably just application to the platform. You know, or maybe they're full stack but doing web development. You know, they're just going down to like Node and JavaScript. That's totally different. And I then interpret it very, very differently. But then I like to go into some questions as to the languages that they're choosing to use and for what purpose. For instance, for embedded engineers,

a lot of them you see, and actually a lot of what I recruited for requires C++. It was found to be a little bit more efficient in some of the complexities of the product that we were working on. We were also working with Qt. And so those are things that a lot of people don't necessarily touch as an embedded engineer. So I might ask questions that pertain to why did they choose C over C++? Or if they're working with C++, is it C++ 99 or 11 and 14? What features in 11 and 14 are they dabbling in?

If they could ramble on like five to seven, I'm saying, okay, they're fine. They're good. But if they're not really answering that question, they're fine. They're good. But they're not really answering that question. They're kind of pausing, trying to remember. Google it. Yeah. And I know that they really don't know the answer. So, you know, so the other thing is recruiters know a little bit more than they're really allowing to give. We're trying to act like we don't know some of the answers just because we are trying to get them to give us what they're doing. And it's a delicate balance because sometimes engineers are also working on things that are confidential. We don't want them to give up confidential

information. We just want to understand what are they doing and why. For instance, if it's a UI engineer, I might actually pull up their website and the company website and say, so tell me about this website. What was your role in that website? Why did you choose Angular versus React? What was your type of your team and what was your role? Are you doing some of the QA and bugging yourself or do you actually have a dedicated QA on your team? That gives me a very different scope of that engineer. And so I really try to go into the weeds from a high level, then the hiring manager can go even deeper and talk about that technical scope. That makes sense. I mean, as you're going from 15 to five. Yeah, exactly. your goal is basically to weed out. manufacturing. I really want to hear the full process, you know? And so it may sound like they're going on this monologue for two minutes, but I want to hear what is that monologue and

what are they adding and what are they not choosing to share? Because at a first level, you're kind of asking, have you ever done anything? Ding, ding, ding. And at what point? Was it shipped? Was it a shipped product or not shipped? Was it always an R&D? Because especially I have a lot of hiring managers that are looking for a lot of academia. Well, a lot of code, especially in the academic side is different from production. It's polite it's a different style. And now you're shipping a product. So those features are going to be very, very different. So when you're putting out a product that's going to be touched by thousands, millions of consumers, it makes a huge difference. So that prototyping, that whole idea of start to finish, that they've touched entire cycle, is what I'm trying to get at. Going on. So the recruiter, you have gotten my resume. We've talked on the phone.

You've passed it along to the hiring manager. Your role is not over there. A lot of people think that is the end of your role because recruiter means you recruited, now you're done, but you continue on. Yeah. So we're an agency recruiter. They really don't have that control from then on because they're offsite. An internal recruiter is onsite and they're working with the business. And so they're having constant conversations with that hiring manager and the team, and they're constantly navigating things. They're not just navigating that particular resume,

but diversity issues, culture issues, all kinds of things operationally that comes into play. Maybe the architecture changed. Now we are going to change a little bit of the scope of the resume, or I'm sorry, the job description. So that changes things dramatically that the agency recruiter just doesn't have that ability to do so. But yes, I like to think that the recruiter is an ambassador to the process. And so for the candidate's sake, it's really in their best interest to be so respectful and be responsive, really be available and allow us to do our role. Sometimes the worst thing you can do as a candidate is go around the recruiter, try to go to the hiring manager or the CTO. But if the recruiter has a good relationship, a good partnership with those hiring managers or leaders, they're just going to bounce it right back to you as a recruiter.

So it's really important that you go through the recruiter because they own the process. I'll give you an example. I actually had one of my hires who was the director of software. He was actually referred by our CEO, and he was brought on a couple times before he was actually introduced to me. If I was able to start the process from the beginning, I would have had a much more solid, very fluid candidate experience for him. And it would have been a lot easier and faster to get him on board than what we actually did because I wasn't brought in from the get-go.

And so solid and more fluid, like he would know where he was supposed to show up to interview and he would know what the interview was going to be like and how long it was going to be, that sort of thing or something else? A little bit of that, yeah. We're able to kind of navigate the process, be able to make sure that we have other candidates for that role. Also in consideration, we have to consider equality. So we can't just open a role for one particular person. We need to do things the right way.

Also, we want to make sure that that agenda is tight. We had to keep asking that person to come back because we didn't put one or two people on the agenda. And then we found some things out of their resume because no one read it first and foremost, where I would have. I would have vetted it. Then we didn't include a couple people in that process just strictly because we didn't realize he had a certain skill set. So again, if they had started with the recruiter, we would have had the correct panel in front of him and didn't have to bring him back multiple occasions. And then after that, usually in my world, it's the hiring manager who ends up giving you the

offer and talking to you, negotiating that part. Actually, I disagree. Recruiters should be the point person. In most cases, they're not. The recruiter actually looks at the budget. They look at the levels. They're able to actually coach the hiring manager, say, we need to re-level this individual. They're not three years of experience. They're 15. So we need to look at a principal level as opposed to just a software or a regular level engineer. We could coach through all that. The hiring manager doesn't necessarily have the budget to be able to go and look at the salary surveys. They just have the allocated number. But when we choose to open up a requisition, we might choose to put, say, a level three or four on the budget, and that's the allocated range. But let's say we bring on someone who's level six. Well, that level and that compensation is not going to match what we originally budgeted. So again, the recruiter needs to navigate that process with finance and HR to correct that,

where the hiring manager needs to rely on that person. Now, once the recruiter does all that, and especially if it's a competitive market for that particular role, then the recruiter may say to the hiring manager, hey, why don't you go ahead and roll this out in a verbal, and I'll follow up with an offer in paperwork and email it. I've done both, but at the end of the day, the metrics are mine, if that makes any sense. It's my closure rate, and I have the relationship with the candidate. And so I would rather roll out the offer because that's my closing rate. On the other hand, I could argue I want that candidate to start fostering a relationship with the hiring manager, and that's the opportunity to do so. So I think it's a number of ways, and I think it depends on the corporate culture. The culture I'm walking into actually

does that for their software hires, but nowhere else in the other departments. And I think that's totally fine. That is actually the perfect area for that organization to actually streamline it for that way. My days as a hiring manager, how much it would have been nice for me to not have to do all of this wandering around HR, trying to figure out budgets, trying to figure out salary ranges. I never had a recruiter to work with. many people a month, as opposed to me who ends up hiring one or maybe two people a year, you're wired into the company process much better than the manager is. Absolutely. Absolutely. And we could even help make the onboarding very fluid, make sure that they're joining with other people. There's so many variables in play. And the hiring manager may not be as quick as

a recruiter to solidify those things and time is going to kill the offer you know so um hiring manager is not their goal is not to hire their goal is to get things done right so to have a savvy recruiter be responsible for all that is imperative where that's again what the agency recruiter is not going to have on site so their hands are tied they're going to wait for that recruiter hire me i'm sure to give them a call or email saying we are so excited we want to hire you know jane and we're able to offer this much and they'll know if that that fits Jane's compensation requests or not. And they can maybe go back and forth, but then that kills another couple of days. Going back to the 30 seconds on a resume, is it best to have keywords at the top? Should I have

an objective? Should I just slam out every place I've ever been? What are some good resume strategies to get past that 30 seconds? Well, the first and foremost is having a portfolio. And I know that sounds very strange. I've said that to a lot of engineers, and they don't necessarily get what I'm trying to say, especially if you're software. Even for software, I think a portfolio is actually a keen idea because a lot of things visually makes a lot more sense. If you're able to have a picture of what you're working on and then like a paragraph as to what it was all about in the tech stack,

then it goes much further than what's just written. If you're on the hardware side, especially on the embedded, you can actually kind of have more of a portfolio, especially an ID or an MEE engineer would suit very well to have a portfolio. If I had a portfolio of products I've shipped in the last five years, my resume would be way more than four pages. Yeah, that's why the portfolio kind of slims that down. So what I would do for a resume...

Slims it down? So let me point out, so I would do a resume, quick format. The ones that are blocky with just text strip is not going to work. Bullet points are easier on the eyes. It's just going to hurt my eyeballs. If I want to read, I'm going to pick up a book. I don't want to read the resume. I want to skim it.

And so having skills in bold and languages in bold and then a list. I actually don't like bold. Bold tells me that you hired one of those recruiters who makes like the dime of a dozen. Let me pull up my resume. I'd rather see like technologies listed and have a way, like a scale, maybe you could do in a graphic format where say it's a scale one to 10 and, or even years of how many years or skill level that, that technology has been used.

So if I see C++ and you've been working in it for 10 years, that's valuable to me. Okay. Yeah, I'm going to have to pull up my resume. I have lots of bold here. How about strikethrough? An objective is only important if there's something there that matters, like you're relocating or you're looking to take a step up into leadership, things like that. Something that matters, then an objective is good. But really, it should be the most boring portrait of your life, which is very, very hard to write because it's personal. So, what other advice do you have for resume writers?

It just needs to pop. And it needs to be, just again, imagine my desk. How long can it be? I actually don't care about length. Okay. Especially if you have a PhD, you've earned it. If you have a master's, honestly, I don't care because I just want to see what's been there. I'm going to read from the bottom up. I'm going to look at education first.

You're going to read from the bottom up. I'm going to look at education first. You're going to read from the bottom up? I'm going to look at the education first and then I'm going to skip a few jobs unless it's a recent person, maybe five to seven years in their work, then I'll read that. But if someone's been in their work for 20 or more years, I'm going to skip a few jobs. To be

honest, if it's not within the last 10, 15 years, I think you should just cut it out. You should just list the companies on the title and leave it at that. Because we can assume a lot by just the title and the company, right? Or maybe put more emphasis on the most recent jobs. What I love, and yes, I'm going to nerd out here. I'm just a little OCD, but I call it the rule of odds. I don't want to see two or four bullets. I want to see three or five. I don't want to see 15. I don't want to see 11. I want

to see three or five. Not seven? No. Okay. Christopher really literally has his resume up. I really didn't learn that about that. My poor client is my career coach. Three or five. Three or five. Okay. After the... So going back

to the end of the job hunt, how about negotiations? Do you have to deal with that or is that the hiring manager? Yeah, no, that should be with the recruiter. And money is a sticky and awkward subject. So again, this is another reason why I think the recruiter should be handling the offer because you don't really want to be kind of trying to have that awkward dance with this

new employer that you're having, that leader that you're going to be reporting to. You want to start in the most comfortable light. I'm going to actually mention something that I think is a little bit of an elephant in the room, if I could. A lot of people are very sensitive about sharing compensation. And I'll tell you, first thing first, just tell the darn recruiter what you're expecting. Again, they're your ambassador to it all, the process, the budget, everything. If they really want you,

they will find a way to make it work. And I really do mean this. If you made 150 at your last job, mention that. Say, I'm making 150 in my last job. I'd like to see a small increase. If I could get to 160, that'd be awesome. I'd love you forever if you can get me 170. The very lowest I will accept is 155. That's great. I have something then to go to my CFO to make a case. Then I'm going to ask them to say, if I can get you to 160, can I get you to sign then

like two days by Friday or by Tuesday? I could go to my CFO and say, my candidate will sign at this amount. Can I please get this approved? It's really hard for us to go for bat when the salary survey sometimes tells us something different than what the market's yielding. And so we need as much data as possible, including any offers. So if you're up against other offers, share it with the recruiter. It's only more data. Yeah, it's not likely to hurt you.

No. Although salary chicken is a thing. It's a little hard sometimes because I don't know always how much salary I want. It depends on the stress of the work environment and how much I believe your stock options are worth and whether you will give me four weeks of vacation a year or two. And so there's all these other variables, although many of those can be negotiated as well. Sometimes vacation is becoming one of those non-negotiable items that used to be, but not anymore I'm finding, which is a bummer. A lot of the companies that are actually doing the unlimited PTO, it's because they no longer want to negotiate that.

And it's because of an equitable... Because they've figured out we don't take PTO if you give us unlimited. And they don't want to pay it out. That's exactly it. Exactly. So it's a sticky situation. So here's the thing with if you're going to ask for more equity, then expect your salary to go down. If you're going to ask for more on the base, expect your equity to go down.

It's this fine balance. So I like to ask as a recruiter to the candidate, where do people teeter? Because sometimes people really want the equity. Sometimes they really want the base. I like to suggest if you're working for a public company to go for the base because you're going to get replenished periodically. And options. And DSPP usually, which is not a thing that you negotiate at all. You just put money in. Exactly. Now, for a startup, I hate to call it this, but it's fun money.

It's kind of monopoly money. Monopoly money. That's what we call it. Yeah. Yeah. Because it's not a value until you IPO. However, I do believe in sweat equity. It's kind of like when you're renovating your home, you have a lot more further pride when

you own a piece of the pie. And you want to see your work come to fruition. So that's really, I think, important to have a piece of that. And when you're in a startup environment, you kind of have to take the acceptance of, I'm not going to earn the same amount as Google. We're not going to have a bonus structure. You're not going to have a 401k match. There's going to be a lot of things missing from the overall compensation that you would get for a public company. But you might win the lottery. You might, but also I'll tell you what else.

A lot of startups these days are just fun engineering and the impact is great. And you can see your work every day. Absolutely. And I'm see your work every day. Absolutely. And I'm one that loves startups. I've been in startups my entire career and recently came out of a career search. I did interview with the big box companies. And I did choose a startup over a big box when it came push to shove to sign an offer. And I'm really

happy with my decision because at the end of the day, some things really count. People, the technology, your impact, your imprint, the smile on your face of that satisfaction. It goes just so far to say, yes, I'm part of this. If you're part of that big organization, you're just kind of siloed. You're kind of stuck to this job description and you're not really allowed to kind of go over and above until you go into the next role. Let me, let me go back to the seven bullet points for just a second. Cause I just realized why I had seven bullet points. There's a lot of us who've been doing contracting for a number of years.

It's always been tricky for me how to put that on the resume because I might have had a dozen clients over a few years. It's much easier to say, Oh, I worked at Cisco systems and I was a principal engineer and I did this and this versus I worked for these 12 clients and I made toys and rockets and medical devices and consumer products. And so how as a contractor

should we be putting that experience on a resume? First of all, portfolio would be awesome because those visuals just really go far. But second is adding a summary of some of your products early on your resume before your actual work experience and putting some of that content out of those bullets and into the summary. Maybe have a product summary. And one bullet is consumer products and you list all the different kinds of products you shipped. Another is, I don't know, widgets or networking, whatever it is, routers. You could do all that kind of stuff in that summary and just go to town.

I see the same thing with leadership. If you're trying to transition to a leadership role, put that into a leadership summary, something to emphasize it. Especially someone who's been good in contracting, they have loads and loads of products to their name, their imprint. And it's really, really hard to emphasize that on a resume and it can get lost in a shuffle. And sometimes it just comes out as a little bit unrealistic, but it's completely legit. I was talking to one of my principal MEs from my last company the other day and he was like, Anita, when I counted all the products I've shipped, it got to 230, and then I just got to a

point like, stop counting. But he's been, as a consultant, he's worked for himself. He's done a number of different organizations that he really does legitimately have that many products to his name on his resume. He needs to put in a portfolio. And that's exactly what he did. Now I'm going to have to stop looking for other people's resumes to copy and start looking for other people's portfolios to copy. How do I get a recruiter to like me? Are there better ways? I mean, you've mentioned being responsive and having a resume that in 30 seconds, you can decide whether or and having a resume that in 30 seconds, you can decide whether or not you want to spend another 30 seconds.

Sure. There's so many ways to answer that question, but I'll tell you the one way- Is it brownies? Not necessarily, but that sure doesn't hurt. I'll tell you the one way not to is being disrespected. As a recruiter, we get this all day long. And it's really shameful. We take it very personally. This is our passion, our profession.

And sometimes they're not even taking the time to acknowledge or whatnot. So that's the first and foremost is being respectful, being responsive so we don't have to hunt you down. Because, you know, if we can't hunt you down, guess what? To the next one. There's plenty of fish in the sea. We don't have time for that. But the best thing is just to really give us as much ammunition to be able to work with you, to be able to know and understand where your value is. I want to basically know where your value is to this position that I'm filling. And then we want to test you to that and the interview process when I do my debrief with the team I want to basically be able to quickly go to hire, no hire

culture fit or culture add where is their value to their team and where can we coach them plain and simple and if they could rattle off great but if I don't have enough of that clear cut answer from the point of the phone interview, then I'm not going to have enough to represent you to the hiring manager.

And then you won't make the cut for the five to seven that I share. so stop viewing recruiters as barriers and start recruit start viewing them as people you need on your side absolutely like the biggest thing i still am scratching my head about is people don't research the company or or the industry you know take the recruiter interview as a phone interview you know we're not going to ask you to do code, but treat us like, like, I want to know why you want to work for us. I really do. Yeah, it's good to be able to spell the company name right. Right. I want a job is not the answer.

Any job. Yeah. I want to pay the bills. Because I want you to also love it. You know, I don't want you to be talking to me just because you need a job. I want you pay the bills. Because I want you to also love it. I don't want you to be talking to me just because you need a job. I want you to love it. Well, that's hard because a lot of engineers are skeptical of people who like things. Yeah.

Well, let me tell you this. The first question I want to ask myself when I'm getting done with a candidate and I'm writing down the notes, first thing I want to know is, did I love that candidate? Did I love talking to them? What I want to do is hear them talk about what they've been doing and feel really engaged. And like, I understand in layman's terms

what they were talking about, but that I'm excited too. And I can't wait to tell my hiring manager all about it. So I want to walk away saying, I loved that candidate. And then second, I want to also be able to tell my hiring manager all about it. So I want to walk away saying, I loved that candidate. And then second, I want to also be able to tell my hiring manager, this candidate's going to love working here. And so if I can't really do that,

then they're not going to be in that top five to seven. That was a key thing you just said there, which is be able to describe what you do in layman's terms. Ding, ding, ding, ding. A lot of people can't do that, especially for more esoteric things. But even for pieces of consumer products, you can have people talking about, well, I worked on the display subsystem for this wearable,

and it did this and this, and you've already lost them. When it's like, oh, I worked on the thing that presents the pretty graphics for this. Right. So there was actually an article, and I think it was a conference, that Jeff Weiner from LinkedIn was just speaking on. And he was actually saying that we're not amiss on technical breadth. We're amiss on soft skills.

And that's the biggest challenge that people don't understand. The recruiter's time is for you to be able to explain. Sometimes people think, oh, I don't need to tell the recruiter because they're not going to understand it. Well, first of all, try them. They might actually be understanding it. But second, it's your job to make them understand and to believe it and to feel the passion of what you're doing. If you cannot do that, then you do not proceed forward. And that's the soft skills that we're testing. And we need to understand that this person's going to actually be able to operate in our ecosystem in a collaborative way. So sometimes we like to say, we don't hire jerks,

but it's true. We want to have somebody who's going to be respectful of the process respectful of the recruiter be able to really kind of see themselves in the organization and love it do you have any pointers on interviewing for with the team in general have there been times when you've found somebody you're just like, oh, this person's perfect, and then they blow it in the interview? Yeah. So I like to actually coach my teams to follow a 15-15-15 rule if they have a 45-minute slot, which means 15 minutes of soft questions, and then 15 minutes of kind of grilling or

tougher questions, and then 15 minutes to have the candidate ask questions or to sell the company. And before that, I try to get the team together and actually divvy up who's going to be testing what so it's not duplicated. But that way, the 15 minutes of kind of the grilling time seems like it's sufficient. What happens time and time again is you get a candidate on site and they kind of walk away and we say, gosh, but they're really good at optimization. Did anyone test an optimization? Because optimization is all over the resume, but guess what? They didn't. So guess what? We have to bring them back just to test them on optimization. Well, again, if you have that huddle beforehand and divvy it up and say someone's going to test them on optimization. Well, again, if you have that huddle beforehand

and divvy it up and say someone's going to test on optimization, then that should be covered. Someone should be covering maybe algorithms. Maybe someone should be covering problem solving. It should just be all divvied up and feel very natural. But organic because a senior candidate is not going to want to write code on a whiteboard. Maybe an algorithm is appropriate.

So for that nervous Nelly or person who's coming in who really is squeamish about that, bring your laptop. Just say, hey, I'm nervous. I don't like doing it on the whiteboard. Would you mind if I actually use my laptop and I can even compile and test it for you? How do you feel about take-home coding exams? I think those are good. Especially if it's not timed, then you can think in your own time and there's less pressure. If it's timed, then you're feeling a little bit more pressure and you're open to making mistakes. But I think those are good. And believe it or not, recruiters have to

do those too. We have our own little take-home test. What's on your take-home test? Oh, boy, you don't even want to know. We've been tested in all kinds of things. Presentations and, like, you know, here's a candidate, here's a job description, write us an email, or all kinds of stuff. Yeah, I've done, you know, here's a TV and this is the features, please write me a Boolean string. One of the difficulties with the take-home test is they're sometimes eight or 12 hours long. That's redonkulous. And yes, I make it up words. I'm happy to hear it. it should really be two to three years

three years two to three hours long it should be just enough that you get a good clip of problem solving into the resolution and I'll say this, the answer does not have to always be correct. It's the method to the madness to how you got there.

I've had plenty of hiring managers who said, you know, let me just look at this a little bit further. And if they like where they were going, they would still bring them on site or still continue the conversation. So people should not worry so much is it right or wrong, but how are they doing it, how are they approaching it. And that goes also on the whiteboard or in person is just kind of take the feedback.

Because a lot of times people are not a match strictly because how they're responding to the feedback given along the problem solution yeah i really like your advice to bring a laptop if you're not if you're not really comfortable with a whiteboard i often bring a notepad for that because I am much better looking down. Yeah, it's interesting you say it that way. It's not organic to do on the whiteboard unless it's an algorithm. That's a little bit more useful. But a lot of people say, this is the way it should be.

This is the way we test. I think as a nervous candidate, you can change things by just being human. You come in and say, I'm a little nervous. Would you mind if I just open up my laptop and do this? Usually they'll say yes. I've actually had some of my own engineers and just gone to them and say, hey, can you just write like a buggy application, have them find the bug and just give them a laptop? Cool. You know, that works. Do something that's worthwhile to what maybe you're actually going to be doing day to day. Don't ask me about recursion unless you want me to laugh.

Well, here's an example. A lot of times we're asking interview questions that don't really seem to make any sense to the actually the business or the problems being solved and so i tell my hiring managers all the time can you maybe use a problem that's actually pertinent to the business because guess what then you're also selling the company and the actual problems you're solving i mean here part of the sales pitch is that we have really heavy problems that we're solving so take one and put it to the board or so asking deeply technical questions about how a particular piece of C code that has nothing to do with anything you work on is, is probably something. Right.

But it's so funny how most hiring managers are in teams are still asking these silly. I think they, I think the attitude is we're testing these people and we want to prove that we're smart. I think that happens. I think it's less about, Oh, we want to find out if this candidate can think and more, let's see if they can figure this out.

Yeah, I would agree with you at a certain point. There's some egos. Yeah. I'll just be honest. I think it's more than egos. I think a lot of people just don't know how to interview. That's true, too. And so, you know, the recruiter also kind of plays a role of talent advising and helping the business kind of navigate, give ideas, give them feedback, saying, hey, I'm hearing all my candidates are leaving without a chance to ask questions.

And by the way, you guys are all asking the same questions and are here for five hours. Can we like maybe do a huddle beforehand and divvy up? Who's going to ask what? So we look like we're a little bit organized. And there's a reason why I do some of the practices I do. It's because I've seen it and tried not to put my finger in it until I can actually say, okay, so Jake just left, and he told me that da-da-da-da-da.

And they're like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm like, oh, no, let me tell you exactly what he said. Jake just left and he told me that da-da-da-da-da. They're like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm like, oh, no, let me tell you exactly what he said. It's amazing how far it goes if they have some kind of feedback or data. I find engineers like structure. If you can actually structure it out into something like the 15-15-15 rule or something like that, then they will follow. So do you have any questions for me part of the interview? That's part of the test, isn't it?

So I like that question. It is part of the test because some of the best questions that are asked are really, really telling. And I think it's important for the interview to be kind of a two-way street. Absolutely. So one of the questions I like to ask is, tell me what is the good, the bad, and what you would change? And you could make that pertinent to anything, the culture, the team, the engineering, the product, leadership, anything. But what I'd like to do is I ask the same question to every single person on the panel and see how consistent the message is. And that's, I think, the two tests.

And I just want to say something about Glassdoor. Glassdoor is a resource to consider, but it's not the end all. For one, the salaries on there are hugely off from what I've seen. The second is what people are posting, for one is if they're negative, they're typically disgruntled employees. Two, the positive ones are typically written by marketing or they're having a big push asking everyone to increase the score. So kind of take that as a grain of salt and just look at the messaging and try to find something that's consistent with each other. If they're all saying we have awesome benefits or we all have an awesome technology then take it for what it is but

kind of also realize that a lot of it's padded or you know disgruntled and you can't really take it for full face value like yeah i question that a lot of people are going out of their way to leave positive reviews for previous companies i would never never even have considered that. But it's much easier to say, well, that was awful. I better go tell someone. So, yeah. Yeah. Are there other questions you recommend? I would say that's it.

Yeah. Svek, who was on the show last week and we talked a little bit about college recruiting, mentioned one that he uses, which is tell me about the last two people who left the company. He says that shows a few red flags and gives some useful insight. I think it could be good or bad. Every organization will have good and bad times. And when I'm recruiting someone, I want to really know that they're going to be able

to hold through through adversity. So that could be a good question, but it's, again, kind of like the glass door to take it in face value. The people who left, maybe they've been there for five years, it was just their time to go to their next stomping ground, or maybe they just weren't even a fit and they were only there for six months. So the context is really important. Yes. there for six months. So the context is really important. But it's also been sometimes, you know,

sometimes it's really, really hard, especially if you're a startup and those big box companies still keep going after our employees. I just recently came from an environment where, you know, one big box company was, in particular, was going after all of our staff. And we were really challenged to turnover all of a sudden just because they're all going to this one big box company. It's hard to compete with some of those salaries. I kept wondering, are those recruiters in our parking lot? What's going on?

But it's really, really hard. And it just happened that that particular company was throwing some really big salaries at anyone with our name on their resume. And they actually did take some really awesome talent. So I don't want to say huge salaries for not so great talent, because they got some awesome, awesome talent. But I think what happens is that everyone goes through those cycles. And so you go through those turnover times and you see some consistencies. And then you see some people who just want to change for whatever reason. I've been there.

So shifting gears entirely, you do career coaching. I have to think that having seen so many resumes and been through the process so many times, you probably would be a pretty good career coach for getting my resume in place and getting to contact people? Yeah, I originally started career coaching in between jobs. And I always said that when I was in the agency side, gosh, if I can only monetize it on the candidate side, because again, we work for the hiring managers, we're hustling, we don't have the time to coach the candidates as much as we'd like to. And so I started to do this with the idea that if I hop skip many, many years into my retirement, I want to keep a foot in the marketplace on a part-time basis. And so this is kind of my opportunity to do it on a side basis, slowly. I'm not taking any time to nurture it. It's all referral base. People just kind of fall in my lap. They refer their brothers, sisters, their spouses, their co-workers, their best friends. Some of them past candidates, past co-workers. But I've found it to be very

useful because you know what? It even helps me because we don't take our own advice, but then if I take a step back and say, what would I tell one of my clients? Ah, I need to do this. All of a sudden, if I treat myself as one of those clients, then I know my answer. But I'm also really interested in helping people beyond the career search. So I'd say most times than not, I'm working with people the first time because of a career search. And when I'm doing that, it's on a weekly basis. But then once they land a job,

then we typically will work maybe once every two weeks or once a month, and we'll put together a 30, 60, 90-day success plan in one year. And then maybe we might work on, say,'ll put together a 30, 60, 90-day success plan in one year. And then maybe we might work on, say, executive presentation or managing up, or maybe performance reviews, or, all right, what should I do now that I've been put on a PIP? Or how do I do this? What do I do when I go networking?

Let's put together a networking plan. It really goes on to so many other levels that it's not just a career search. But that's typically when I catch people for the first time. It's a career search. We knock it out. I share with them a lot of tips that they wouldn't necessarily get from a book or from a career services or anything like that. And I just put these together for myself when I was doing a career search myself. Then I started documenting it, and then I practiced on a friend who is now in career services herself on a university campus.

And then it just kind of created from there. And so it's been nice because I have maybe about 20 clients, but I only work with about three to five on an ongoing basis because it goes in waves. Some people are ad hoc, some people weekly, depending on where they are and what phases. And the career planning, that's always been a weakness for me. I kind of bounce from interesting job to interesting job. And it makes for a resume that reads interestingly. I call it eclectic. Yeah.

But there was a time when I wanted to be CTO. I'm kind of past that now. But there was a time I wanted to go up the ladder or stay on the technical side when everybody wanted me to be a manager instead. And so you would have advice for how to deal with those problems? Yeah. Actually, that's originally how I started my career coaching was I put together a career plan for myself. I actually started my career in recruiting, took a hiatus right after 9-11 and went into more of a sales and marketing. And then I actually needed to come back to recruiting after I was in a layoff.

And so putting on paper and putting very substantial metrics as to how I was going to return recruiting and be current was something I needed to call myself out on. But I know this is going to sound funky, a little wonky, if you will. I always tell people to start their career planning for where they expect to see themselves at retirement and work backwards. Because people are not really planning for tomorrow, they're just planning for today. They'll look at a company or recruiter touches them and says, hey, I've got this great opportunity. You'll be a great fit, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they say, oh, that sounds kind of cool. That sounds fun. But is it in line with your goals? That's going

to take you to your retirement goals. So if, say, you did want to become a CTO, then you need to accept roles that are going to align you with those leadership capacities. And I have to give a good push. I do want to see more and more women in those management roles and leadership. So if people are trying to push you in that direction, that means that you have the skills, the soft skills that's really needed and to really bring more women into STEM. Yeah, but now I'm a consultant. It sounds like you act partially as a mentor to people. I would agree to a certain point. I would say part of what I'm doing is just asking enough questions, probing to help people get the answers or to get the input that they have buried.

Yeah, it's as much saying what they said back to you. Right. It's interpreting things in a different way. Because a lot of times it's not what they're telling me, but what they're not telling me. And so I have to keep asking more and more questions. And I actually believe that from a recruiting scope too. I use that kind of technique in my recruiting when I'm talking to candidates. I'm trying to figure out what are they not telling me. So I actually use a lot of different techniques myself and how I

close them just to be able to sell them based on their motivations and not the company or role, just so I could touch on the things that they're not asking. As an engineer on LinkedIn, I don't connect with recruiters as a rule. I mean, it says on my profile, I don't connect with people I don't know. And yet, nobody cares? Is this back to the 90% people just throwing darts, trying to get someone to take a job? That's some. When I read that personally, I see that as someone who's distrusting of recruiters and has a wall up. I don't say I don't connect with recruiters.

I say I don't connect with anyone I i say i don't connect with anyone i don't know and to be honest you're not the only one i get them all the time i get people all the time who reach out to me to connect without even a note and i'm thinking why would they matter what value did they have to me to join my network um i scrutinize just as much as you do. And you would think I wouldn't just accept all of them, but I don't because I kind of guard my network, my imprint. I think that you should accept some. Do have kind of your wall partly up and have some blinders. My tip is to really consider that recruiter. Are they somebody who is specializing in your wheelhouse?

Are they somebody who works for agency or in-house? If they're on the agency side, are they working for a search firm that is in your wheelhouse and that there may be, you know, reputable? Maybe it's somebody who's been in their seat at their particular desk for some years. Has somebody referred you to that recruiter? I think if somebody has referred you, then you definitely need to accept. I think it's always, always, always really a bright move to have some recruiters in your back pocket because you never, never know when you may need them.

If you're in a search yourself, you could reach out to those recruiters to help promote your resume. It's something called going to market where they could actually take your resume to potential customers and market you. And I think that's valuable because then it does help them to open up a new rec,

but it puts you out there in front of customers that may not even have a job posted. And so you're reaching out to roles that are not even in your spotlight. And if you're working with recruiters who could do that and know your skills, your wheelhouse, and are very specific to you, then that makes sense. If it matters, it makes sense. If it doesn't, not at all. Like you're not going to work with a recruiter who specializes in legal or F&A. You're going to work with a recruiter who specializes in embedded. Yes.

No, not really. I almost never work with recruiters. Since I am a consultant and I saw them work with recruiters, in-house recruiters. If an in-house recruiter is sending a connection request, I think those are worthy to have in your connections. If I want to work for their company. Yes, but you never know where they're going to be in a year or two years from now. Well, I think that's good advice,

although probably not advice I'll take. I'm not going to sway you. The people that I connect with are people that I would have lunch with if they said they were in town. Gotcha. That's kind of my bar. Okay.

And I don't usually have lunch with strangers they said they were in town. Gotcha. That's kind of my bar. Okay. And I don't usually have lunch with strangers. Yeah, that makes sense. Also, listeners who have tried to connect, I'm sorry, I don't. I just don't. There's just so many of them. And again, I really find a personal brand is really important. And so you want someone who's going to be connecting with you that's going to have some value to your network,

have some value to your brand, not badmouth you or whatnot. So that contribution is important. I have a couple of listener questions. We have a listener Slack channel that is from Patreon supporters. And Matt asked about, he graduated with his degree in electrical engineering. How does he get started looking for a job in embedded? What skills should he be focusing on in order to get a job in embedded systems? So that's a great question from Matt. Most embedded engineers have a dual

degree, one that's in electrical engineering or something like in hardware, like mechanical, and then also computer science. So I'd recommend a master's in comm sci. But more importantly than education is the work experience in the seat having experience that are in internships or the entry-level position that is maybe product related that you're going to ship a product maybe consumer or robotic or drones that's going to integrate both software and hardware and then if i was to choose programming languages to spend time in definitely see because you're going to find a lot of embedded work in C, but also anything with complexities are also going to work with C++ and sometimes the Qt as well.

And from Chris G, what has made applicants stand out to you in the past? Well, I spoke a little bit about portfolios, but I think just a clean resume, you'll be surprised how many times there is a typo. And you'll be surprised what our assumption is of a typo on a resume means maybe they don't always have clean code. So that's something that is noteworthy to have someone proof it, to have another one proof it and another person proof it until, because what happens is your eyeballs go kind of fuzzy after you've looked at it so many times. You're not going to catch what we're going to catch. And it's silly stuff usually. I went through an interview not long ago and they said I had too many commas. I was like, wow. But that was important to them.

I thought it was splitting hairs. You mentioned interviewing yourself because you have a new gig. I do. Do you want to tell us a little bit about it? Yeah, I'm super excited to be part of this team. They're called Carbon, located in Redwood City. Carbon 3D. They're known to be a 3 this team. They're called Carbon, located in Redwood City. Carbon 3D. They're known to be a 3D printer. They have this very sophisticated technology called clip method.

And what it allows it to do is this accelerated 3D processing. It could be like 10 minutes or less to print something from a liquid pool. It's super cool, very geometric. Their big partner right now is Adidas, so they are printing the midsole of the shoe, of the Boost and some other shoe that just has come out. I apologize, I don't know this. I start tomorrow. Yeah, that's totally fair.

So I'm kind of waiting it. But I'm super excited. I'm going to be able to recruit software and hardware. But the big impact I'm going to have is on the software side because a lot of software candidates do not see where their imprint is going to be in such a hardware or material science type product. And yet the software is the secret sauce. So I definitely will be doing some really fun things to drum up the awareness from a software perspective. But they do some really heavy problems there that the software team is really digging apart at. They've got some big milestones in this next couple of years too. Right now they're just under 350 people, but they're going to grow really quickly in this next year. What's fun too is they're a

dog-friendly environment. So you see like 50 dogs around there. They have this internal bike valet. So people are cyclists. They can actually park their bike inside, which I think is really cool because I'm one of those people who was madly in love with my bike and I would never ever park it in a locker outdoors or lock it up. Put it in a cage. Put it in a cage. I'd be in tears if someone ripped it off. Well, that sounds like fun. And I should actually probably let you go because it's Sunday night and you're starting a

new job tomorrow. I know. Super exciting. So yes, I know the onboarding will be quick and I'm going to be thrown in and I'm really excited. So I was there on Friday for an all hands meeting and I couldn't believe all the promotions and how transparent everybody was, especially the CEO. He shared financials for the next couple of years. It was great. From a startup perspective, that's really such a great thing to have, that transparency. So it was fantastic to be part of that. Do you have any thoughts you'd like to leave us with?

Just one. Be yourself. Everyone else is taken. That sounds like good advice. Our guest has been Anita Pagan, independent career coach and recruiter, tomorrow, at Carbon 3D in Redwood City, California. If you want to know more about her career coaching, she can be found at anitacareercoach at gmail.com or you can email us and I'll connect you,

of course. You can email us at show at embedded.fm or hit the contact link on Embedded FM. Thank you for being with us. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you also to Anthony for introducing us to Anita. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you also to Anthony for introducing us to Anita. Thank you to Christopher for producing and co-hosting. And of course, thank you for listening. This week, I don't have so much a quote to leave you with as a fact sent in by a listener after listening to last week's show. This is from Malta. There is an area in Venezuela with thunderstorms on one third of the days for 10 hours a day with nearly 300 strikes an hour.

That's Catatumba lightning. And I am totally going to look at that Wikipedia page. Embedded is an independently produced radio show that focuses on the many aspects of engineering. It is a production of Logical Elegance, an embedded software consulting company in California. If there are advertisements in the show, we did not put them there and do not receive money from them. At this time, our sponsors are Logical Elegance and listeners like you.