How do we know what we want? And how do we know what the shape of any of that stuff is, if you know what

I mean? Look, it's a great question. And I was just talking to someone yesterday and they couldn't, which is normal, by the way, they couldn't tell me what their vision of their career was going to be in three to five years time. So I said, okay, that's fine. You're in an industry that you want to move out of, okay, what industries do you want to work in? And straight away, this person could tell me to industry. So I said, fantastic. Okay. Now we've got something to go a mile deep into. So my next step for this person was, okay, can you come back to me in a week's time with 10 to 15 companies in that new vertical that you want to work in? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So now all of a sudden you've got 30 different industries, sorry, 30 different companies in two different industries. Yeah. To get some movement on. It's not that you're going to get the silver bullet straight away, but from this exercise by thinking strategically about your career and then seeing what's in either your industry or the industries you want to get into, you've now actually got a bit of a playbook to get to the third stage, which is later, which is execute to try and get to meet. People are learning more about these companies.

Yeah, because it's funny, isn't it? Like it sounds so obvious that everyone you should know that. And it's like we do kind of need to draw this vision board, don't we, for our career? Like, what do I actually, what would I hope my average day is like in three to five years? You know, what job is that? What am I doing? Is it what I invest that? Is it what I enjoy? Is it in an industry that I feel good about working in? Is it in a place that I like? And there's all these things to consider. And I think a lot of us are maybe a little bit scared of like painting this perfect dream scenario. And we just think actually, I just need to be realistic and crack on and get a job that's got, you know, a salary of like 10,000 more euro a year or something. And we're thinking these very kind of, I don't know, unambitious, prosaic ways about it. I just need to get a job that earns more and sounds a bit

more senior, you know. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. And I call that business as usual job searching. And that is roughly what 90 to 95% of job seekers do. And yes, best of luck to them. The challenge though is you're in a market of 95% of the market doing looking for that. I just need to fit up here. I just need another 10k uplift. By doing the strategic work I'm talking about, by actually, which probably most people do for their businesses that they pay to do for it, by doing that work, I know this because I give this advice out for free probably 15 times, 20 times a week, less than 5% of people come back with the work. And if I'm jumping completely ahead here, if you were to approach a senior recruiter like me with a really good CV, which we can get into how to build

later,

an outline of where you want to get to, and then a list of 10 or 20 or 30 companies you'd love to work in, you're memorable. I can see that you have put some time and part into your career. So you're elevating into that 5%. Now, there's other ways and means to get into a further percentage which we can get into. But that back to my original thought on all of this, no one will care about your career until you start, like you can start pointing fingers at companies that are interviewing you. And if you show up and imagine you did one of those companies three months later, a job comes up and you've already researched them, you've got to speak with maybe one person in there, you've got a level of insight way beyond the salary increases that you mentioned. But to me, it's a no-brainer. And especially if you're out of work, why wouldn't you be spending two to four hours a day doing this?

Yeah, that's true. There's definitely no excuse if you have the time, for sure. I guess that's the other big limitation, isn't it? And thinking about the sort of skill set, what skills, including those softer skills that are outside of the actual discipline itself of marketing? How are skills recruiters looking for at the moment? Has that changed at all in the last year or

two? It really hasn't. But it's always changing with the latest trend. And being a good or bad trend, our development, I suppose, tech development, we're facing into I think the most exciting time work and world's ever seen with AI. And AI means actually critical thinking, leadership skills, empathy,

really leading in a new way rather than command

control. And these skills are actually the ones that show up way more beyond the CV. It's shown up in your attitude. And there I say, displaying that quote mindset attitude, which has been, I suppose, thrown around as a buzzword a lot. That's if you have had that in a clean your career all the way through your career, then you'll be able to talk to examples that display that. I think a perfect place to start to upskill in these areas is either to put your hand up internally to mentor people. So if you're not managing people, it's a great way to start to develop your leadership skills. But these days, there's just some access to great courses online. But a really simple way to start is I think an introduction to some form of leadership coaching. Yeah. Because even if you don't take that coaching further for, you know, to become a life coach, you will it's the best lens of putting a mirror up to you and what you really stand for. And you see some amazing things back. And for me, it also triggers hopefully this lifelong learning pancer, which to me is again so important for the future with all the technology changes coming.

I mean, how can I make sure that those kind of skills jump out at a potential recruiter though, because they might not fully get that until they meet me. So

they always say, when is the, you know, when's the best time to plant a tree and they would have said, you know, 30 years ago. But then it's tomorrow. If you haven't done these things, yeah, that's fine. But you need to start somewhere. So if you looked around in your industry, I'm speaking for the marketing industry broadly in Ireland, they have a mentorship program. So you can go anytime and offer your services to mentored people or to be mentored.

That would be

one.

I believe

you've gotten now be either back in college or doing something that's upskilling. That's showing how you're advancing your skills, or filling the skills gaps that you have. And sorry, I should have said where you're about on the vision. One of the main reasons I want people to think about who are these people three to five years ahead of you in your career is it's very easy then to figure out what your skills gaps are between you getting to their position by either asking them or just checking what they say

is on their internet. Maybe you're part of your local community.

I'm at a stage of life where I volunteer in the local GA club. Those things first switched on hiring manager. That will make a difference and actually give you a little bit of an edge as well.

Yeah, it's true. Isn't it? The things that you do out of work and sort of say a lot about how much you step up to the plate and are there for other people and lead, get stuck in, get involved, you know, because people want people want employees who are sort of agents of change, just for who's is one cliche way of saying it, or agents of something. Anyway, agents that people who drive something rather than just sit back. So it's a good way of demonstrating that, I suppose. Yeah, that's interesting. So thinking about that, one soft skill that we talked about for the trends episode was this personal brand building, right, building authority and thinking about boosting your profile in your industry or just in general, right? Just give us a bit of a recap on what you think about that. Because somewhere it's not for everyone. You know, and I'm always worried about making people who just cannot do that feel bad. So let's just plate that clear. Yeah. And I

thought, you know, I look, I get it and might be surprising that

I had 20

LinkedIn followers before I moved from my marketing job 10 nearly actually nine years ago this month into recruitment, had never posted on LinkedIn or never worked on my brand, being very honest, I get it. So I've come from that place. I recently talked to a very senior candidate who's trying now to break out of an industry and is allergic to all of that. I'm going to be brutally asked to say, you've got to put on your big boy or girl pants to step into this digital branding arena. You can do it in the offline way and you should do it in both. You should have a dual strategy networking, especially since people are back meeting people is actually, I believe, a lot more effective than ever before. However, if you can just think of like, how do you develop a new habit? Or, you know, how do you eat the elephant? You have to start small. So my simple advice is LinkedIn is probably the best social platform for this.

Yeah.

It's just start by having a 15 minute habit a day of using LinkedIn to go through the feed to see if you can learn something new by spending your 15 minutes in there. Try and do that for a couple of weeks. So you're just getting into the

platform. Even in maybe

week two, three, just start liking and commenting. It could be just liking. It could be, we all know that that's going to boost the algorithm. You're going to show up with someone liking. And that's exactly what I did. Then I had this because I was starting to go, oh, that article is interesting. This is interesting. You go down, go at learning rabbit holes. For me, it was I found a Harvard Business article around parallels between being a peak performance in high level sports to high level business. And I wrote my first blog about that.

But out of that blog,

like, there's been, I actually set up my coaching business out of that blog. You know, so it was a case of I got curious about a topic. And then I remember saying to one of my partners here in talent of going, I think I've found something here. So A, I said, look, all my content, I want you to hold me accountable. All my content that I'm going to start actually, you know, all staying, which was even tough for me, just keep me accountable that it's linking. It's not going to be about recruitment as such as to here, I have a job. It's actually, here's ways to be better at your job. So I didn't know, but subconsciously, what I was doing was using my content to help people. And actually then later, when I started doing a bit of work on myself and my purpose, I realized, well, my purpose is I got loads of joy and energy from helping people. So it all sort of aligned. Now for some, right, they only need to do this till they get the job. But again, if people can think about 95% of people not doing that, and you stepping into that 5% for three to six months, I can tell you so many people get hit off

by

a good blog. And these days, maybe just a good post, but being consistent. I know someone that got ahead on a trend of retail media being the next media in retailers like Tesco, he's now as a CMO, carved out a niche to go around the world speaking about that at global conferences. So I'm not saying that is going to happen, but it's your brand. And I'm talking to marketeers that you go and recommend this to your board all the time. Why don't you just spend that time on yourself to do it?

Yeah, it's true, isn't it? I like your idea of a routine. I think, look, the best of us are busy, and particularly people who've got children or other commitments. You just, you know, personally, I found that once I had kids like the spare time I had to put into things like personal brand building and content creation just really went down big time. So you've got to then turn it into a routine, right? So it actually happens. And I, funnily enough, you know, the first person I've heard that from, you know, I hear about LinkedIn creators. We've had a LinkedIn creator on the show all talk about having basically a morning coffee routine where go down the feed for 10, 15, 20 minutes, whatever. And like you say, it might not be about posting content. It's just showing up and it's liking and commenting. And actually a comment should be more than just a line as well. It should be more than like, nice one, mate. You know, it's a comment should be you can actually create content in comments. You can really add to the conversation and you're showing up in a popular post. So you're actually becoming quite visible, right? Because you're showing up in a post that hundreds and maybe thousands of people are seeing with actually a really good comment and a really good additional suggestion or something resource that you post a link to there or whatever. And you don't have to have original content ideas, but as you say, the more that you do that and you show up, actually, you start to learn what works. You see what your particular tribe, what your industry, whatever are very receptive to and what they seem to gravitate towards. And then having those content ideas all going to become a lot easier, right? And then you can try that just once a week or something, you know, again.

And sorry, but that's so glad you picked up on that. And so when I talked about vision, there are steps to actually then getting to speak to these people that have carved out what looks like amazing careers and probably speaks to them. They probably aren't happy in their careers either, you know. But say you have, let's just say a global brand like HubSpot on your target list and their previous CMO who was based here in Dublin, Purim, of his content and still to this day is follow him, Purim Flanagan, he's all about AI now, the best in the world. But so let's go back, roll the clock maybe three, four years ago, when he was on his rise up through that tech company. The whole idea to build company lists and people to follow and people to emulate is that you need to then get out of your comfort zone and start making inroads to get in front of them. If you haven't done what we've just chatted about there and started building the habit, getting comfortable, starting and you said, not just going to terms up mate, but actually great point and here's a bit more insight from me. When you have to eventually do that cold outreach to that individual, you have a far better chance of getting that converted to a response at least. If they may be seen, ah, that's John who, Arceira, who I see commenting on my stuff. Like, I vanish, he does play a role in this too, people have ego. So again, you might not like doing this, but do you like, if you don't like to chop your in, you've got to ask yourself, what can I do? What are they willing to do that's painful now that will give me those rewards further down the line?