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EP 223: Tune your career with Fatemah Mirza

Fatemah a Certified Resume Master who has been helping job seekers with their resumes for the past 13 years. She owns a company named CareerTuners. CareerTuners is a small team of skilled professionals from various industries who specialize in providing professional resumes, cover letters, LinkedIn profiles, and much more career-related services to help ambitious people land their dream jobs and achieve career goals.

In this episode we talk about how to find the right job for you, how to prepare for a job interview, negotiate your salary and more.

Guest Links: 

Website: https://careertuners.com/

LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/careertuners/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/CareerTuners

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/careertipsfromct/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/careertuners1

Link to the show:

Please find all resources like video, audio, show notes and as well some shorter clips of the episode at the show page:⁠ ⁠https://www.jensheitland.com/podcasthome⁠⁠

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Apple Podcast:⁠ ⁠https://podcasts.apple.com/za/podcast/human-innovation-the-jens-heitland-show/id1545043872⁠⁠

Spotify Podcast:⁠ ⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/7H0GWMGVALyXnnmstYA1NL?si=7307c301794b483e⁠⁠

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Transcript:

(This Transcript is AI generated)

Today we talk about career and career management and trying to understand how you help people to have an awesome career and find new jobs and so on.

So let's start with yourself.

Who are you? How did you get to where you are today? Give the listeners a little bit perspective, why do you end up helping people to build an awesome career?

Okay, so my name is Fatemah and I actually was in the world of environmental engineering, so totally unrelated to what I do now. And I just started helping a few of my friends with their materials and I realized that it was something I was really good at. So I pursued it full-time and it really snowballed.

And today I lead a team of about 30 certified resume writers and career coaches. And our job is basically to help people find a career they're passionate about, get it and make more money doing it.

That sounds awesome.

Yeah, it is awesome because I get to meet a lot of fun people.

Yeah, I can imagine. Why is it so difficult writing CV's and or getting the right job?

I think it's really difficult because a lot of the advice that we see online and generally, like in books about how to write a cv there's basically this assumption that people have a very traditional and linear career path, which is how the world was. I think pre two thousands when a lot of these books were written and when a lot of the people that were writing these books are putting out this advice, were beginning their careers themselves, however, with, the two global crises that we've had, first with the recession and then with the pandemic and like just the how fast everything is moving in terms of supply chain evolution, technology, evolution, and all of that.

It's becoming very normal to pivot a lot, and it's becoming very normal to not have a very strictly traditional career path. Like I studied environmental engineering and this is what I do today. And, I worked with a director of engineering that didn't even have a degree. I mean there's so many people out there with different backgrounds, people who take a decade off to raise their kids, et cetera.

So I think. It's very tricky and you can get very insecure when you're looking at all this advice because you're like, okay, this doesn't apply to me and I feel like an outlier. Well, that's not true. This is very normal, actually.

Yeah, it's quite funny because I was joking with another podcast guest the other day. He, I think he's 62 or 63, and he was saying he had four jobs in his whole life. And I said, okay, I've had four jobs until I was 27.

Wow.

So I agree. It's, it's a completely different world where we live in, and I think it's even more so I have a five year old daughter.

I can't even imagine that if you compare that with my brother, for example, he's a couple of years older. He's still in the first company he has ever worked for, and he had his 20 fives anniversary with that company already.

I can't imagine that for myself. But then the next generations, if you take my daughter as the next generation, it's definitely not going to happen if she even ever gets into a normal job when she starts working. I have zero idea.

Yeah, and I think, I mean there's also this, like I've had to work with people like your brother that are like, I worked at this company for a couple decades and now I need to move, and now I am the odd one out because people think I'm stale. People think I'm not agile, that I don't know how to master learning curves.

So like everything is there to make you feel insecure, I feel nowadays. So you just have to take that power back just by figuring out how to tell your story in a way that makes sense to the person on the other side of the table.

Yeah. So how does it work? Let's say I'm not really looking for a job, not taking me as an example. I'm definitely not looking for a job, but someone who considers maybe in a year, maybe in the future, how do you help people in navigating where they want to be? Because what I see at least a lot of people from a leadership perspective,

they're unclear.

They don't know where they want to be. Is that a thing they should be focusing on at all or just applying to an as many as possible? I dunno what the right strategy is,

I think it's definitely easier to have a singular focus because what happens when you're like, I wanna do this, or maybe that, or maybe that is like you, your own efforts are gonna get diluted. And you are not gonna be able to network properly because the number one weapon that anyone has is your network.

And if you are able to go to your network and say, Hey, I'm interested in a marketing director role for companies that help empower women. That is so specific and memorable that your network is gonna be galvanized to help you versus if you go to your network or like your, like a family party and you're like, yeah, I'm looking for work.

I don't know, am I going to sales or am I teach or am I go back to school? But definitely like marketing's, and they're gonna be confused cuz that's too much mental work that you're asking them to do to help you. So it's really important to help people help you. And the second thing is like you're gonna get exhausted.

If you're just applying willy-nilly and you're like, I'll just see what happens and I'll make the most out of, you know what I get. That's an inefficient way to figure out which career path is right for you, as opposed to just taking a couple days doing a little bit of homework and being like, okay, this is what I wanna pursue, and then pursuing that with focus, you know what I mean?

Yeah, I had it when, when I was doing jobs interviews as the manager. You sit in front of the person and everything looks, because first, first you maybe have a conversation on online or like you see the CV and everything looks good. Then you talk to the person and then you figure out holy cow, you don't even know where you want to be, so you're, you're asking me all these questions to figure out where you want to be.

Maybe we should do a coaching session rather than a job interview.

You don't wanna give that impression at all. You, even if you don't know what you wanna do, even if you're like, I don't know if this career path is gonna be right for me, like in the interview, you wanna make it sound like you're the answer to their question, you

Yeah, exactly. So let, let's go deeper into searching for a job. So let's say there's a person that knows where this person wants to be, how do you help that person trimming their cv, cover letter and all the different things to get ready to find the right job.

Okay. I just wanna clarify though, like when I said, when I was giving that example, Hey, I'm looking for a marketing director level role in a woman empowerment organization, like that level of specificity is great. Sometimes you don't have that level of specificity. Sometimes you're just like, okay, I want to.

Pursue senior leadership roles in marketing, that's fine. You just don't wanna be all over the place. And to answer your question, you want to filter your resume with that goal in mind, right? Like you probably have had a career where you've worn multiple hats, so where you've done lots of different things.

However, if you load all of that into your resume cover letter and LinkedIn, the messaging that you're giving in that very first impression, which first and foremost is fleeting. Right. Like they're only looking at your resume really quickly to see if you check off their boxes. And if you do, they're gonna read it more carefully.

So if in that first impression they're getting that same thing that you said earlier, like they're like, this guy doesn't even know what he wants. That's what you're portraying if you're putting everything on there. So you have to strictly filter what you're showing and you have to show that.

You improved something in every line of your resume. So rather than just being like, okay, this is what I was responsible for, you have to say, this is an opportunity that I capitalized on, or this is a problem that I fixed, or this is a partnership that was very profitable. Something like that where you, where you're showing your ability to move the needle and the language that you use, it has to be in line with the level of the job you're pursuing.

If you're going for let's say, using that earlier example a marketing director role, if all of the language on your resume is hands-on management and worked one-on-one with my teammates to improve campaigns, that's pigeonholing you into a lower paid marketing management role.

Versus if you're like outlined the overall strategic objectives for, the year and all of that, that's like a more director level role. You're showing that oversight. So that's also really important. And a lot of people mess that up,

Yeah, I think you don't want to see my CV from the old days.

to be honest. Like sometimes a CV doesn't even matter, right? If your reputation. Precedes you, which in your case it does. Cuz you do so much work to cement your brand in people's minds, right? You have this podcast and you do so many other things to promote yourself. Then a CV is an afterthought where someone asks you for your cv.

It's a formality for like their HR systems. But if your CV is your first impression, you have to make sure it looks good.

also have to be able to toot your own horn and make sure that your accomplishments are highly visible and you're working on high visibility projects. If you're like, I'm exceptional, but I'm doing work that's not very visible, then you are not gonna get that same level of traction.

And then the other, there's someone that I helped recently where they had, they were like you Jens, where they were very like, accomplished and, people wanted to bring them on. They still needed a resume to convince kind of those other people that are sitting at that decision making table.

So he was giving like his crappy resume and people were like, I don't know, like I trust you. But this guy, and then the interviews weren't that strategic. Like they were like very defensive where he was being asked to defend all of the work that he did. So like in those cases, having the strong resume that shows that you bring that roi, it can really help with those decision makers that may not be like that familiar with your work, 

that's interesting. So it matters from not just. Hey, these are the jobs I have done, but even inside of the jobs you have done, you need to tailor make it to the person that you're contacting from A to Z. So if you want to have this marketing role, if I understand you're right, then it need to come through that it fits to that position, that it fits to the company.

Or is it one CV you create for all the different, or cover letters and then you tailor make that just a little bit. How does network.

I think it would be very difficult to like tailor each and every one of your applications like A through Z, but you just have to know like in general, this is what I'm pursuing. If you're like, look, I would be okay with either like a marketing management role or a marketing director role, then you just have to have two different resumes with that two kind of messaging.

Right. I wouldn't like overdo it to the point where you're like, this is exhausting. I'm spending like three hours per application, because then you're not moving anything forward.

Yeah, get it. How does that work on the different levels? So is it different if I go for a director role than for an executive management role? If you look into large organization, which often, at least what I've heard, Works through external people who kind of head hunt people to get the right people on the table.

Absolutely. There's gonna be a very big difference in the language, like with an executive application. You definitely wanna show that you understand that organization's culture and can further. Bring your own personal culture to have synergy with the organization. So as an executive, you are setting the organization's vision and you are taking the CEO's vision and trickling it into your department.

Using that kind of language that you are able to do that and bring ROI is important. Showing that you're able to be on the cutting edge and innovate in your space is also critical. As a director it's more about finding external opportunities and capitalizing on them. Whereas with a management role, you're taking the director's initiative and you're creating like internal opportunities and closely managing your colleagues.

So if you're trying to go from a management role to a director role, Try to pursue projects where you're shining the light on that, where you're innovating more and you're helping the organization partner externally and all of that. So best way to do this is to look at the job description of the job that you want to do and see what what they need and, and try to build your resume around that.

And if you have nothing on your resume around that, and you're like, okay, I need to actually do this. Then, then ask for those projects, have honest conversations with your boss about what you're gonna do and ask for those projects.

Yeah. One thing I always look for is not the obvious things. So when I hired people, I was always looking, what else are they doing than just the normal CV stuff. When I got the last three candidates, that was whe were brought to me to have a look of, Hey, this, this are the last three candidates.

Have a look at them. Do you want to speak to them? What I always did, I was then just googling them. And just checking out what are they doing in their social media life? What's going on in their life? Because everyone knows that if you get a CV and if you get a cover letter, that's the a plus, plus plus version of that person.

It's not the, Hey, I was drinking last weekend with my friends on and share that on social media. Not saying that I was looking for that, but I was just looking for the human inside or behind of that paper. And what, at least for me today, what is easy if you, of course, if you have a podcast, if you have a social media channel where you have videos, then you get to know the person way better than if a person has zero presence on social media.

Do you help people building their brand around that as well?

Yeah, I definitely do. And I would caution people against posting really stupid things online. And when I say stupid things, I don't even mean that drinking stuff. That's fine if you're like drinking on the weekends and you're posting it like. Maybe your boss is gonna be drinking on the weekend.

Maybe they'll feel like, oh, this guy's likable. He's like me or she's like me. So that's, that's not a big deal. I'm talking about like really stupid stuff. Like I have seen people posting like those little math quizzes and being like, how smart are you? Take the stupid IQ test and they're posting all the wrong answers and it's bro, you need math to do your job and like you're posting this on your LinkedIn and it's not a cute look right now.

Yeah.

So you have to be careful about things like that. And you should also be honest about who you are as well. Like one of the questions that I receive often is, someone looks a certain way or they present a certain way, like maybe someone's homosexual and it's a big part of their identity.

Or someone is, very religious and they're wearing a turban or all of that, and they're like, I don't know if I need to put this on my social media. And I'm like, you do, because if you don't, and you know you're having this issue in interviews where people are discriminating against you, then why don't you just weed out those haters from the beginning and attract people who are specifically looking to hire unique voices like yourself, so I think this is. You shouldn't be like too careful and be like, I'm just gonna be cut, boring and professional, like 24 7 online. You should be authentic, but you shouldn't be dumb either,

A, a agree, but I think this, the authenticity is the number one thing. And I gave you the compliment before we went Recording that you do that on your social media, so I really appreciate that about people. Specifically in business, when you are yourself and you see that in the videos you do.

Where you have fun in between, of course, there are always important topics you tackle, but it's not just, Hey, now I'm the tied up person in, in this shoot because I'm in business. You are human and you are yourself. And I think that's what, at least for me, that's a huge differentiator in the people I have hired.

I always looked for is it truly the person or is it just fake it until you make it, until you get the job.

Yeah, I think it definitely depends on like that industry's organizational values as well. There are going to be organizations that are gonna celebrate people like you, but on the other hand, there are gonna be organizations and even industries that are more conservative. And they're more like hierarchical and traditional, so you have to adjust based on the type of organization and industry you're trying to go into.

that's a good question for me though that you didn't ask a question, but for me, the question for, for me, the question in this is maybe then it's the wrong organization. So if you take myself going into a bank, if we just take a bank as an example of which I know that banks are different today than before the two thousands. Me wearing a suit every day would just not fit me.

The environment would not fit me. So me knowing myself that it doesn't fit is better than not applying to jobs where you have to do it every day. So that's also a starting point. 

We went through, okay, writing the cv, writing the proper cover letter, getting the language topics right, getting the target right. Interviews how do you help people survive, or master is maybe the better word, master

Mm-hmm. I think the thing with interviews, the thing that I do to help people is a lot of times people present something in interviews that they're not aware, they're presenting. Like I have coached people that

thought I'm presenting that I'm very passionate and I care a lot about the outcome of what I'm working on, but what they were actually presenting in interviews is I'm really difficult to work with cuz I want everything my way. No interviewer is gonna be like, Hey, I'm gonna give you honest feedback.

Like you sound like a jackass and not fun to work with. No one is ever going to do that. I will do that for you. I'll tell you, you sound really difficult to work with, and if you just adjust your answer like this, instead of showing that you're difficult to work with, you're showing that you're passionate.

So it's, it's just that like basically presenting themselves and the discussion we were having earlier about managers versus directors versus executives. That's also something that people really struggle with in interviews. If they're trying to move on to the next stage, or if they're close to retirement and they're trying to downgrade their jobs, how do you talk in a way that doesn't come across like you're a fish outta water or totally intimidating.

And the third type of person that I help are people that are trying to transition into a brand new industry, and they just need help presenting that they are, familiar with the vernacular and they're not, again, a fish outta water.

Yeah.

This is something that you need help with and you'd like to do it on your own.

I highly recommend just interviewing with companies or for jobs that you're not really that excited about. It's like a free way to get interview practice, and I recommend doing this every year at least once, because you don't wanna be like Jens brother and being like at the same company for 25 years and then and three decades later you're like, I don't even know how.

To interview anymore. You know what I mean? Like you have to be able to interview well and understand what's going on in the job market and it evolves rapidly. So don't let yourself get, still, keep interviewing even if you're not gonna take the job. It's just important to know what's out there.

And it might even help you do your job better because you might learn something about the company and use some of that competitive intelligence to fulfill some of your projects.

Yeah. I love that because that's something I did differently as well over the last years and now I can say it because it's quite a long time ago. I did this all the time doing interviews with not the goal to get it, but as well to understand what is the market, what I'm worth it in the marketplace to understand, okay, how much are they willing to pay?

Do they see me fitting into this role already right now? Because I was always the youngest person in all the different topics. Now I'm not anymore. But at that time at least, I was always the younger person in this environment, the younger person that's in that leadership role. And just to understand what's

my worth and how much can I put on the table? Help me to understand as well, yes, I'm there or I'm not there. To have the internal conversations when it goes to pay rise or not pay rise, different promotion opportunities and so on, to be a little bit more stubborn there and say, Hey, but I can do it. Not saying that I was in interviews, just, just, just doing.

So how do you do this interview training? I'm fascinated by that. So, Are you jumping on Zoom calls and talking with the person and the person and it basically play an interview, or how do you do that?

It depends entirely on what my client wants in some cases. Like they know, they're like, okay, I know for sure that what I'm saying for like these kinds of questions is tripping me up. And then I say, what do you normally say? And then I help them tweak their answers. Sometimes they don't know what's going on, so we'll do a mock interview and I'll be like, okay, this is what the problem is for some people.

There it is. They just wanna kind of polish how they're presenting. So we'll do like a question, feedback, question feedback. So it strictly depends on the client and what they want to do. And some of them, they're taking interview coaching because they have been constantly rejected at the interview phase.

And they just need to understand what is it that I'm presenting that is rubbing interviewers the wrong way? And this also sometimes entails taking a look at the job descriptions that they're being hired for because how you present yourself to one company. Might not, like it might, they might not like it, but it might work really well for another company.

So in those cases, it's just about reassurance that, hey, maybe that was like a one off. It's probably just, what, that company was looking for something different.

Yeah, talking about job descriptions, what I see and still it, it's everywhere. Job descriptions. They want to have the person that can do everything and has done everything. Like you are 25 years old, but you have 30 years of work experience and have been 20 years a manager. How do you help people apply to positions? Where you have this situation, that's not possible that a human being can be that perfect in everything.

Yeah, so first step is to not be human. Like you need to turn yourself into ai. Upload yourself. No, I'm just kidding. What you need to understand is when people write job descriptions is, first of all, they maybe do not have the training. Or capability to write a job description, like the person who wrote the job description is a human being and they, you don't know, like maybe they're, they just, they're not even that familiar with the role.

They were tasked to do this by the department head. Maybe they're just some intern in the HR department. Right. The second thing is, Sometimes people write job descriptions, like they are creating this roadmap for what their dream house is gonna look like, but they only have 50 cents in the bank account.

Have you seen those reality shows where people are like, yes. I'm like, a part-time school teacher and I'm, I have my eye on this $5 million mansion in Beverly Hills. It's that they're trying to get the most out of the limited budget they have, and it might be totally unrealistic.

So when you're looking at a job description, if you're finding yourself nodding along to at least 50%, you should probably apply if the rest seems interesting to you. And statistically speaking, women do this a lot where they are like, I have to check off like a hundred percent of the job before I apply.

Whereas men don't do that. And. You. Your job is not to figure out the quality of candidates like you. Your job is just to apply. They are gonna let you know if you're not a good fit. So you should apply anyway. And you should also learn to read between the lines. So if they have this job description where they're expecting you to be 25 with 30 years of experience and 20 years of management experience.

What does that mean actually, right? So like 20 years of management experience means like you have the ability to set that like executive level vision that you have experience trickling that vision throughout your organization, if they're asking for lots of years of experience, they're asking for.

Mastery of specific things in the field, and maybe you have all that, you just don't have the years. Maybe you've done stuff in school or maybe you've done stuff when volunteering and maybe you've done stuff you are so successful at that doesn't take you years and years for you to be able to exhibit that kind of skillset.

So talk about that. Read between the lines. Don't just look at the number of years and figure out exactly what does this organization need and how does my story match up to that? 

It's interesting because it sounds easy when you say that. But it's often difficult then to jump, like you said, female have often the challenge that they want to have a hundred percent fit, which then as well, goes into the conversations that they already writing it off inside of the job interview though, that they haven't done anything wrong and they're not confident enough with themselves.

The other thing you have to do when you're reading between the lines of a job description is trying to understand what their headaches are and what their cultural values are. Like if they have language developing a team of high performers that tells you that they want you to.

In the interview, not say things like, yeah, I'm really good at like disciplinary action and if someone was underperforming here's the step by step plan of how I would fire them. That's a big cultural mismatch. It's also hinting to High performance and, and we want to hire very talented people.

We probably have a big training budget and that kind of thing. So these are you, you can, you can read between the lines to figure out how to word your interview answers and which stories you should be sharing. Like not the story of the time you had to fire somebody and how such a tough decision it was and how to fix your experience around their business needs, basically.

Salary. It's always a big question mark, how do you shoot for the right salary? How do you negotiate it and what's your strategy? How do you help people to build a strategy to find out and negotiate the right salary? 

So finding out how much to make is very easy if you're like a fresh graduate or if you are working at an organization that makes it pretty obvious what their pay scales are like, for example. There's so many forums dedicated to cracking interviewing with Google, Amazon, et cetera, and they're, they publish the salary offers that they're getting.

So it's very easy to collate that information and figure out what you should be asking for. My favorite tool for, younger professionals is salary.com. It's great if you are looking for a job that has there's for example, if we continue with the marketing director, Example, I have seen marketing director roles in this year, 2023 that paid as less as $80,000 a year all the way to, half a million dollars a year.

So that range is useless. Like it, it's not a useful indicator of what you should be asking for. So the best way to figure out what range you should be asking for, In my opinion is to join like a professional marketing association where you have the ability to talk to recruiters, where you have the ability to look at salary data and have an honest conversation with people about okay, look, this is my background and I'm asking for $230,000 per year.

Do you think that's unrealistic given my background? And this is a great way for you to actually ask how much money people are making without. Asking that question because it can be considered extremely impolite. So if I come to you Jens, and I'm like, Hey, I'm gonna start a podcast and my financial goal is going to be like, I don't know, $200,000 a year, do you think that's unrealistic?

I'm asking, how much were you making in the first year? And you can share that information with me without feeling, like I'm being hostile. So, you can ask this to people who do what you want to do. You can ask this to people who place the kind of people that you know you're emulating.

I spoke with a recruiter recently and, I had a very exact same conversation and he was like, okay, I recently placed someone for much higher, but she had a master's degree, and This was like her background. So then you have the data to know what do you need to do if you want to go for something higher, like at that point you're in a fork in the road, you can be like, okay, let me just apply, I'll take the 180,000 whatever, or maybe it's, it would be a good investment for me to go back to school so I can start getting those 2 30, 2 50 per year jobs.

You can make an informed decision. About what it is that you should be doing in order to increase your pay. So once you know this information, it's time for you to actually negotiate. Just kidding you, the salary negotiation process begins way earlier in that first impression on your resume.

If on your resume you're constantly showing, I bring roi, I bring results, I move the needle, that conversation becomes much easier down the line. If in the interview you're asking questions like, Hey, what does success look like? In the first year, in the first quarter, and you're answering to that, then it becomes much easier to show that ROI and you are getting information that allows you to draft like your counter note much more easily.

If you are interviewing and you're asking good questions and you're finding out like, wow, their department has really low morale, everybody feels demoralized because the previous management didn't do a good job with their onboarding and training. You can really shine the light on your onboarding and training experience.

You could really shine the light on like positive employee satisfaction ratings that you've had in the past, and you can say, I can fix the problem that you're having, not just in the short term, but I can also capitalize on opportunities for you in the long term. This helps make the salary negotiation process very smooth and like they don't even have to think about it to give you 50, $70,000 higher.

Yeah, what I've seen, it's also a little bit of course industry dependent and then company size dependent. If you go for a smaller company, most of the smaller companies will not be able to pay the big salaries, even if you do a similar responsible job. And most of the time, at least what I've experienced, you work more than in the bigger companies.

Because in the bigger companies, you have 20 other people working with you on the same topics, so adjusting it to that as well.

With that being said, I mean, I think sometimes at larger companies, they codify their salaries a lot.

Oh yeah.

Not maybe in the higher executive level stages, but like for younger professionals. They might be in like specific bandwidth versus at a smaller company you can show that, hey, not only can I do everything on the job description, I have a little bit of skill that'll help some other functions go more smoothly.

And that might give you the flexibility that you need. And I think working at smaller companies, yeah, it's like it is more work at the end of the day, but if you're looking for a pivot, They are more forgiving for things like blemishes, in your, in your history and that you're pivoting or all of that.

So it might be a good option and it can really help you grow your salary quickly if you consider it as like a stepping stone.

A hundred percent though that I have to say, even if there are salary bans in large organization, there's always an opportunity to do things differently.

Mm-hmm.

And even if you are the first person ever asking for it, that's fine. I've seen it and it's happening every day. So it's more the confidence going into that negotiation and knowing what it is about that helps you, at least what I've seen from.

Being on the other side, hiring people. It's, there's always if I wanted to have a specific person the money, if you take the bigger organization, the money is there. It's not that there is no money, it's more about how important is this person to this success in my case to me and my team and the organization.

Yep. You wanna show that you're more of a fit than anyone else, and you should be able to negotiate for

Yeah, exactly. I helped startups building their skills in leaderships. And one big topic for them is hiring.

Mm-hmm.

It's the biggest challenge. If you have never hired a person,

Mm-hmm.

you get started? So if we now turn the table and say, what would you recommend for people starting to hire.

How do they look for people? What is the best way to find the best people on the other side?

Right. I think the first step is to understand your company's hiring philosophy and peril philosophy, because there's going to be people that are gonna be a very good fit in your organization and there's people that are not, and. If you're, like, if you're doing your own thing, I think creating a hiring philosophy and creating a starting philosophy is really important.

So it's, it's just things like, we, this is the kind of behaviors we want to reward. These are the kind of behaviors we're looking for. A person who, this is what our business objectives are like in the next five years, and these are the kinds of people that will work well.

So having that very like high level idea of who you're looking for. Is important because it helps you differentiate between two otherwise really good candidates. And you might be like, oh, I don't know. And this will help you see who's actually going to fit better with the rest of your team.

And the next step is to write a job description, understand what your business needs are and put that into a job description that hopefully shows a little bit of. Personality of your team and what they can expect when they work with you, talking about not just oh my God, we need someone to fix this issue right now.

 I know. It's tempting to write a j job description like that where you just have a very short term view on things, but also this is what it's gonna take for you to be successful in the next five years. Kind of Touching on both of that and the job description will help people really be able to see what it's gonna be like working with you.

Hopefully as long as Jens brother or something, because turnover is so expensive. And then, yeah, it's just a matter of putting it out there and interviewing and understanding like, okay, oh, oh, and one thing. I would ask the same interview questions to everybody, and I know the flow gets a little bit messed up if you do that.

I'm not saying don't ask follow up questions, don't dig deeper into their resumes and that kind of thing. But standardizing what you ask is so important because if you're not. You're giving some candidates an unfair advantage over others, right? So having okay, these 10 questions no matter what I have to ask, like that's the bare minimum what you should be doing.

Introducing yourself, who you are, introducing some of the problems that your department's facing, introducing you know what you're hoping to achieve in the next few years. Really giving the candidate a complete picture so that they can first of all, relax and understand that you're also a human being.

And then second, they can speak to that in their interviews and you guys can see if it's a good fit for each other.

Yeah, I love that. I always did it and still do it in the, in the way that I try to. Give way more from my side in the beginning, just that the people, because it's a weird situation. You want to, to get the job and the other person, you don't know the other person. It's all a little bit weird.

So I just you, you wouldn't imagine that with me doing jokes, so I've, I'm just trying to get, depending on the context. True. Trying to get a calmer situation, just having a little chit-chat and just trying to have a normal conversation. But I also tried always to keep the questions in the same way that I understand how they're answering and then what at least helped me always have a second person inside of the same interview someone, and then having the discussion afterwards where I was like, oh my God, that was the best interview ever.

And the other person what the f. That person was the worst ever. And then you have a conversation, okay, maybe I was blind in this one and or the other way around, which was alway always quite cool.

One thing I think if you sense that the other person's stressed out and nervous, it's so normal when someone's interviewing, compliment something you see on their resume. Say, oh, that's really cool. And one of my favorite compliments to give is did whoa, this is so interesting.

A lot of the most successful people. In our organization have done X, Y, and Z similar to you because then they feel like, okay, like I'm relaxed and I this, we're talking about my strengths. We're not just talking about all of the things that you see as potentially defects in my profile.

yeah, yeah. Fascinating. I could speak to you a couple of hours more, but we need to get to the end because as you said in one of the recording breaks, I need to get to bed

Yeah.

to the at at the German time limit.

guy goes to bed at eight o'clock. You

Yeah, that's not true. It's after eight already. After eight.

do you have a warm glass of milk before you go to sleep?

No, no, I don't. I have a warm glass of beer. Let, let's, let's get into the last part of the podcast

good.

where I ask a couple of questions unrelated, but maybe related, so, If you could work with a project that is impacting every human being on earth, what project would you choose to work with, and why would you choose to work with that project?

I have the perfect answer to this because I'm working on it right now. I'm working on this like chat G P T script project thing where we are. Basically taking, we have this chat g p t script that writes your resume for you if you tell it your story. So we wanna take this and we wanna take, we're working on another script that helps people find the career that they should be pursuing.

We want to scale this across underprivileged universities in Pakistan first, and then hopefully across India as well. While doing that, we're also going to be providing training to the career services organizations of these universities because cuz that's a very unique country in that I think there's a lot of talent.

But due to a lot of the recent economic situations and like a lot of the climate change related situations too, like the recent flooding in Kochi and all of that, like it's. It's very difficult for you to have the upward social mobility that we take for granted in the western world. And right now they are experiencing a huge influx of very talented female refugees that are escaping from, the Taliban and everything.

So I think working on that, It's not gonna impact like everyone across the world, but I'm very excited to do this. I've already spoken to quite a few people that are going to be helping me with this vision, and what we want to do is take all of our services that we're providing at career tutors and figure out a way to package them in a way that AI can help us deliver them very effectively and efficiently and scale it to people who need it the most.

Like I was listening to, I think it was on the Daily or something where there was this, a Afghani refugee woman in the slums in Islamabad who was like an extremely qualified journalist who had to leave due to domestic violence issues. And she had two kids and she was like, I do not know what to do. This is I.

The most difficult situation for me, it's gonna cost $30 a month for me to send my kids to school, and I'm a $30 a month girl. Look like I have that in my pocket right now. And like the level of poverty. But at the same time, the level of qualifications and skill and passion that these people bring, I, I, I feel like AI is the way to match that and, and make sure that people are, are getting the, the proper social mobility they deserve.

Yeah, I love that. And it's still growing. If you take AI and she G P T, it's just, it's just the beginning.

Yes.

I agree. I think it's a, it's, it's a huge opportunity.

I just wanna say to the listeners, if you guys are, interested in this or you have any ideas for organizations that I can collaborate with in order to make this vision a reality, please, please reach out to me. I'll be posting about it on LinkedIn soon, I think.

Yeah. Reach out. Very important. Next question. What advice would you give to a young innovator that's just getting started?

A young innovator that's just getting started. Find a mentor and make sure you are getting all the resources that you need because you might have lots of ideas, but you need someone to make it a reality.

Yeah. That's so important and I've had the luck and the opportunities to have different mentors in my life who helped me. As well, being honest to me telling me what the truth is. Like you said with the job interviews, if you have someone used like a that sucks, don't do this,

But you need that, that's so

exactly, because in the normal business world, it's not happening.

It's seldom, let's say, it's very seldom that's someone's my God, you suck. That's not every day that it's happening. So getting it to an end. Where can people find you? How can people connect to you? Give us a little bit more information about your company, what you do as well.

Sure. So we provide resume writing, LinkedIn covered letter services, and we also help people identify which career paths would be best for them, how to get to those career paths, how to negotiate for more, and how to ask for a promotion once you get there. So if you are looking for growth in your career, or if you feel like, oh my God, I'm just stuck in a rut, you can reach out to me.

At the very least, you can download what I like to call my salary doubling resume cheat sheet. It's based on the case study of someone who used their resume to double the initial offer they were getting. You can grab that@careertuners.com slash free resources.

That's awesome. And you have to Fatemah on social media. I will put all the links down as well. They're fun videos, very helpful education. I have it in my feet every day since we connected, and I really like it.

Thank you. Thank you so much.

you very much for being on the show. What's a pleasure having you?