A new job? In 5 weeks? In this economy?!

I would not want to try to be looking for a job right now. I just, I don't think I have it in me, to be honest. - Okay, that's the social clip. (laughing) - Alex here, this episode is brought to you by our friends @Meshakool. I'll be honest about my relationship with social media. I don't love using it personally. Unfortunately, social media is an absolute essential for work. Significant amount of super past growth traces back to LinkedIn. But it's the single most distracting part of my week. I sit down to write. I open LinkedIn to schedule one post and 40 minutes later, I'm reading a thread about something that has nothing to do with super fast or content marketing. The other thing that bugs me is that it never closes. There's always one more comment sitting there, one more thing to queue up before tomorrow morning. Metricool surveyed people who do this professionally, like me, and more than a half said, they feel as overwhelmed as ideal. Metricool rentals the chaos of social media and marketing with one streamlined calendar for all of your channels. So you can schedule content, format posts, and interpret analytics all in one place instead of opening five different distracting apps. It tells me the best time to post based on my own account data rather than generic benchmarking. And the reporting sits right there. So I know what actually worked for the last month. My favorite part is that there's one single inbox to manage all of your conversations across different channels. Over three and a half million professionals use Metricool daily. Start free or get 30 days of any premium plan with our super path code. They'll link in that code or in the show notes. Enjoy the episode. This summer Ruth found herself in the midst of a job search. In just five weeks, she landed a new role. In any environment that's impressive, but particularly in this job market. Ruth agreed to let the gang, that'd be me, Chloe, and Rachel today, put her on the hot seat to ask her how she did it. While no job search is the same, there's some interesting takeaways for anyone who finds themselves looking for their next thing right now. Hope you enjoy the episode. Ruth, you got a job. Tell us about it. It's been five weeks, right? Since you were laid off and you've already got a new job. And I've already got a new job. Hey, it's been really fun. I am really excited. And yeah, it was rough. It was rough out there. It was not fun. (laughing) But I made it through, and that's all that matters. Give us the high level of what the process was like. Can you give us just the numbers? Summary, and this is gonna probably surprise a lot of people, but I think I submitted 30 applications. I had two or three recruiters reach out to me, and I didn't hear back from about half of those. I interviewed with like five, and I got rejected by 10. The only jobs that I actually made it to the end for were the ones that the recruiters reached out to me too. - Interesting. - It was really interesting, 'cause I spent those five weeks agonizing over all of these submissions when in the end, I should have just been focused on those relationships with the recruiters that I was speaking with. I am now the director of marketing at Answer Rocket, which is a boutique AI consulting firm based in Atlanta, and we do AI solution building for a variety of industries. So happy to talk about that. - Is it remote? - It is remote, yeah. I am based in Salt Lake City, so I get to stay here. - Nice, okay, so you had a five week process and you got a remote job, so that's basically like the dream for everybody. That's in the job search right now. - That's also a high level of activity though, for five weeks, like that's six applications a week. - You know, I didn't sleep much, mostly due to the stress of having lost the job in there. - Yeah, no, I was told the week prior like on a Thursday that my last day was going to be the next Monday. So my official layoff date was June 15th, with that layoff date, I took the weekend to process and kind of make a plan of, okay, I'm going to post on LinkedIn on Monday, and over the weekend it kind of just texted everybody that I knew, and it came as a shock to everybody because I'm the kind of person who loves my job. No matter where I go, I love my job. So I spent the weekend just kind of like dropping little crumbs, past managers, past colleagues, past co-workers, I made my post, and that post kind of blew up. I think I got over like 10,000 impressions on it, and it's still getting reactions to this day. And from that post, I think that's how the recruiter found me. - I was gonna ask, yeah. The recruiter found me didn't reach out to me until the 23rd, which is like a solid week later. At that point, I had already been dropping applications, probably optimizing my LinkedIn profile for the third or fourth time, really figuring out what my headline should be, what I'm trying to market myself as. I have spent the last five years kind of being a generalist, so I could kind of silo myself anywhere. Now as a director of marketing, I am going to be a content-forward director of marketing. With that in mind, it was kind of hard trying to figure out what to apply for in the five week journey, but I knew that I wanted to stay in the AI world. So when answer about me, I was like, this is perfect. - Did you feel like the 30 applications that you put in without the recruiter was wasted effort, or were you making progress on those as well? - I don't think it was wasted effort. I was making progress on them. I did get a lot of emails back, but at that point, I was in the second and third round with the recruiters I was speaking to. It was also good practice, honestly. One thing that sucked was that I tailored my resume, you guys. I'm not kidding, I think I made a custom resume for each of those 30 jobs that I applied to. I'm sorry, I think that's so overrated, even though everyone tells you to do that. - No, and it wasn't because I wanted to. It was because I wasn't doing it for fun. I wasn't doing it because it was like best practices. I was literally doing it because the way that I could write my experience for the different jobs I was applying to, do I want to be a senior PMM? Do I want to go be a director of content? Do I want to be a director of marketing? I ran a global events program. I've done product marketing, I ran a content program for three years. How do I position that for each of those three different roles? Because everybody is defining a PMM and a content manager so differently these days. - Uh-huh. - And if you don't freaking do something to your resume to get past the ATS, you're not getting past that ATS. - It sounds like you went on an accelerated period of self-discovery, which I feel like happens when your job searching. I obviously recently went through this myself twice, which was super fun, don't the sarcasm. And I kind of went through that journey as well where I interviewed for like a VP of marketing job at a really small startup. And I was leading with brand. I was leading with content. I was like, this could be really interesting. The only director of VP jobs that appealed to me were the ones that were more focused on the content heavy portion. Because I had like a conversation with one of my peers and she basically said, as the person that's in charge of everything, know your strengths and surround yourself with the people or tools that fill in the gaps. And that really helped reframe me from being like, oh, I could never do that to being like, oh, okay, it's about finding like the right fit. So I went from generalist marketing leader to also looking at PMM jobs, to also being like, well, obviously my sweet spot is content. I think as time went on, I just started getting like narrower, narrower in my search. But I started the exact same way that you did, which was like, well, technically I could do all of this. So why not apply for all of this? I think I started like that at the beginning. I kind of was like looking for everything. But I had a narrow search of the types of companies that I wanted to apply for. I knew that I wanted to stay in the AI world. I used to market a weather climate type of solution. Unfortunately, that industry is very, very small. What's adjacent space? Space is so hard to get into and they also want you on site in California, Texas, or Florida. So what's next tech? B2B SaaS, AI. What about an AI company that is serving all of it, Bingo? That's kind of like where I ended up looking and everything that I built for my job search because it was so quick. I actually have recruited reaching out now, but it takes time. I do want to emphasize that this was really fast and Chloe, to your point of not having to customize your resume, I would also counter that in this job market, I think you have to because the companies that are looking for marketers genuinely want people who have marketed to that industry before. I got recruited by a company because they wanted somebody who had marketed to HVAC. I used to work for an energy efficiency company. No, part of it, Chloe. It's such a tiny thing that they're like, hey, we're struggling to find somebody who knows this, how much of it do you understand? We need to be selling this entire system. Like, okay, cool. This is what I understand, this is what I know. How technical do you need me to be? And they want that on your resume. And these days, you're seeing content marketing, life sciences and health care. How do you show that that is the industry that you have written for or created product marketing for your entire career or understand fully? It's really hard to kind of switch into that if you've only ever written for tech and sales enablement. Yeah, I mean, I think what you're getting at, which is what I think it's challenging to switch context in this job market. it. So I think like really understanding what your superpowers are, what your background is, and like what you bring to the table and then articulating that through your cover letter and through your resume and the best way possible. That's why I'm kind of the counter tailoring your resume. At one point I had like four or five different versions of my resume because I was applying for all sorts of different positions and I wasn't getting anywhere and the only traction I was getting were the things that I could speak about more, particularly that cool, that makes sense. That I could be that I knew my shit, right? I feel like you guys are kind of describing two different approaches to a really niche job market. Like Ruth, it sounds like your approach was more like I'm going to apply wide to like anything that might be within my jurisdiction but I'm going to customize my application of my resume very strongly to each one. But then Chloe, you're kind of advocating for like just create a few versions. So niche with what you're looking for and then zone in on those very narrow jobs that fit. You know, Ruth is kind of looking out and customizing and you're kind of customizing first and then finding what will fit that and bringing that into you. I mean, it makes sense that both of those approaches worked for both of you but it feels like the kind of thing that's like just don't mix them. Don't try to do both. You know, pick an avenue and then go for it. Yeah, because if you're trying to do both, you're just going to end up sad. You're going to be doing like really vague trying to do everything, not really doing anything well. Looking for a job is also a full-time job. Yes. You spend so much time customizing a resume. I think as marketers, we also get caught up in what I wanted to look nice. The hour you guys I spent in Canva, I think I paid for a month of Canva premium because I was like, no, I need the templates. I used shout out to a Novo resume and I did pay for a premium or some sort of subscription because their formats are ETS friendly, but yeah, it looks nice. As a marketer, you do feel like it has to have some sort of flair, but at the same time, I'm not a designer, so I wasn't about to fake that. I once turned in an English assignment that was mostly stick figures because for some reason, they were having us draw in AP English class. True story. Nothing wrong with a stick figure. So you said that job seeking is a full-time job, but how did you protect your mental well-being? Two things. I have a hot yoga studio membership that I took full advantage of, and I have a six-year-old dog who I would hug in between job applications, so I have a six-year-old dog that I also hugged in between job applications. I feel like every time I would submit a job, I would just look her and be like, we're one step closer, Rosie. We're getting your bones, but no joke. I was doing a lot of hot yoga. I was trying to read more. I think I was just like leaning into hobbies, which is really hard for me. I am a workaholic. Imagine going from working all day long, and then you get told. You were traveling for work, right? You were doing a big event. I was doing a big event, and I was traveling internationally, and then I got told my role as being eliminated in a restructure. I go from running a marathon to literally. Nothing. Everything just stopped. It was like a shock to my system. Yeah, it's so jarren. It was really, really weird for me. It was an insane. It was a strange body experience for me, and I had to fill my time, and I immediately filled it with applying for jobs. I was just going to say, like, not to get too psychological, but do you think part of why happened so fast for you is because you just threw yourself into it with that same. I'm just going to work at this 24/7 mentality. That and another thing is this is the second layoff experience that I have had, and I was so much better prepared for it this time than I was the first time around. My network was so much bigger making that post on LinkedIn. Having a recruiter find me is not how my last layoff went. This experience was better, I would say, but it was still a complete shock and unexpected. I had to fill my time, and I also was like, okay, this is weird. I think that's interesting because I think. I was on the job hunt much longer than you. There's a difference between like that first sprint, I think, in the first couple months, and then when it starts to drag on a bit, and then you start getting panicky, and then you start looking at, oh, my unemployment's about to run out, and where can I tighten this, and where can I do that? There's definitely a shift that happens, but for people depending on where you are and in the process and the timeline, I found that time blocking, like certain actions was really helpful for me. So I still filled my calendar, but I filled it in a different way. So it wasn't like, I'm going to spend six and a half hours looking at jobs and filling out applications and tailoring this and customizing this and doing this. I came up with more of a like, okay, Mondays, I'm going to spend some time actually looking for the jobs that I want to apply for, and then I'm going to spend the afternoon applying for the handful of those because you do want to be like first in the door. And then I locked out like a couple days for more like networking-related things, like a coffee chat or a local networking event. The hobby thing is great, and I just know if you're in the thick of it, and if you're in like month three or four of searching, there is no amount of exploitive that are going to come out of your mouth after someone says that, right? Like it's just like, that's just not your focus, but what I will say is try to balance between whatever the hobbies, whatever keeps you sane and healthy with things that you feel are going to like advance your search in some way. Whether that's, I'm going to spend an hour making sure that my resume is the best it can be or perfecting my cover letter template, or I'm going to go like network or I'm going to go have a coffee chat, or I'm going to go boost my LinkedIn presence by spending like half an hour doom scrolling on LinkedIn or finding new people to follow because I want to get inspired. It doesn't have to take over your entire life and overwhelm you, but I get it Ruth because I'm a workaholic too, and I went through the exact same stages. Now there are a lot of people that are probably listening to this that have not, you know, the job process is hard for everybody, but for you it was five weeks. You had recruiters reach out, obviously you made it pretty quickly through the process with a lot of companies. So I'm curious, like while it's still fresh, what do you think are some of the experiences and skills that stood out and helps you move through the process quickly? So there's two things that I like did specifically in my job search that I think helped me one get my foot in the door for some of the organizations that I applied for, like the jobs that I did interview for all were because I submitted an application and I had somebody refer me. I did the whole, you know, find a role you want to apply for and then find somebody, see if you know somebody at that organization, and lucky for me, I have spent a lot of time over the past three years building my network by joining superpath, by joining a couple other communities a few years ago. I was one of the first AI marketing specialists hired during the first wave of AI and since then I've kind of been able to tell a story. These days with how marketing is growing, with how teams have shrunk, teams want to hear that. The other thing is that I always emphasized my results first. My resume is like my name, a headline about where I am, and my LinkedIn profile, my email, and then four key things about me. They're all related to the title, but I'm framing four big things that I've done in my last role that all have to do with ROI. That's what they want to see. How do marketers connect what they're making to money? Are, you know, tried and true conversation of how do you connect content to ROI? And if you can tell that story, then they are going to want to continue to talk to you. I know you had a very AI workflow forward role. In my mind at least, as I think about this, I'm like, oh, you had an AI forward role, a lot of the people hiring right now are probably looking for those people with those experiences. Do you think that was relevant or could you cite anything in particular? Any stories that came up in the interview process that you're like, wow, I'm so glad I had X experience or story to tell because I think that went really far. Every single role I applied to asked me about my AI experience. Tell me about how you have been using AI. How are you using it right now? Even as you search for roles, how have you been using it? Many of the roles I applied to asked if you had built something that was still being used, and if it saved anything, any costs, what did you build? What did it do? Trying to get out of you. Do you know how to use vibe coding tools? Speak to those tools. They're trying to poke at that. And I think just having been exposed to, yeah, I know how large language models work. And I also know that there are content tools and that there are video tools and that there's these other tools. Which ones do you want? That would impress a VP of marketing who is in strategy meetings all day long and they haven't had a chance to try out anything. I'm curious what the makeup of your of your new team is because you went from those your title before and what's your title now. Now you're director of marketing. But before I was a senior marketing manager. Okay. Okay. So there wasn't content in your last title either. There wasn't content. No. but it was a very content heavy role. That's the interesting thing, right? Like my last content role was one job before that where I was a content marketing manager. And then my first role, and my last org was a marketing specialist where my first task was Transformer SEO strategy. So very content focused. That's interesting. So, and how big is the marketing team that you are joining/leading? So it's really small actually. I have a team of four. I'm interested in your journey because you went from being like content focused to like generalist to then generalist plus content to kind of like leadership. So like you sort of have I feel like a lot of people listening to this are thinking, okay, well what's beyond content? Or is there the world beyond content? And like you you've landed that now. So I guess what are you most excited about learning about in your new role? And what do you think you're going to take forward with you from all of the content things you've learned? I like to say that a hill I will die on is that all marketing is content because it is. You have to write something for everything that you are creating. Whether it's a campaign, a new product launch, a trade booth, whatever there's some written asset there. And it has to look good. I want to understand from the rest of the organization, all of marketing is content. What do you need from that in order to succeed and build pipeline? There are just a lot of gaps between the relationship that I'm noticing. It's like you know the typical story of there needs to be better processes between sales and marketing in order for harmony to exist. It doesn't exist. And you can tell. And now I get to kind of like bring things together and see how it comes together. So I'm excited to kind of bridge that gap using AI and also just learning traditional sales strategy. I was given like three book titles today that I have never heard about because I've only ever been in tech. Wait, what are they? Now we need to know. One of them is called like one the challenger. Yes. Yeah, I was going to be on there. Yeah. What is that? You. Yeah. Yeah. So we were talking about the challenger today. And I was like, excuse me? You're who? What? So that was interesting. Was another one beautiful constraints? No, no, but the challenger, a former SVP of sales, how does all read? It was fascinating and infuriating to me as well because I'm not one for the like magic wand question. I deal with like reality and logistics and the whole point of it is we didn't have constraints. Like what would you do? And I was like, this isn't logical, but it did promote a lot of thinking. And it's a really pretty book. I think that's interesting. I've also been at an organization where I've seen what happens when it works and I've seen what happens when it doesn't. Anything you can do is a marketing leader to try to understand where the gap is and then also like be proactive in offering solutions to fix it is really important. Yeah. So I'm excited to just build and actually have a say in what gets built. Do you have any tips for anyone that is on the job search right now as we kind of run this out? Yeah. Don't go it alone. Number one, have someone you're talking to. I had a friend in another community. I'm in shut up to Natalie from marketing women who I think I was talking to her every single day just updating her on like how job things were going, how application submissions were going. But she was also on the job search. She had me as a sounding board and I had her and we'd never felt like we were alone in it, which it can get lonely. The two of us had a very short job search. I really want to emphasize that this is surprising to me also and probably do a lot of people out there who are like, oh my gosh, how did you do that? I feel like I have done a lot to make myself marketable and you need to do that too. I think people think it's cringy as hell to try to build your own brand. I do too. I don't think I have built my own brand, but I have done what I can to highlight the work that I have done in my role and then showing that on my LinkedIn profile and then optimizing my LinkedIn and having it searchable. Really good point though. Whether or not you are in a job search or preparing for a potential layoff or preparing for like your next step and thinking about how you can market yourself in a non cringy way is really important. I joined this podcast while I was job searching because I was losing faith in myself. Do people care about what I'm talking about? And I found out I guess people do, which is great. But on top of that, it also gave me stories to tell. One of the best pieces of advice that I got was by Pete Vomichel. I might be pronouncing his last name wrong. I'm not actually sure. But he has this banner which is like open to help and he are like happy to help and he literally dedicates his time hopping on with people who want to network or people that are job seeking and giving them just really straight forward advice and what he told me because I was definitely in a bit of a downward spiral when I talked to him was I'm looking at LinkedIn profile right now. And while you're a good writer and you're entertaining, don't be the person that just talks about looking for a job. Don't make that your brand and your personality. And I went, oh, and then I looked at my last post and I was like, yeah, you are kind of right. The way you found your sort of like partner and crime for this, try to find people that yes, you can vent to and that, you know, you can network with but also people that are going to lift you up and move you in the right direction because the way that you're portraying yourself right now during your job hunt, people are paying attention to that. So the more that you can talk about what you've experienced, what you've done, what you want to do, what you're learning, those things I think are really just pieces that you can bring. Start your own personal brand even if you don't want to call it a personal brand yet. It took me a while before I was like, I guess this is my brand. But really it's just talking about the shit that you really like to talk about and that you hopefully know that you're good at. And I like what you've kept saying to Ruth about figuring out how to tell a story with your career growth in that you're not just spouting out random facts of like, oh, here's a thing I did about figuring out how to weave all of those pieces together into a narrative so that a recruiter, for example, can come in and look at that and say, I understand how this person is going to fit into this role that we need. It's easy to be a storyteller for other people and sometimes it's hard to kind of tell your own story. I've definitely experienced that at least, but I feel like just applying those content narrative skills to our own career journeys can be such a game changer or at least it, it seems like it was for you. I think the biggest piece of advice I've been told in career searching is to turn your like your pitch about you into a short story. If you were to summarize your entire career history into a short story, how do you do that? My short pitch will be my five years with a one second intro of the first, like seven years of my career. I'm also really, really good at meeting someone's energy because no matter who they are, I will lift it up. They'll start somewhere and then I'm like, nope, we're going up. We're we're actually going to pump this conversation up because we're both going to leave this conversation happy. And you're going to remind you're going to remember me as the smiley person who made you have a happy day. I love that. And that's all my intention is like, I'm fun. I'm just picturing you showing up to an interview with a shirt that says like, I'm fun. Smile. I'm like, hire me. Hashtag fun. So that's your if that you're going to take anything away from this call. It's to wear a shirt that says hire me. I'm fun. I think that might be a good place to end it. Ruth, thanks for letting us put you on the hot seat today. And congrats again on the new job. Thank you so much. Rachel, Chloe, thanks for joining. We'll talk to you all soon. Fun times as always. Congratulations, Ruth. Congrats, Ruth. Thank you.