Pete Newsome - Top 5 Actions for Job Seekers & How To Stand Out from the Competition

Welcome to the job interview experience. I'm a former executive recruiter, search from owner, director of town acquisition, and today, your host of the job interview experience. Joining us today is Pete Newsom. Pete is the president of four corner resources, a staffing firm founded in 2005, and winner of numerous awards, most recently on Ford's best recruiting firms in America, the seminal 100 and the golden 100 Pete and his team also launched Zingig in 2022. We'll get to that more later in the episode. Pete is nationally recognized as a thought leader in hiring and recruiting with two decades of experience and placing over 15,000 candidates. I wanted to bring Pete on so that you can use his insight for your job search. He's also here to share his top five things that you should start doing today as a job seeker, his unique way to stand out from the competition. And I'm going to ask Pete what hiring looks like in 2023 and some predictions for the future. Pete, thanks for being here. After you, it's an absolute pleasure. Thanks for having me. Before we dig in, can you tell us a little bit about yourself outside of work, what you like to do for fun, how you like to spend your time? Sure. Well, I spend most of my free time with my kids. I'm fortunate to have four wonderful children and two are still at home. So I'm on the clock there with my youngest two in high school. So really trying to maximize as much time as I can with them. But I work at home now and have been since COVID. We decided not to go back to the office since launching Zingig about a year ago. I find that I spend most of my free time working these days, which is just fine with me. Can you provide a brief career overview and what led you to what you're doing today? Sure. Happy to. Well, you could say I was destined for sales. I came out of college with a two-point something GPA. Hopefully my kids aren't listening to hear that. A polyside degree. And like I said, I was destined for sales and I went to work for Arotech right out of college at the time. They were much, much smaller organization than the behemoth that they are now. It's as illegal global. I think it was about not even a hundred million dollar business at the time. And I learned a recruit from an amazing organization. And I didn't stay there that long. I wanted to start my own staffing company almost from the day I left. But I spent 10 years selling software solutions for two enterprise, four to 500 companies. And then I finally just had to scratch the itch, so to speak, and put a stake in the ground, start four corner resources. And that was 18 years ago, which seems almost impossible to believe. And I've just been managing the staffing company and trying to grow it and be the best that we can ever sense. And then a year ago, my team and I launched SynGIG, which is a career advice website, which is a totally new avenue for us. And between those two companies that you have, are you focused on just recruiting at four corner and then just the career resources at SynGIG? It's a great question. And I have said often lately that I bid off more than I can chew when we started SynGIG. I didn't anticipate how much I knew there was a need for better career content. I didn't anticipate how great the need was. And we fell into it five years ago. We started doing a lot of content creation with four corner and quickly realized that most of our traffic and attention was coming from the content we created for candidates. No great surprise in hindsight, candidates need information and it's a much larger pool than the hiring managers and talent acquisition professionals that we were targeting from a staffing standpoint. So we decided we to be really true to the content we needed to create a separate brand. And that's how SynGIG was born. And like I said, there's just so much out there, so much need from for students. And that's personal to me because I have teenagers as well as two kids who are in their 20s. They need advice. They need guidance, just like I did at that age. And there's really not a great place to go for it. All the way through senior experience, people need good information, especially those who haven't been on the market in a while. So there's a lot of needs that we're trying to serve through SynGIG and content takes time. And so it's been quite the journey over the past year and a half. A team of executive recruiters putting out information for job seekers. That's a really good match. I'm excited to talk a little bit more about that later on. Before we do, you've interviewed a lot of people and you've seen, I'm sure in your role as president at four corner, you've seen a lot of people go through the process saying from maybe a 30,000 foot view what type of people make it through, what type of people are standing out to your recruiters. What do you think are the top things that every job seeker should be doing during their job search and during their interviews? So there's five things that I start with that I think every job seeker should do. And unfortunately, there's a lot of people unintentionally unexpectedly on the job market right now. The first thing that I recommend is to tell everyone you know, this is a time to put your ego aside, ask for help. Don't be shy about doing that. I often say you should cast as wide a net as you possibly can. And that's really the goal of a job search is to find out as get as much exposure as you can. Find out as much about opportunities that exist that you possibly can. So start with your network friends, family, neighbors, let everyone know that you're on the market. The next thing is to take advantage of LinkedIn. It's such a powerful tool right now to a recruiter spend their day. They look for candidates there first more often than not. It's a way to have your resume be public and very findable. Update your LinkedIn profile. Make sure it's very professional in nature. And it's not that we take these things for granted sometimes being in the professional recruiting world, but it's still necessary to say so I be careful about everything that you have on LinkedIn and know that recruiters are going to see that as the cover of a book, right? The story is you, but the book has to look good on the outside. The next thing I recommend is to post your resume on the big job boards. We're talking indeed, Zip Recruiter, CareerBuilder Monster. If you post on those job boards in addition to LinkedIn, you have probably 95% of the market covered and that's where you'll be found. Again, that's what recruiters, those are the tools recruiters use to find candidates. The next thing is to connect with third party recruiters. Now, that's not something everyone thinks is a great step or one that they would even think to do, but there's a large percentage of jobs that go directly to third party recruiters that will never be available to you otherwise. And it's in your interest, again, back to my philosophy of casting a wide net, to connect with great recruiters in your space, whether that's your specialty, your geography, your industry, whatever it might be. And there's two places I recommend to find. Recruiter's one is clearly rated.com. It's an organization that independently surveys the candidates and clients of third party recruiters and then rates them publicly. You can search by industry and geography. So go to clearly rated.com and then also check out the American Staffing Association. I recommend ASA because they hold their members to a high standard. So sometimes, believe it or not, recruiters get a bad rap. I know that's hard to imagine, but ASA companies do operate at a higher standard. So you're safe to go there and you can again search by geography. And the last thing I'll say is of course I have to plug Zingig here is go to our job board. We have about seven million jobs that you can search there and also easily sign up for daily email alerts by title, by location. So you can have jobs set right to you and be the first to know, which is important right now because there's so many applicants for any individual job. So those are the five things. Those job alerts that you do are huge to me. That's like someone working for you because depending on your industry or how neat your role is sometimes refreshing a page a couple of times a day, it's just too much. And so having something that pushes those out to you as soon as a company hosts a job or within minutes of that makes a big difference. And it just takes the the headache away of having to check a bunch of different websites that wants. I'm personally a big fan of that. I'm going to ask you if there's anything job seekers shouldn't do. But before I do, I'm going to add my own because I keep meeting to mention this on the podcast and I keep forgetting. But you talk about LinkedIn. So for anyone listening, if you have a LinkedIn profile and you don't have a LinkedIn profile photo that page is about as good as non-existent to a recruiter. In my experience, they see that as nobody's home. No one checks it. Maybe they have a limited amount of messages they can send per month. Usually they pay to have a certain number of messages they can send to reach out to people. If they don't see a profile picture, they see that profile is inactive or even that you're just uninterested in what's become our professional role dex and putting a face to the name. So if you're listening, make sure the picture's professional. We all know that not the picture from last weekend out with friends or whatever else. But if you have anything slightly professional or even with phones these days, if you can go outside with a friend or a spouse and just have them take a bunch of pictures, find one that looks good with the blurred background, that will make a huge difference to recruiters. And I see a lot of people, they make the profile and they forget this, but it really helps put a face to the name and makes your profile look like one that's worth engaging with. So thanks for letting me get that out of the way, Pete. No, it's important advice. And I'll just add to that to say it doesn't have to be professionally taken, but it has to be a professional look in your picture. So it's a great way to start and it's a no brainer with camera phones. Anything else that job seekers should avoid maybe one or two things that you see happening fairly often. It's tough with LinkedIn because some of the biggest accounts on there, some of the influencers, I'll say that they pan. to the crowd at times. And this may not be the most popular statement, but they will tell candidates what they want to hear, not what they need to hear. Things like showing up early for an interview. I see posts that get lots and lots of likes and shares saying, this isn't, it's not important to do that. It's who you are on the inside. Don't worry about whether a candidate shows up. And I can promise you, companies care if you show up one time. So show up early. How you dress for an interview. Sometimes I see advice saying that doesn't matter. It does. Every single thing you do in that interview process matters. You are being judged. You are being graded against every other candidate who applies. It's really important to put your best foot forward in every interaction. And so I guess the overriding message there is just, be careful about who you take advice from. Everyone's well intended. Even though I say, I said earlier, tell your friends and neighbors and family to get you on the market because you do want to get leads from them. You never know where that great opportunity is going to come from. But it doesn't mean you should take resume advice from them or interview advice from them. So go to the professionals. Go to someone like you, Matthew, and what you do. Go to Zingig. We have lots of content on there for all aspects of the hiring process and job search process. So just go to those people who make a living by being effective and producing results in the recruiting process. Not just those who do it for likes and shares. - What you said about dressing well for interviews, I think has really come back with video interviews to be more relevant. I will use the term hope that people think that there's home fancy and office fancy. And home fancy is okay for an interview. And home fancy might be your favorite hoodie with your high school's logo on it or whatever else. And when I would come in on interviews and join virtual interviews with recruiters, interview candidates, I was really applied for fairly professional level positions, how casual and people just feel naturally comfortable at home. They think it's fancy to put on the sweater instead of pajamas, but how you dress for your interview needs to mirror the company culture, not where you are. So yeah, if it is a tech startup, maybe the hoodie will be okay. You don't want to wear a three piece suit. But for the most part, you can't go wrong with a button up polo or a blouse, anything like that. And it's also just a sign of respect. I think for the people's time, you don't have to get dressed up. Depending on the position, but you do need to mirror the role in the company. In my opinion, you need to go a little bit above that. So if it's a super casual company, you don't need to be super casual, but at least finding research in the company beforehand, finding out what they do, what they look like. And maybe going just a couple steps above that, it's really important. And it seems like that is fading away as people are on their sofa doing job interviews and maybe what they woke up in. That doesn't get people as far as maybe they think it does. - No, a lot of things like that have faded away. And that's great. If you're Michael Jordan, you can dress however you want. But most of us aren't Michael Jordan. And so we have to really do everything we can to put the odds in our favor. And to your point, that means dressing to impress. And realizing you, I'll say it again, it's you against every other candidate who's interested in that job. And everything you do matters. So pay attention, ask the recruiter who you're working with, what you should wear to an interview. That's always an easy guide. And then pay attention to it. I mean, I can't tell you how many candidates that ask that question or we share that information, make sure you wear it. I make sure you wear a coat. And then disregard it. And it doesn't go well. So if you ask the recruiter who's very motivated for you to be successful in that interview, you should follow their advice. - Yeah. And as I always say, recruiters want you to make a good impression. They want you to do well. They need to fill the role as quickly as possible. So that in a lot of ways, they're rooting for you to stand out and make a good impression. But it's also on them to relate. Your understanding of the role, the respect you show for at your conscientiousness, which I think is big for video interviews, things like that. So make it easy for them. And I like how you set it up. Put the odds in your favor. - Yep. Absolutely. - That's a good way to stand out from the competition for job seekers. How else can job seekers look at themselves? They resume their application and do things differently to help stand out from the crowd? We talked about this briefly before we started recording. There's, I'm old school. I mean, I'm old. I won't say I'm old school. I'm just old. When I started recruiting, we ran ads in the newspaper. We had resumes faxed in, mailed in. I was excited to check the mail every day as a recruiter to see what came in. But that seems like ancient history now. But we've gone so far in the other direction to make jobs so easy to apply to. I've been shocked. I'm not shocked anymore because it's been a couple of weeks I'm over it. It really has bothered me how many applications come in for any single job posting on LinkedIn, hundreds within a matter of hours, a thousand or more for many jobs out there. I'd say most jobs that are available on LinkedIn. That's a bad system. That's a broken system. No, we're not gonna fix that right now. And no candidates going to fix it during their job search process. So it's a matter of what can you do about that? Knowing what the situation is. So do something that other candidates won't. I mean, that's the best advice I can give. Pick up the phone and call. Call the company. If it's a third party staff company, call them and ask for the recruiter who's responsible for a job for that job. If it's a position being recruited directly by the end user employer, call and ask for the recruiter. You probably won't get that person live, but at least you'll get your name out there. And they'll pay attention. As you said, recruiters want candidates who are motivated. Well, that's gonna show motivation. That's gonna show your willing to do that extra bit. And while candidate recruiters naturally, of course, want to find the right candidate, they want to rule out the wrong ones. And that takes a big step in letting that recruiter know that you're not someone they have to worry about. And then the next thing, and this is really gonna make me sound old school, but I believe in it firmly, is right a handwritten note. Drop a card in the mail. It doesn't have to be elaborate. It doesn't have to be long. It's just enough. And over the years, I've received very few handwritten notes. I've done thousands of interviews. I've had hundreds of vendors trying to sell the products over the years. And the ones that send handwritten notes, for reasons I can't tell you, there's some psychology behind this, and I'm not equipped to explain. I'll keep those notes around. I have, I feel guilty throwing them out, because they're meaningful. A LinkedIn message isn't that meaningful. A one-click application certainly isn't meaningful, but a handwritten note, a little card in the mail, can make a huge difference. So I strongly recommend that candidates don't try to find a job based on volume of effort. Do it based on specificity of effort, and zero in on the positions that you're qualified for, that you're genuinely interested in from what you know about it, and then go all in on those. It's not more time. It's just more effort and a more focused direction. I started my recruiting business with handwritten notes to potential clients. And I would include some other information and a little envelope, of course, about what I do, but just a handwritten note, explaining how I thought I could help them. And it helped me tremendously. And I talk about handwritten notes on the podcast P, and my take on it is always, of course, first do it. Just do it, make it happen. But it's not even, it really doesn't matter. It does matter what the note says. What the note says has very little effect, I think, on the outcome. It's the fact that someone receives a note. It's the time that they know you put into it. We just know there's effort now. Where are the cards stock? Where's the pen? Where are the stamps? I've got to take it out to the mailbox. What you say is very important and what you should avoid saying is also very important. There's a lot of mistakes you can make there. But I think if you just wrote, "Thanks for interviewing me." And that's all that it would be just as effective. In this day and age, it just stands out in a way that nothing else does. It's physical and a digital age. Most of our jobs, if you're outside of physical products, I mean, almost everything's just in the open air. It's software. It's accounting software. It's insurance. It's whatever. And so the rare occasions where someone receives something physical just makes a different impact. And it shows that you care. It shows that you're invested. You can't send out 100 of these a week. So this is something that you care enough that you took the time to say something. And if you're the one candidate that does that, which you basically will be, even if you're not as technically qualified to have someone who's that bought in to spend the time will make you stand out. It's not guaranteed that you'll get the job. It certainly helps your chances. It's meaningful. Isn't that interesting? I didn't know you were a proponent of that as well. I talk about it constantly. And I would say, 0.01% of candidates actually do it if that. So even though I give that advice all the time, it sounds like you do very few listen and will take the steps. It is a great opportunity to stand out if you're willing to do it. Yeah. And I think that you can hedge your bets with emails because say you interview with someone at Google, it's gonna be really hard to get that card to them. And, but if you did it, it would help tremendously. So I think sending an email either the day you mail it or a couple days afterwards and just saying, "Hey, following up on my note I sent you in the mail." Maybe something like that, just so that they know you did it. I hate to say that with it. For those of you that are applying locally to companies in the hundreds or thousands, it's a lot easier to get a hold of someone at these big companies. I don't know if that mail is gonna reach them or if they're remote, things like that. But I think you can bring it up later on as a follow up and email, doing two follow ups, I don't think hurts anything if they're mirroring the same message, but there's a lot of options out there. I've never heard anyone say that the handwritten note hurt them. I've only heard positives from it. And it's good to hear that from you too, being on the hiring or representing talent side. Absolutely. So, What does four-corner resources do that's helped you gain so much recognition for how well you do things but also for your growth? - Wow, that's a great question. Consistency, I think more than anything, we are blessed to have very loyal long-term clients. I don't think that's coincidence though. I think it's because they know what to expect from us. When I started the business, it's a long time ago now, but I've really kept the same standards that I started with, which was I knew that everyone I did business with had a line out the door of options that they could be working with, and I had one shot, and not that I had to deliver every time, but that I had to do what I said that I would do. And that was important to me, and I also have always thought that the value of a staffing company like mine is to save time and effort to our clients and deliver the highest quality that we can't. So from day one, my objective, and it's the same that we have today, is to fill every opening with as few resumes as possible, and ideally that's one. So that means we can't work with everyone. We're not really good with, we don't work with VMS systems, we don't do a lot of high volume recruiting where we don't have any interaction with hiring managers. It's a very intimate thing, and I believe hiring is an intimate process when it's done right. So we, yeah, we try to spend as much time on the front and fully comprehending the role, and explaining as thoroughly as we can to candidates, as I said, ruling out the candidates who are a good fit, making sure that position is interesting to them and fits their objectives as much as anything else. We never try to talk anyone into a role, quite the opposite. I like talking them out of it, if anything. And then delivering one candidate per opening. Now we don't hit the mark 100% of the time, but when that happens, we consider that a problem. We stop and evaluate. Where did the commission breakdown go? Was it between us and the client? Was it an internal? Was it between our recruiter and our candidates? We just try to be as accurate as we can and consistent over the years. And I think that's, it's not much of a secret to success, but it's easier said than done, I think. Have you and your team at four corners noticed any changes? Let's say in the last year, and what clients are looking for or prioritizing for the candidates that they want to see? And the market has been crazy since COVID hit as we know. We went, the pendulum just has had these giant swings from everyone, so many layoffs that happened in early 2020 to massive hiring swing going the other way where you couldn't get enough candidates for openings. And now unfortunately, it seems to be going the other way. So I'll say over the past few months, I've seen everything scrutinize at a deeper level that it has been. Hiring is slowed down. This isn't great news. I wish I had a better message to share, but it's reality of what's going on in the market right now. So I think it's just a need to be more precise than ever with what's going on in the market and just communicate openly. Right? I mean, that's, again, sounds easy, but it doesn't happen often enough. So my advice to talent acquisition professionals is take advantage of the recruiters if you're using a third party. Give them as much information as they can, as you can, and they'll be your best ally and resource out in the field. And by the way, most of the time we work for free until we deliver on a contingency basis. So take advantage of that. If I had free lay, if anyone's offering me free labor, if anyone listening wants to call me and offered it work for free until they deliver, I'm going to sign you up for it. And then recruiters just be open and honest with candidates. I mean, that shouldn't be necessary to say, but a lot of people are looking right now. So we need to just be very clear and direct about what expectations should look like on any job opening. Are you seeing industry growth in any certain sectors for you and your team? I wish I had better news right now. We're based in central Florida. We see some industries not being affected specifically, but I'm not experiencing significant growth in any sector right now. I wish I had better news. We do a lot of IT recruiting. We know it's been lots of layoffs in that space. Honestly, pre-COVID, I would have told you in my lifetime, until I retired, there was always going to be more job openings and there were qualified candidates to fill them in the technology space. But that's not the case right now. So it's a weird dynamic going on in the market right now. I don't think companies are somewhat frozen and unsure about market conditions and how to act if they should act. I wish I had better news there. I hopefully other staffing companies are experiencing better results and we have over the past few months, but it's a tight market. And you tell us a little bit more about Zingig. Zingig is what I think the market needs so badly right now. As I mentioned earlier, I don't remember if this was before we started recording Matthew, but I have a college senior. I have a recent grad. I have a high school senior and their friends and their parents, the parents of their friends. Everyone is trying to figure out where to get good information. As far as degrees, job opportunities, whether college is even necessary to go to. Now that's a whole different discussion. I won't go down that road right now. But there's no great source for that kind of advice. And so Zingig started off with the intention of providing career advice and content to experience professionals from early career to senior, but we realized the scope is even bigger than that. It really needs to start with high school students on having a good resource to go if you want to know how to become a surgeon or you want to know how to become a marine biologist. You need to figure out what that job looks like. You need to figure out what that career path looks like. What kind of degree do you need? What is your life going to be if you go down that road? So Zingig provides that. We have 500 career guides that's growing every day where we offer as much information as we can about any specific job title. And then we are really trying to be that comprehensive site, which I don't think exists with high quality anywhere else. So I didn't necessarily set out to build this such a big website. It's still a work in progress. We have a long way to go. But that's what Zingig is really all about is being the one-stop shop that job seekers or people in their career or just beginning their career can go to and find everything from salary data to interview help, to resume help. We're just trying to be that one source. And if we're not the best answer for it, we're going to connect our website visitors to the source that is. Yeah, for those listening, it's zingig.com. And it's really cool just having so many things in one place, zenigig.com. And we'll link to it in this episode's description as well. It's definitely worth checking out and finding things that apply to you. And why I wanted to have Pete on the show is it's built by his team of recruiters and executive recruiters. And I don't talk about it enough on the show, but there's so much bad information about there. I think some of the top career influencers, if you actually look them up, they've never worked in a recruiting role. They've probably interviewed-- maybe they've sat in one or two interviews for other people besides themselves or whole life. And I don't mean that to say that in an unkind way, but they're just copying information from wherever they find it online and making it sound good for you. Having a team of executive recruiters, each of which I imagine have interviewed a lot of people have been impressed or unimpressed with a lot of people infusing with that information and then also your career guides, things like that get people more in sight than they would hear on this show or other places. I'd recommend you go check it out. I really liked what I saw there. How can listeners connect with you and your companies? What's the best way if they want to get in touch or just dig in more to your resources? I'm on LinkedIn a lot more these days than I have been. So feel free to reach out there, but also just go to our website for staffing, of course, for corner resources and then gig. So thank you for the very kind words about that. It means a lot. It's a very much a passion project for me and one that we really hope will help a lot of people. And I will say all our content is free. If my CFO is listening, I promise we'll figure out how to make money, the money back on it one day. But in the meantime, our goal is just to provide as much information as we can. So if you need something that you don't see on ZenGig, message me on LinkedIn. Please, I'd love to know I can't promise we'll build it immediately, but I promise that we'll do the research and if it's something that is needed in the market, we'll figure out a way to provide the content for it. Pete, can you share some final words of motivation or encouragement as listeners take what you've shared, a pipe to their job search, but also get back out there to the world of applying and interviewing? If you're frustrated, just know that these things come in cycles. And I've been through many of them. Again, I'm old. So I've had the opportunity to see ups and downs through my career, financial things that are going on on the economy and in the job market and just know that things will improve. And now that may not be helpful in the moment. But if you take the advice that I know Matthew gives and some of the things we've talked about today, I believe you can change the odds in your favor. I mean, that very sincerely, like we've both just said, no one writes handwritten notes, even though it sounds like we both give that advice regularly. Very few people will pick up the phone and call a recruiter for a job that they applied for just to get their name in that person's ear so they can have their resume pulled out from the pile. These are simple things hard to do. Right, you have to be disciplined and committed to it. But you can make a difference. I truly believe that. You can pull yourself out of just the masses if you do a couple of different things. So that's the best advice I could give to a job seeker. That's what I would do right now if I were on the market or for close friend or family. Remember, I actually do give that same advice to the people I know the closest and care the most about. Take just do those extra little things and it can make a big difference. - Thanks a bunch for joining us. And for sharing your insight on careers, I hope to bring you back on podcasts again, sometimes soon. - Wonderful, thanks so much for the opportunity. We should. - Quick favor, if you're listening on Apple podcasts, we're only a couple hundred reviews away from 1000, which is an enormous milestone for the show. If you've gotten value from these episodes and you have the Apple Podcast app, it takes 10 seconds just tap the five stars and hit submit. Or I'd love to hear your experience and how this has helped you in the review. These stories mean everything to me. Let's hit that 1000 mark together and thank you so much in advance.