5 Hacks for Landing an Interview - Insights from Janet Murphy
It is a competitive market for candidates looking to land a job. It is not enough to meet the job criteria - thousands of others meet it too. You need to stand out. Janet Murphy tells you how.
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Life is fragile.
It takes only one moment for your life to be changed forever. All of the plans you had for yourself suddenly become irrelevant.
The strange part? We don’t always recognize that moment until years after it happened.
This was Janet Murphy’s experience - a 17-year recruiting veteran, President and Founder of iPRO Staffing, MBA graduate, and soon to be published author of “Recruiter Hacks to Get Hired".
(Pre-sale to her book, which is set to release July 2024, can be found here).
So what was Janet’s pivotal moment?
It was when she took a personality test while interviewing with a recruiter for a job placement. The result suggested she would make a great recruiter. This was quite the opposite career path she had intended when she became an engineer years before.
So like any great engineer, Janet followed the guidelines given to her by that personality test and built herself a respectable and impactful career, one that has brought her fulfillment, joy, and deep expertise of her craft.
Cubicle Farm was fortunate to sit down with her and get the inside scoop on how candidates in today’s job market can stand out and get noticed by hiring managers.
How to Set Yourself Apart in a Competitive Job Market
1. Use LinkedIn
LinkedIn is the most utilized tool for companies to look for candidates. It is integral for any candidate that is looking to make a career change.
The first thing that you should do if you are looking for work is to optimize your LinkedIn profile. You can do this by customizing your URL, or notifying recruiters that you are “open to work”. Even adjusting your photo and banner to promote industry-specific content and professionalism will go a long way.
2. Network Strategically
Before you even apply for a company, use LinkedIn to research the employees. One simple hack to increase your ability to get in front of a human is to get a company referral from a current employee. Perhaps you don’t know anyone at the company you are interested in? Janet has a hack for that too.
Reach out to employees that graduated from the same university as you.
For example, I am looking online for a job and I see one that interests me: .Senior Product Manager - Ad Syndication for Yelp. Instead of running straight to the website to apply, I am going to do some research. My steps will look like this:
1. Search “Yelp” on LinkedIn
2. Filter by “People”
3. Click “All Filters” and Filter by “School”
4. Click or Search the School
5. Filter by “Current Company”
Pro Tip: You want to make sure that you are looking through candidates that still work with the company. LinkedIn may try and show you any person that has “Yelp” in their profile, which could mean they previously worked there, or they simply wrote about it on their profile somewhere.
6. Message the Employee
To refine your search even more, you can narrow down the candidates by ‘1st Connection’ and ‘2nd Connection’. This allows you to reach out to people in your personal network that work for the company, and who also graduated from the same university as you. That is very powerful. But even just as powerful is if someone from your network can give you a warm introduction to an employee from your target company, who also shares your alma mater.
In my example, I had no ‘1st’ or ‘2nd’ connections, so I would lean solely on the fact that we have a shared experience graduating from the University of Utah. When I message the person, I want to make sure I highlight that point.
I may say something like:
“Hi,
I’m a University of Utah alumni. I am looking to make a career change. I see that you’re working at Yelp. I’d love to learn more about why you enjoy working there.”
When I speak with the individual during our scheduled chat, I can then ask them if they feel comfortable submitting my name to Yelp as a referral. If they accept, my resume will go straight into the hands of a human.
Response rates are not going to be 100% with this method, so you may want to message a few individuals from the company to increase your odds of talking with someone. Even if you have to message a handful of employees via this method, this approach is going to be more fruitful than blindly submitting your application via the ATS, as internal referrals have a high likelihood of getting an initial interview.
3. Tailor Your Resume and Cover Letter
Every application, resume and cover letter that you submit should be customized to the job for which you are applying. The goal of the resume and cover letter is not to get a job. The goal of these tools is to help you get in front of a human and get an interview. So you need to customize your documents to get through the Applicant Tracking Software (ATS).
One of the best ways to do this is to ‘word match’. To do this, there are different tools online where you can copy and paste the job description to learn which words are being most used in the description. The specific words that are being used in the description are exactly what you should use on your resume, even if there are synonymous words or phrases that are more commonly used in the industry.
For example, if I have experience with ‘fraud detection’ and ‘risk management’, but the job I am applying for uses the phrases ‘risk mitigation’ and ‘loss prevention’, then I want to prioritize using ‘risk mitigation’ and ‘loss prevention’ within my documentation. Matching terminology to the company’s job description is paramount to succeeding with the ATS.
A simple way to word match is to add a section to the bottom of your resume where you can match keywords to the skillsets and qualities that you possess. This is a powerful way to score well with the ATS.
Of course, you should never lie on your resume. Don’t keyword match skillsets and qualities that you don’t actually possess. With that said, you don’t have to be the best at any skillset. You just need to be able to tell a story about a time where you demonstrated it in action. If you can do this, then keyword match the term.
Taking up too much space on the resume with these keywords should not be a worry, as a resume should be two pages long (it can even be three pages if the the third page is simply to fill out the keyword matches).
Some professionals have advised candidates to put their keyword matches in white font so that it is not visible on the resume. However, ATS tools are smart enough to catch this trick, and it may disqualify you. Even if it makes it through the system successfully, it is not wise to start off a professional relationship with a lack of transparency and honesty.
4. Understand the ATS
In addition to understanding the value of keyword matching, you should also understand how the ATS works. Most systems grade resumes on a scale of 0-10 or 0-100, with a minimum score requirement of 7 to 8, or 70 to 80 respectively, before the resume is passed on to a human. So your goal is to match enough of the keywords to reach this minimum score.
But even if you are using all of Janet’s tricks, you may still fail to get an adequate score if you are using the wrong format for your documents.
If you are like me, you have been told to always save your document into a pdf format before you send it via email. The form and structure of the document will hold better than if you were to send it via a word document. However:
You should never submit a resume in a pdf format.
The ATS uses technology to ‘dissect’ and ‘read’ the resume. When it is saved as a word document, the technology can easily accomplish both of these tasks. But when it is in a pdf format, the technology may struggle and fail to accurately read the content. If this happens, no amount of keyword matching will help.
To put it plainly, submit the document via a simple format, such as a word document. Also, eliminate any ‘bells and whistles’ that you may be tempted to use. This includes imagery, decorative pieces, or clipart. Though pleasing to look at, these too, may confuse the ATS.
Janet gave a ton of value in our discussion, but for me, this was the single most valuable gem that she provided. It was so simple, but deeply profound.
5. Describe How You Solved Problems and Delivered Value
Thousands of people will have the same skillsets as you. Potential employers don’t want to read about your skillsets. They want to learn about how you problem-solved and what you delivered.
Janet has two frameworks which she calls “Problems, Actions, Results” or “PARs”, as well as “Features, Accomplishments, Benefits” or “FABs”. You can use these frameworks within your documentation, as well as within your interviews to set you apart.
If you are a applying for a Product Manager role, and you are describing your work within your resume, it is not enough to say:
“Prioritized and groomed the product backlog”.
Instead, it is so much more impactful to say,
“Delivered 4 features in one quarter, which led to an incremental $4.5 million in annual revenue for the company, simply by prioritizing higher impact features within the product backlog.”
If you are describing yourself in an interview, you may consider a lengthier response, such as:
We had 8 -10 different features that customers were requesting. Our team is agile and lean, so we couldn’t work on all of the projects. I dug deeper into each of the feature requests to understand what the problem was that each feature would resolve. After I formed my hypotheses, I spoke with multiple stakeholders to help them understand the direction I felt was best for the product to move. They agreed with the reasoning, and we were able to prioritize and focus on 4 projects during the quarter. Having that focus enabled us to deliver these features, allowing us to experience an incremental increase in annualized revenue of $4.5 million.
For many people it feels uncomfortable to ‘brag’. But the above statements are not brags. They are the truth. They are quantifiable evidence that you are sufficient with that skillset. Most hiring managers will recognize that you did not deliver $4.5 million in incremental annual revenue all by yourself. They will understand that a team was involved. But you will demonstrate that as the owner of the backlog, you did your part to ensure the correct work was delivered, which led to the increased revenue.
Be direct. Be honest. Quantify your efforts.
Learn More
Janet only began to scratch the surface of the various techniques that candidates can use to land an interview and get the job they’re hoping for. If you liked these tips and tricks, then you’re sure to love her others. To learn more of them, you can pre-order her book “Recruiter Hacks to Get Hired" here, which is scheduled to release in July 2024.
You can also follow her on LinkedIn.
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