What can applicants or students do to find the perfect job? How do we find exactly what we are looking for?

There’s a lot of places you can search. A good book is “What Color is Your Parachute”. For me what worked was being curious and always asking people. I asked my trainer how he got to be so good at his job. He said he waited on tables for 8 years and learned that everyone had special needs and that helped me learn that I have to customize my training for each person. I thought “Wow! No one would expect that lessons learned from waiting tables could have much bearing in one’s professional career.” Start with your friends and relatives and then expand. Talk to your relatives about their paths, their suggestions, their likes, and dislikes. Talk to as many people as you can to develop a diverse worldview. Over time you will learn what you like. There are tons of resources available online and constantly explore. Put a premium on someone who has figured it out. These people can tell you. One of my friends told me that if you hadn’t had a setback in your career, you haven’t had a career. You have to try stuff and some of it is not going to work.

In your years of experience working in different industries, what are the traits you have seen that allow for leaders to succeed and what traits hold them back?

The good leaders that I see have a couple of fundamental traits and then I will give you a trait that is essential for anyone. If we are talking leadership, for me, the future is all about being human – that is having empathy and compassion. I look for leaders who are transparent and humble enough to admit they are not good at something. Good leaders are those who are comfortable with hiring someone better than them in some area. Insecure people will never hire someone better than them because they need the sunshine on them always. Good leaders do not block others from good opportunities. Those are the big traits, the human ones – empathy, compassion, transparency. You build the trust and provide what’s important – a psychologically safe environment for people – they will do great work. 

But the #1 skill which would make you more valuable than most out there and give you a career advantage is what I call high learning velocity. In a changing world, adaptability and agility are very important. I am seeing a change in the recruiting world. That is that I am seeing more people getting hired not on what they know but on how good you are at changing. A joke I like to say in recruiting is that the average value of a job description put online is 2 months. As soon as someone starts working it changes. If you are good you can change that job to your advantage and move your work into the areas you want. The more comfortable you are learning new things – I am mainly talking hard skills – the toughest are the soft skills. The easier ones are the hard skills like new programming languages for example. My strong recommendation is that you are valuable to a company if you can show to a company or people that you can change fast. A company is always going to change and if you can change with them, then you will. be good for them.

While there are more opportunities on the internet, there is also more competition. As more people search for jobs online, what can people do to make themselves the best candidate and get the job?

I agree with you. The candidate experience seems to be recording right now. Companies are trying to leverage tech to find more employees but you feel more like a number in a system. It’s hard for companies, it’s no excuse for that. Companies cannot afford to have tons of recruiters. They don’t know how many people they need in the long run, they know maybe 6-9 months but not more. Recruiting adjusts based on the real-time demands of a company. Everyone is overworked and business is getting tough and pandemic stole the predictability of business. So how do you stand out in this impersonal world? Try as hard as you can to utilize your network to get into a place. The main purpose of a resume is to get an interview, if you can one a different way that’s what you want to do. The people who blindly apply on sites like Linkedin are new grads. If you do an internship, that’s a start of a network. Your friends’ parents and your relatives are a network in themselves. If you connect with everyone you know, you can find a web of all the possible places where you have contacts. Go to websites like Glassdoor and do your homework and find out information. People online have all the tips and cheats for getting in. After the first job, it gets easier. Every job after my first one got easier. The best way to clear the first hurdle is through an internship. An internship is the best way to learn about a company, it is a two-month interview. There are new ways to find internships, for example, the website, symba.io, which finds you internships online. But there are also other ways to make money nowadays. For example, I have college students who help me create my TikTok presence. When they approached me, I said I had not wanted to advertise myself to lip-syncing teenagers but there is a huge audience out there for my info. There are many ways you can do it so just go out there and explore to find what you like.

stevecadigan.com

Steve’s book link: https://stevecadigan.com/workquake/

Steve’s TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@stevecadigan?lang=en