Alli Peck walks through her five-step plan after a layoff: warm up your LinkedIn network, tailor your resume for each job, post content showing your skills, prioritize referrals and recruiters over cold applications, and apply with targeted outreach. She includes how-tos and stories, like landing a job in 14 days through a referral.
Questions this video answers
May 22, 2023
She recalls getting 'like $1,500 or maybe $1,000' for a successful referral (phrased as uncertain).
She reports receiving a job offer 14 calendar days after initial recruiter contact.
Chapters
Good morning. What's up, YouTube family? Today, I'm going to do a video about if I got laid off yesterday, how I would spend the next few days and weeks, because we all know it takes a while to job search these days. So a little bit about me first. My name is Allison Peck, and you may know me as Ali from corporate. I'm on lots of social media channels, and for about three years now, I have been making video content about career development and everything in. In the job cycle, from job searching, interviewing, getting a job, making it work with your manager, and getting laid off as we're talking about today, or quitting a job and job searching for a new one, and then the cycle starts again. So today we're talking about layoffs. There's a lot of layoffs that have been happening. And I get asked this question a lot. What would I do if I got laid off? And my answer is a little bit different now than it was a year ago or two years ago, because the market is shifting, as it does all the time. So if I got laid off, first thing I do is I'd treat myself to a nice glass of champagne and maybe cry because it sucks being laid off. However, the two times that I've been fired or laid off in my life, I have always found greener pastures afterwards. And so the next time it does happen, if it happens, I won't beat myself up too bad, because I know that it's a part of life, it's a part of career, and a lot of times it's out of your control. So what would I do if I got laid off? All right, first of all, I would leverage LinkedIn. Now, I want to preface this by saying I have been posting on LinkedIn very regularly to showcase my skills and experience and my personality, frankly, for a couple years now, I have been catching up with old co workers on LinkedIn in private messages. So I feel like I have a really strong network. I have, you know, asked people how their summer's going, asked people how their sick mom was doing. And so when I reach out to them and tell them that I got laid off, and if they know of any positions open for a program manager, that's what I do, they would be more inclined to say yes and help me since I have been maintaining that relationship when I didn't need them. You ever have that family member that just calls you when they need something? And you know, when you see their. Their number on the phone, you're like, ugh, what do they want this time? You don't want to be that guy. So before you get laid off, hopefully you don't. But in between job searching, whether it's by choice or not, please communicate with your network and just ask them how they're doing. Reach out to a different co worker every week and just say, hey, how's it going? How are you liking your job? Don't ask them for anything. Just catch up. All right, so if we got laid off, I'd reach out to people on my network and I'd send them an updated resume. I'd say, hey, I'm job searching. I just got laid off. And I'm wondering if you know of any program manager opportunities in your circle, please let me know. Here's my resume. Which brings me to my second point. Resume. Okay, I'd update my resume. And now I wouldn't just do it in the general sense, like add my previous role to my resume, I would do that. But also, every job I apply to is going to have a job description. That job description is going to list a little bit about the company at the top, a little bit about the role, the responsibilities of the person, necessary qualifications, and then nice to haves. So what I would do is before I applied to a job, I would. I'm out of breath walking up a hill right now. So before I apply to a job, I look at the job description and I say, okay, what skills are required for this job? Okay, I have this one, I have this one. I have this one. I'm going to put those on my resume. What's not required for this job are a couple other skills that are still on my resume from the last one. I'm going to remove those. So your resume should reflect the job you're applying to, and it should be slightly different with each job you apply to. Yes, this creates a little more work for yourself, but job searching is hard work, but it can be worth it, especially if you position yourself well for negotiating. Okay, so what else? If I got laid off yesterday, I'd reach out to my network. I would update my resume. Okay. Third thing I would do is I would start posting on LinkedIn, maybe every day, maybe every other day. What I would post is showing my skills. So if we take me as an example, as a program manager, the skills I have are with. We're talking about hard skills. Microsoft Project, making slides, presenting them in meetings, agendas for core team meetings, meeting notes, smart sheets. The list goes on and on. But in terms of showcasing my hard skills on my LinkedIn, I would write a post, let's see my first post. I would say my favorite feature in Smartsheets is the card feature because you can easily drag and drop and it's very user friendly. So what this is doing, you can do a different skill every day. But what this is going to do is your resume tells people what your experience is and what your skills are. But these LinkedIn posts you're going to do show people that you know what you're talking about. And showing is way more powerful than telling. So what I would do is I would take a different skill required for these program manager jobs and I would post about them on LinkedIn. You can even use ChatGPT to help you. It's not cheating. We all need to grow accustomed to using AI and incorporating AI a little bit in our daily lives. Now that it's out there, it's free, it can really enhance a LinkedIn post. Of course, look it over afterwards, change some words, make it sound like your own voice, but use AI to help you leverage tools available to you to make your job easier. Okay, what else would I do if I got laid off yesterday? So we're reaching out to our network, we're updating our resume, we're posting on LinkedIn. Okay, how about actually applying for jobs? So I have a really specific strategy for applying for jobs that has worked for me over the past 10 years. I would see if it worked now if it didn't, I would reevaluate and come up with a different plan. But what I would try is internal referrals. Now there's a lot of controversy. I've made some videos about this. Lots of recruiters have stitched my videos and they've said, nope, terrible idea, but let me explain to you why I think it's a good idea. So instead of going to a company's website and clicking that apply button and then you put in your resume and you have to enter your experience again and you put in your desired salary and then you get maybe an auto rejection email 10 minutes later. And you know, there was no human that looked at my resume. How unfortunate. What I'd prefer to do is since I have been cultivating my network on LinkedIn, as should you, I would reach out to somebody in my network that worked at that company before I applied and I'd say, hey, I'm about to apply for job number 123 at your company. Before I do, is there any chance you give me an internal referral? If so, here's my resume. So the controversy lies in what if this is a stranger. What if you don't know this person? So I'm in a little bit of a unique situation because I've been posting on LinkedIn regularly for years now. It's very easy for somebody to go look at my LinkedIn page and feel like they already know me. Turn around here. Feel like they already know me. Because instead of wondering what my greatest strength or my greatest weakness is, I've answered that in LinkedIn posts. So people maybe don't have to put me through as many rounds of interviews as other candidates because I've already answered lots of interview questions. My LinkedIn and people. It's free for people to go look at it. And I've had recruiters say, wow, I feel like I already know you. So this internal referral route, if you don't know what an internal referral is, let's say I work at a company and somebody is job searching and they ask me, alison, will you give me an internal referral? If I know them or if I can really assess that they have the skills required for the job, or if our department is really needing that role, I might be like, yes, I'll refer you. Now, what I do is I send their resume to the hiring manager and the recruiter for the role that they're applying to. It's different for every role, so they have to have a specific job they're applying to. And I say, hey, I know this person, or, hey, this person looks very qualified for the role they're job searching. They're interested. Please take a look at their resume. Now, if that person gets hired, I might get a referral bonus. Now, I've gotten this before and it's awesome. I referred a friend of mine. She now works at the company that I work at. We work together and I love working with her and our department loves that they hired her and she is definitely a value added employee. And I think I got like $1,500 or maybe $1,000. So there's incentive for me to refer the person and there's incentive for them to reach out to me because it gets their resume to the top of the pile of resumes. So where the controversy lies is, well, can you just ask a stranger for an internal referral? They don't know you. It might reflect bad on them if you're hired and you suck at the job. Or even worse, you, I don't know, are bad at the job. So. So I don't recommend asking strangers for internal referrals unless you have a very robust LinkedIn presence or online presence or social media presence that's relevant to the jobs you're applying for. I don't advise you to just ask strangers for referrals because then we kind of get into conflict of interest. Like maybe they're just referring you because they need the money and it's not because you'd be a good fit for the role. So that's my two cents on that. But before I apply to any jobs, I never just cold apply, meaning like I never just go to a company's website or click Easy apply on LinkedIn because sometimes you can't get past that firewall of, you know, a robot auto rejecting your resume. So I like a human to look at my resume if I can help it. So I always try to get an internal referral. Another thing that you can do when you're job searching, instead of internal referrals, I just contact the recruiter directly. This is how I got my current role a year ago. So what you do is you go on LinkedIn in the top search bar, you type in Program Manager if that's the role you're searching for. And then you click Enter and then you click Posts. You know, you can click Jobs, People, companies click Posts and then scroll down. And sometimes you can see recruiters have posted job description. They say, hey, I'm hiring a program manager. If you know of any, please, you know, comment below or message me. I will message them directly and I'll say, hey, from your post about the program manager role that's open from July 13th, I'm really interested in the role. My 10 years of medical device experience with design controls and FDA regulations makes me a great fit for the role. Here's my resume. I'd love to, love to chat with you if you think I'd be a good fit. That's how I got my job. The recruiter messaged me and said, yeah, you look like you'd be a great fit. Let's talk. Had a phone screen, went on to the second round of interviews. It was a half day interview with four different people and I got a job offer 14 days later. Fourteen calendar days later, that's the shortest job search I've ever heard of. It was stress free. She even told me like, wow, I looked on your LinkedIn, I felt like I knew you because I looked at a lot of your posts. They really provided like a positive supplement to your job search and your candidacy for this role. So those are the things that I would do if I was job searching. If you are job searching, and you're having a hard time, or if it's been more than three months, drop a comment below. Let me know where you're getting stuck. If you're getting stuck getting auto rejected, it might be a resume. If you're having a first round of interviews and not a second, it might be your interview skills. Whatever it is, maybe I can help. All right. I hope you found this video useful and let me know what questions you have. I'll see you in the next one.
More from Alli
Change Your Career Without Leaving Your Job: Podcast Episode with Darcy Eikenberg
