The Art of Landing Your Dream Job with Mike Richards

Foreign welcome to this week's Treasury Career Caller Podcast where each and every week I talk to treasury professionals about their treasury careers. This week we've got a bit of a treat for you in the form of a special edition show. I recently hosted a live webinar for tmac, who are the Treasury Management association of Chicago about the art of landing your dream job or dream role. If you know. I love working with tmac. They host the yearly Windy City Summit for Treasury Professionals in Chicago. I've been speaking there for about 10 years. I was lucky enough to be invited to speak to the TMAC members about their treasury careers and offer my advice as a Treasury recruiter, now with over 20 years treasury recruitment expertise. In this virtual session I talked about how to craft your resume, offering some do's and don'ts along the way I explain why having a powerful LinkedIn profile is key to crafting your own personal brand if you like, and why you actually need it to work for you. As a Treasury professional. I then talk about the brave new world of virtual interviewing and what you need to do to prepare yourself for the next one, that one to one grilling if you like, and to finish off by reflecting on the power of marginal gains that hope all of you will not only enjoy but that will help you implement all of the advice I actually give on the session. Anyway, as I regularly say on the podcast, that's enough from me. Let's get on with the show. But let's hear from this week's guest who in this week is. Oh yeah, that'd be me. Well anyway, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did doing it and enjoy the show. My name is Mike Richards and I run the Treasury Recruitment Company. I'm here today this afternoon to talk to you about your treasury careers and help you whether you are looking to find a role now or might be looking to find a role in the future. This is why I'm here to help we recruit. As it says on the next slide, Treasury Professionals Treasury Analyst to Global Treasury Director I come and speak at a number of the conferences around the world about what you guys need to do to make yourselves nice and presentable. Also what you need to do is if you're employers and trying to recruit treasury talent and also explain to you what you should be thinking about. So what's happening in the market, what's the state of it. Obviously post Covid pretty challenging times, pretty challenging world but we're getting through it and we all know this. What gives me a lot of this Knowledge. Well, I also host a weekly podcast called the Treasury Career Corner, admittedly enough. So we're up to 138 episodes by the time this comes out. It's fantastic. I talk to a Treasury professional each and every week, really deepen my knowledge about what you guys do. And I've always loved it because I know that treasury professionals such as yourselves, it's quite weird, you, you know, I might say that you all have the same title of treasurer, say, and you'll do the same thing in the same way with the same tools and you get the same results and that's, you know, utter baloney. As you guys know, it's amazing the variety of what you do with the tools you're given and treasury itself is fantastically interesting. And that's why I love doing it and love talking to you guys on a regular basis. So listening to the podcast so you can hear some of the tales, some of the war stories and some of the treasures there about how they built their careers and what they see as the next development. So, yeah, the podcast is good fun to do resumes. Now we're just going to call it resume CVs for now, but from now on the outset we're going to carry on with resumes, as it were. So now coming to this next slide, there will be prizes for anyone at the end. We will do Q and A at the end, but I would like to question if anyone actually knows where this comes from. And this is about when you send someone your resume, you need to really grab their attention. It's like that. It's about reaching through the glass. Now that photo, some of you might see that image. That's right, it's from Take on Me. The world winning, award winning band are who I have met who are amazing, great guys and been see them a number of times. Yeah, that's a guilty pleasure. We'll come back to that later on. But that aside and joking aside, that is, that's what you need to do with your resume. You need to reach out from the virtual world to the real world. You're sending your resume to someone, you need to grab their attention, you need to draw them in, literally, just like that photo showing you. And that's what you need to do. You need to make sure you're grabbing someone's attention when you first send the resume. So how do you do that? Well, let's go through. This is the first impression they have. It's about how does it look? Does it look perfect? Does it? Is it nicely laid out? Or has it got loads of boxes on it? We'll come back to some of the don'ts in a moment and things you should look out for. But it's that first impression. So first meeting, if you like. When you walk into a room for a meeting, you're actually saying to people, here I am, this is me. Well, this is actually your calling card. This resume is actually who you are and it's if you're looking for a job search or it might be an internal document as well. It's not just if you're doing a job search, it might be that you're moving departments, moving teams and again, you've got people can look at your LinkedIn profile. But actually if you had a decent resume, that would also help you to introduce yourself to other people around the company. So what things do you need to look out for? What are the key things? A lot of people get quite wound up by their resume and think, oh, goodness, what do I have to do? Well, one of the first things you have to do is, is make sure it's no spelling errors. How hard is it for you to hit on your keyboard? F5. That's all you need to do. Do a quick spell check and make sure it works, then check it again. Now, the number of times I see manger instead of manager, I've seen attention to detail with detail spelled wrong. Don't know why spellcheck doesn't pick that up. Don't use boxes. Basically anything that distracts you from just a nice plain document which goes through in chronological order. About your is, you know, waste of time. We'll come into in a moment about personal statements and things like that, but it's just some of those and we will share these as well. Professional email address. Yeah, I don't want to see. Mike has 20 beersmail.com. that's not true anymore. It's only five beers. But more than that, I want to see something that makes me think, actually this is a professional worth meeting. And your CV will also resume. Will actually tell you or tell the your audience member why they want to meet you and why they should talk to you. So the next question. Personal statements. Yeah, as you can see, I'm not a fan. Why? A lot of the time I see it saying, well, in fact, we'll just skip onto the next bit just to show you. What should you have in a personal statement? If we go back here, it shouldn't be something saying, I'm a motivated individual with a great attention to detail. I'm a Treasury professional. I did this in an audience. I one of actually one of the Windy City conferences. And I actually said to you guys, right? How many people have on it cash management, how many people have foreign exchange?