The Art of Landing Your Dream Job with Mike Richards

Foreign welcome to this week's Treasury Career Corner 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, the 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, inventively 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 will 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. 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. Aha. 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 had. 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, it's that first meeting. If you know 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 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 has20beersmail.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, if I would 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 and 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? How many people have this? And everyone's hands were going up. I said, so you're really unique, are you? And everyone was like, oh, no. So you don't want to have a generalistic personal statement. In my opinion, 50% of people, a lot of the time hate them. So what you're doing is by putting a personal statement on there, saying, I'm a motivated individual, you're turning off half your audience. Throw it in the bit in the garbage, you know, you don't. In the trash can. You don't need that. What you need is either a cover letter or a personal statement that is adapted and targeted towards your audience. So one of our listeners today and one of the participants, if you like, I did some work with him earlier this year and we focused on one of the. He was applying for a number of roles, wasn't getting very far and everything else, but we brainstormed about one of the positions he was applying for. And I said, what are their pain points? What are the key things? Now, this company had recently acquired another company, a number of companies, actually, and what they needed to do was focus on foreign exchange because it was their first really foray into the international markets. So that was one of the key things, if you like. So, you know, what they needed to do was have someone that was experienced in foreign exchange, which was brilliant. I then said also, so they're replacing their treasurer? He said, yeah. I said, why are they replacing their treasurer? Why couldn't they just promote from within? And we looked at the members of the team on LinkedIn and stuff like that, and we saw there was a massive gap and we realized that, do you know what, with that gap, they couldn't promote, so they needed someone, an experienced head. Now, this chap, he'd really been struggling, finding some really challenging times because it is a challenging market, but actually by adapting his message, he got right the way through to the final round interviews. Didn't quite get there, but we are going to work with him further and I'm going to help him find that role. It's one of our missions, if you like, so try and target your message to what your audience want. That's one of the key things to think about. Okay. Some other areas that we should focus on within the resume. And again, we've got resume templates we can send out to you guys. So you're going to know what to do, and some do's and don'ts if you like, so don't. Well, how long should it be now? I've, you know, I've seen, you know, inordinately long resumes which are poor and quite boring to read. I've seen when you've crammed it into one pages and people have said, oh, one page, that's all you should read. You know, some people, if you're a treasurer with 20 years experience, how are you going to get all of that and get some meaning into one page? I don't think you need to. I think it can last two to three pages. It shouldn't be, you know, a diatribe, it shouldn't be War and Peace. That's already been written, you know, we've read that, thank you very much. So it needs to be a chronological view. So start with most recent roles and then obviously less detail as you go back because you built on that experience as well. Says there about employment history and things like that. This achievement bit, this is the key thing, is that when it's, you know, when you're reading that resume, someone is looking at and they're going to make a decision about you in the first five to six seconds of reading that resume. So what you want to pick out on that, when you say achievements, it's, have you implemented a cash management system? Have you implemented a Treasury management system? Oh, great, which one and what impact did it have? So I've seen it before. There was one of my candidates, he just decided he noticed a good way of improving a lot of the processes in the treasury team was to actually implement some AI, you know, hot topic and everything else. But what he wanted to do was actually know how to do it himself. So he went off and did an evening class in Python. Now, that's their programming language for those who don't know. And I'm not saying everyone has to go out and be a computer programmer. No, not at all. However, amazing contribution that he could therefore make. It was a real achievement. I thought it was buried bottom of his cv, bottom of there. And I said, look, bring this out, bring this to the top of things. He was, oh, do you think that's important? I mean, God, if I was any other treasurer, I would love to see something like that. That's what you need to bring out. Don't make it generalistic. It's what people want to buy. It's your sales piece, if you like, if you're putting something On a shelf to be sold. That's the bit you want to present. Qualifications. Again, if you've got ctp, put it up there, because that's what people can look for. Or other treasury qualifications, or other finance qualifications. That's one of the key things you need to look at. Systems. List the system you have. It says here, Word and Excel, you can put those in. What I would actually do is focus more on the specific treasury things. So, you know, if you've done Kariba or Bellen or whatever, it might be any of those Quantum or things like that, there are other treasury systems and it, you know, SAP and everything else, put that on there and your level of expertise in it. Because if you're going for a new role, that's what you're going to be measured on. That's one of the key things. References. What's the point? You're going to be asked for references anyway. So it's just wasted, it's just candy floss. You don't need that on there. Get rid of it. You know, why, why would I need to know that? So there are lots of other tips I could give you about resumes, but it's quite, you know, there's lots of stuff that's been written about it. We're going to move on a little bit now. We're going to talk about, well, personal branding, first of all, and LinkedIn, because that is your show page, that sales page, if you like, for yourself. Now, your resume, if you like, is your, you know, the document that details your background and is a effective sales document for you. But actually, how do you get there? What is your showcase, if you like, for yourself? Well, that is your LinkedIn profile. And we're going to go through some top tips here. And, you know, one of the key things, when I first started a number of years ago now, LinkedIn was in its infancy. So, you know, still out there, you're, you know, treading the book, meeting a number of treasurers and getting to know people and things like that. And here you go. You had a personal brand, but it wasn't actually that. It was actually originally your reputation. You built it up. You go meet people, they get to know you, they'd ask you about the different work you've done and everything else. Fantastic. Now you can build up in seconds and you can destroy it in seconds. I mean, you've seen it a number of times, I think, you know, someone puts out a tweet, ill advised tweet or something like that. It, it's, it's destroyed. You know, someone who has been, you know, doing a great job for 20 years, puts out one tweet, you know, ill advised or anything else, it can be ruined. So you need to be careful with it. It needs to be protected. And if you no longer have a person, you know, if you no longer have a personal brand, you have to make it powerful. But how do you make it powerful? What do you need to do? You know, I'm not looking for a job, Mike. I don't need a job. Well, no, that's fine. It's not about just looking for a job. Everybody can see your personal profile and you could take a career risk because what you want to do is. I've had a number of times. Chris, who was one of our guests on our show in the past, he was actually heavily involved in the afp. Great treasurer. He wasn't ever looking for a job, but what he did was he built up his profile on LinkedIn. And then opportunities came knocking for Chris and he what he found he was a treasurer and then he was approached by a law firm. They said, look, we want a cfo. And he's like, well, I'm not actually looking for a role. They said, no, but we've seen your profile. What we like is we want to make sure, you know, we want you on board with us. We want you to come and join us. So the job came knocking for him. Before the Windy City Summit, one of the years actually started. I was at one of the evening parties and we remember meeting a number of the interns that were going to help us with the sessions and everything else. And there was one of the interns came up and I said, oh. And he was saying, look, I'm all right. I've locked everything down. I'm careful on my Facebook now. I'm looking for big roles with some of the big corporates. So I'm all right. I'm absolutely fine. I said, oh, okay. Could you do me a favor, Jeff? And he was, oh, yeah, yeah, of course. I said, could you go get me a beer? Would that be all right? You know, just grab us a beer? Yeah, yeah, no problem. So he went off, queued up, got a beer, came back two minutes later. I said, jeff, how was Tijuana? He's like, what? Tijuana? I was like, yeah, yeah. Was it good last year? He's like, yeah, how do you know that? And I said, I use a little known search tool called Google. And he was like, oh, my goodness, how did you find this? I went, I just Did a search and he was like, oh, God. And what had happened is he'd been tagged in some photos by one of his friends. Let's go back to his friend. And you have to be careful because it is a public media, so it's social and is out there all the time. Okay, so let's focus in now a little bit on LinkedIn itself. It is not just a job site. Yes, there are jobs there, and it is one of their major revenue streams, but it's actually a professional networking site. That's one of the key things. What you need to be thinking about is a great sales tool for yourselves. And this next slide comes from a guy that you probably never heard of, Mr. Bezos. And he actually said that, I think he did, actually, as one of his phrases. And I agree, it's when you're not in the room, this is what your brand is doing for you. And people will see your brand via LinkedIn. They'll see what you represent. So you have a nice photo, good profile and everything else. And we'll come on to the different elements about it. And it says here what you're not, you know, what people are saying about you. But I think it's more than that. And this is one of the key things. It's what people are thinking about you. That's what they believe about you as well. So they're talking about you, they're thinking this. It's more ingrained than that. So you actually, when you're seeing a good, strong profile or, you know, perhaps you're going to one of the conferences, you will be checking that person out on LinkedIn before you're seeing them as a speaker. You'll be thinking, actually, do I want to watch this session? And you'll be making a judgment call. If you like, you'll be thinking, actually, yes, this is a person I want to listen to. So let's go through the elements of your LinkedIn profile. As I said, it needs to be powerful and needs to be strong, so you create a powerful headline on there. You're all treasury specialists, so don't have it on there. What I want to see is some uniqueness. What I want to do is see why you stand out. We actually did this and we looked at passionate and creative, and I did this. A show of hands. How many people have passionate in the audience and loads of hands. How many strategic. These are the most overused words on LinkedIn. And actually, when I was showing people, they were like, right. When we came up with some alternative words, they could use and things like that. Well, actually, what it came down to was a little bit more granularity, if that was the right way to put. Was about this. It was about definable stuff. So it was about if you're really good and how much you might have saved. You know, we go back to achievements and things like that. This is one of the key things it's, you know, bringing out, if you like, what makes you different. So what have you done in your job? So taking a moment. And again, you might be sitting there, you know, at your desk now, if you could just take a moment, pick up a pen and just try and jot down what you. How much money have you saved for your company in the past year? Just take a moment. Just take a moment and think. If you're coaching members of team, members of a Treasury team, what have you helped them achieve in the past year? So have they grown? We've been working. Everyone's been working from home, a lot of the time working remotely. How have you got through that? Just take a moment. Just. Just a few there. Just a couple of words and things like that. Put those into your LinkedIn profile. Make yourself stand out a little bit. So these are your. So what moments now this is when you're thinking about as well, can you hand that piece of paper? Say you're a Treasury manager and you work alongside another treasury manager. If you were to pass that piece of paper across that treasury manager, could they say the same thing? If they can, then it's nothing, it's worthless. We want you to be showing your uniqueness. What's your individuality? Why are you special? Why are you different to the person next to you? Well, Mike, because I, you know, saved this. I implemented a new system and it was mine. And one of the key things I heard about, actually, was one of my clients, there were again, this talks about the social aspect of Treasury. They were by the water cooler, they have a coffee and one of the people was talking about, you know, that they were doing this daily cash report and somebody else said, oh, I know about those. And no, we know about cash reports. No, no, I know actually a way of automating that a little bit with a, you know, AI bot that I saw recently at a conference. All right, so next thing you know, they've actually implemented this AI bot and they implemented it for their treasury team and then they rolled out globally to their eight Treasury Stroke Cash centers. So every day it was taking one person in each of those centers every single day, about half an hour to an hour some of the time to produce this report and to get it out and then share it globally. They implemented this AI bot. It shared. It saved the time, rather, for all those people globally that eight hours to click, boom, click your mouse. Boom. Automated Went out to everyone. A snapshot of exactly the cash position. A little bit of tinkering here and there, but probably taking a couple of minutes every so often with any glitches solved. So everyone had a clear cash position for that company globally at any one time. Incredible information, but the time saved. And that was two treasury professionals. So one, you know, implemented the idea. One came up with the idea. Brilliant. Put it on there. Okay, so the next one photo on your LinkedIn profile now, should you have one? Yeah. There you go. It's your virtual handshake. Had this at one of the conferences. One of the guys said, look, I'm not very photogenic, Micah, I don't really want a photo. I said, when was the last time you walked into a bank meeting, turned your back to it, back to everyone and all the people in there and said, hello, I'm Patrick. Hi. Look at me. Da, da, da. You don't do it. What people want to do is they want to be welcome to you. So they want to actually know who you are, know what you do, and actually go, do you know what? That's someone I want to work with. And this is your first impression. And you only get one chance to make that first impression, as you know now. Squashed head. Look, let's just go for that. When you put your photo up, it's really difficult, I know, to put it up via a PC or laptop. Get it up on there. Great. And then how hard is it to pick up your phone and look at your own profile and see. Oh, hang on, it's resized the wrong way. My head has gone all squashed. Ah, no, it's not hard at all. It takes you 10 seconds. And there are so many that I've seen have either squashed or turned at 50, turned at 90 degrees, where the person's at. And I'm thinking, really? And these are professional people, your first impression is a negative impression. Absolutely bonkers. We don't want to see that. What we do want to see is a professional photo. You know, there's only so much you can do with it. I know. Rather than, you know, seeing me drinking a beer, you know, we'll. We'll do that when I'm next over in Chicago. But that's actually not for here. We don't need that. Okay. I want to keep going. I know there's a lot to absorb, so we will be sharing all these slides and things like that. So next one. Friendly, approachable. Sorry, not having a laugh. Beer? Ask the recommendations now on your profiles. We have actually recently ourselves been pushing out, doing a lot more testimonial work. We've been saying, look, we want to get these. And why. Why have we been such a big push on it? Well, I did this Joe who works for me in my office, and I said, joe, because he couldn't really understand, he was struggling to get his head around it. I said, joe, do you. Have you ever use that website called Amazon? He was like, yeah. I said, you know when you go to buy product, if you ever look to the star rating? Yeah. And I said, I know there's a lot of problems with bots and stuff they're trying to clean up. And he said, yeah, yeah, I always check those, Always look at it and stuff. Like I said, great. Have you actually met the person that done that? I meant, no, it's not right, so. But you trust what they're saying is that, yeah, I do. I said, so that's what you need to do. You need to actually get out there and make sure that you are, you know, getting recommendations because people trust them. Now, when you're getting recommendations, what I would say is don't get them from your colleagues as such, the colleagues sitting next to you, because hopefully they're going to say something positive about you. And unless you've not bought them lunch recently or something like that, what you might like to do is get from, say, an ex boss, something like that, someone working above you and what you would like and to coach and to train, or vice versa, someone that's worked for you and what are you like as a boss? But people have said to me, why should they build a network? Well, these are some of the reasons this networking grows with you. It provides you more opportunities, more people see you. If you look at a new treasury management system and you've got a great powerful network of 10 people, you're not going to be able to ask too many people about it. Ask 100 people, ask a thousand. It's going to make it a lot easier for you. And access, as it says there, to industry news and everything else. Now, who are you going to connect with? Can they help you and can you help them? If it's someone that's randomly connecting you to nothing to do with your industry, don't worry if you reject them, they don't get any notice about it. They basically, I only connect to people I feel within the treasury industry or related industries because it means that I'm going to be able to provide value to them as a person. If you're going to reach out to people, how do you do it? First of all, personalize the message. So you've met someone at a conference and again, Chris, who I mentioned earlier in the show, he actually, whenever he would go away from talking to someone or meeting someone, he'd grab their business card and he'd say, oh, I met this guy at Windy City. Oh, it's his daughter's birthday and she's just about to go to Northwestern. Oh, I went there. Oh, I could tell her, you know, maybe look at this district of Evanston where you might want to live and things like that. Amazing. Also might be, oh, actually, that guy. I want to build up a further relationship. Maybe you could meet for coffee. Drop that in the email. Say, bob, great to meet you, Windy City. Love to connect. Good luck to your daughter and, you know, maybe we can meet next time you're downtown. Amazing. Great connection request. Personalize your message. And why? Because if you do, don't do it like this and you just do a generalized one. It's actually going to get you barred. You know, people will actually, if you tend to send too many impersonal invites, it's basically going to say, no, thank you very much and give you a bad thing. So these are the people you might want to connect with, people you meet at conferences, networking recruiters. Feel free after this to connect with me. I'd love to help you. Someone you might admire, current colleagues, former colleagues. It's good to build your network and just do it on a regular basis. Again, we'll come back to that later on the show. And what would you do within that network? Again, we're going to skip through. Share your content, keep, you know, acknowledge someone changes their status. A good way to do it, just say, oh, well done. If they've got a new job and everything else, it just elevates you a little bit. Don't forget, showcase what you've done. You guys, I'm sure, have done a lot of presentations in the past. You can take out confidential information on there. But if you presented about an implementation, if you presented about how you've expanded, how you've managed a team, put it on there, put up the PowerPoint. It looks great and it actually shows people what you're doing as well. You're the chief promoter of your career. No One else is going to do it for you. It's a new world, isn't it? Virtual interviews. But Mike, it's just like having a meeting with someone. That's just what it's like. It's not. You need to be prepared and it's totally different in a virtual meeting. When you're meeting your colleagues, if you like, over zoom and everything else, no one's judging you. But in a virtual interview, you are being judged and the person on the other side is, well, it's good. They're going to accept or reject you to the next round. It's a little bit like, you know, their talent shows and things like that. Unless you impress them on that, you are out of the running. You're going for a new role. You're out of the running unless you make a positive impression each time. So what do you need to do? It works both ways. You need to think about how you're going to make an impression on them. They will be judging you about are you going to fit with the company culture? Are you going to fit with them as a team pre do your research. Just like I said for that interview right back at the beginning, what you need to do is look at their pain points and that's something you need to present in a virtual interview scenario. So when you're starting to talk to people, that's what you need to do. I'm going to give you some practical advice. I had one of my candidates. He was fantastic candidate, sort of senior manager, corporate finance, great guy, knows his stuff, technically brilliant and actually very good team manager and everything else. But virtual interviews, terrible. Really, really bad. So I went for a rehearsal and this is one of the things that you guys need to do. You need to film yourselves and we'll come back to some of the things, how you prepare. But I said to him, sat down with him, I've got to be careful not to say his name because it's confidential, obviously. We did a review before he was in the final round. Interviews with the global treasurer and a panel interview with a number of different people over zoom. And he was sitting there and he was good. He was. Well, he looked good on the zoom and everything else. I was saying, this is good, this is good. I started to ask him some questions and his answers were terrible. He waffled, he didn't get to the point. He had lots of value to add, but he never told me it. And actually we got. We did the first one. I said, right, can we just stop this? What? I said, right, can you Just jot down what are the top three things you did when managing your team. And he did that. So he jotted it down. I said, right, transfer that to a post it and I want you to put it on the side of your monitor. So, okay. I said, what are the other things? The other pain points to this client. And they said, well, working remotely is difficult, but the way. Okay, how did you overcome that? Oh, well, what we did was each week we did a remote get together, which was more informal, over a drink and a coffee and stuff like that. We made it on a regular basis. I also scheduled. Hang on, no, write down your post it note. Great, okay. And on an individual basis. Well, actually I scheduled a regular one to one session with people to support them, you know, again, on a separate to both. And part of the session was about work. Part of the session was about home. It was about mental support for that person. Write it on that post it note. You put it on the post it note. When he was asked all the questions, they said he was one of the most prepared candidates they'd ever seen. Some of his answers to the questions they'd never heard before. They thought they were so summarized. And everything else he had amazing value to add. But the only way he did that was by preparing, you know, and he had to make sure that he was prepared to reach through that glass, just like this person is doing here, this remote hand and doing that. So what do you need to do and before test your technology? This actual session for today's session, I actually had to redo twice. I've got a green screen here. You'll see in a minute and stuff. I had to redo my treasure Internet connectivity. I had a problem with the cabling. I had to go and get new cables. It was a disaster. But eventually got it all done and then I was able to start the session. You need to make sure you are there and prepared. You need to check that your microphone works. I think the most overused phrase of 2020 is all of you. No, Mike, you're on mute. Luckily I don't because I'd already been preparing by doing on the podcast. But a lot of my guests, I was like, no, you're on mute again. And trying to call them and get them going and stuff like that. Make sure you're prepared. This is one of the key things, distractions. Turn off your phone, make sure that people can see you. There was some road works the other day on one of my sessions. Couldn't believe it never had roadworks on our place. At all. I was like, oh, my God. So what did I do? Luckily, had a load of foam around in where I do the recordings. I actually was able to put that up and make sure. And also was very direct with my kids and said, look, Daddy is doing this. Stay away. And they're like, okay, all right. Sorry, dad. You know, they know when they do the podcast and things, just tell them, make sure that you're prepared for it. And as it says at the top of here, prepare, prepare, prepare for the interview as you would face to face. Now, that is a key one. What you need to do is probably video yourself. Imagine they've asked you a question, because then monitor your body language. You can go on zoom or you can get your camera and it does a little mini video recording. Write down the question they might ask you, you know, so the question will be, how have you managed a difficult team member? You know, and what did you do about them? And then do it and answer it. Look about where you're looking into the camera as if you're talking to them in the real world. What you want to do is sit up straight, make sure that your chin isn't out of the frame. I had that with a live panel session. I did. And I didn't have the confidence, if I'm honest, to tell one of the panelists how far down in the frame they were. I learned from that the next session. I made sure and I did screenshot of myself with my chin just on the bottom of the. You know, I wasn't going to embarrass them just to show that, actually, I had to be more prepared. That's what you guys can do. By the way, it's free. It doesn't cost you anything to be prepared. What's next? Dressing the part. You know, you don't have to be suited and booted. You know, I've got, you know, smart shirt on today. But what you need to do is feel prepared. Put yourself in that mindset. Get yourself ready for that. There's a lot of information for you guys, and you probably like, oh, brains are reeling. Don't worry. Gonna talk about how we implement some of this stuff. So let's talk about marginal gains and the power that they have. Now you've got that phrase, but let's just bring in here. So Dave Brailsford. He was cycling team or performance director for the Great Britain cycling team. But before he arrived, the Great Britain cycling team was terrible. Since 1908, they had won just one single gold medal, and they were so bad that in 110 years, no British cyclist had ever won the Tour de France. It was so bad at the time, the top bike manufacturers would refuse to sell their bikes to British teams because it would hurt their sales. And they were just worried about it. So he came in and what he came up with and was different was this relentless commitment, if you like, to improving everything by 1%. So what did he do? He did a few things. He redesigned the bike seats to make them more comfortable. He put rubbing alcohol on the tires to give them better grip. The cyclists themselves, they wore over shorts to keep their bums warm, get themselves, you know, nice and prepared. Ideal muscle temperature before a race. When they traveled around the world, they took their own bedding, they took their own mattresses so that everyone got this amazing sleep every time. He kept on finding 1% improvements everywhere he could. He looked at different types of massage gels, which would help with the muscle recovery every little bit. There's so many different things. One of the other ones, remember what they would do is they would. They painted the inside of the team trucks white. This would help them spot little bits of dust, but they could degrade the performance of the bikes, painting it white to make sure there was no room for error, as it were. You're like, hang on, so I'm a treasury professional, Mike, I'm not a cyclist. Why? Why would this be of importance? Well, let's talk about a few things. He aimed that within five years that they would actually win one of the major races. Unfortunately, they didn't do it. They did in three. It was incredible. 2008 Olympics, they won 60 of the gold medals within cycling. Four years later, nine Olympic records, seven world records in London. Well, Bradley Wiggins won the Tour de France, followed by Chris Froome, followed by a number of other guys and all these things. And it was just these marginal 1% improvements. Okay, it's all great and it's all about cycling and stuff. And you're sitting there going, mike, I'm not cyclist. I'm not interested. Really? No, I don't want you to be. What I want you guys to do is to think about the 1% improvements you can make. So next week or today or tomorrow, you wrote this out. Look at your LinkedIn profile. Is your photo visible to everyone? That's a 1% improvement. Have you asked for one recommendation? How hard is that going to be to just send one email every Monday or make it a regular routine? Put it in. 1% improvement. Could you look at. You have a quick review of Your resume. Just one thing, just change a couple of sentences. Imagine if you did this and I had one of my ex bosses said don't do 100, you know, one thing 100% better, do 100 things 1% better. So it's exactly the same. If you do that 52 times a year, once a week, imagine how much incrementally that's going to improve. If you've reviewed, if you just did that for your resume and you did 10 reviews of your resume and 10 improvements, how much better is that going to be? And I'm not saying take hours and hours about doing this. One of the previous conferences, I can't do it. I bought gift cards with, with $5 things for coffee and lots of people took it away and I said, look, buy yourself a coffee and I want you to think about what you can do 1% better. And people were sitting there over their coffees, changing their LinkedIn profiles. They were making a couple of notes about what they were going to do, about how they were going to do some more study, how they were going to change it. But I said don't make big changes. I don't want 100% change, just want a little bit every week. And by doing that, you, you guys are going to get successful, the success you deserve. Amazing to talk to you today. Thank you very much for your time. I'm going to come out of the share, I'm going to get rid of this, going to do screen sharing. Boom. It's been amazing everyone. Chris, thank you for organizing it. And we're out of the session. Thank you very much. Love you all. So I hope you enjoyed that session. As as always, if you are looking for any treasury career advice, whether you're a client or a candidate, just give us a call or drop me an email via mike treasuryrecruitment.com love to hear from you and any feedback to any of the podcasts or any treasury career advice. That's exactly why we're here and we'd love to help you. Or alternatively visit our website for more constructive treasury career advice about resumes, about all the things you've seen on the show, LinkedIn, you got videos, you got Treasury TV there, the lot. So just go to treasury recruitment.com simple as that. We're here to help and help both you and your treasury career. So as always, many thanks for listening to the show. I look forward to next week with a another guest. Many thanks.