exposing the job search in guadalajara

Go, Taylor! Yeah, let's go. So, uh, I don't, I don't know any Spanish, so I'm really sorry. So just give me an English. I'm very excited to be here today. Like I said, my name is Taylor Desseyn. I'm the VP of Global Community at Torc.dev. If you have not been by our booth, please do so. We are literally right there. We'd love to have you. In a nutshell, what we're trying to do at Torc is we're trying to be your home base in your career. So what that means is at the end of the day, not everybody can find a job through a talent staffing company like ourselves. So me and my team make sure that you are engaged, that we do things for you throughout your career. We do resume reviews, we do, you know, interview prep, we bring in experts to help guide you through the job search. So this QR code right here is to join our jobs platform, which— so if you want to join our jobs platform, please do so. Would love to have you. I was told I have 25 minutes for this talk. I typically run this talk about 45 minutes. I'm actually speaking next week in the US at another conference, so we're going to be I'm gonna be quick, but long story short, I've probably placed over 1,000 engineers in my career in new jobs. I've helped hundreds of engineering organizations scale up their engineering teams. Everything I tell you today is just things that I have seen work for me that I want to work for you. My goal by the end of this talk is that you have hope, that you have motivation in guiding yourself through the job search, but of course we want to be here for you at Torc. So next slide. Cool. All right, let's talk about the resume real quick. Who in here thinks they have a good resume? Raise your hand. Anybody? All right, a few of you. That's actually pretty good, that's pretty good. You don't count, you work for me. So I want to go over kind of some few important topics on how to write a really good resume to be seen. First off, most people do not look at your entire resume when reviewing your resume, all right? The first third of your resume is one of the most important parts of your resume. You need to make sure that you clearly communicate to myself, the hiring manager what you do in bullet points. Some of y'all like to write really long paragraphs. I don't read it. No one reads it. Everyone's tired of reading paragraphs, so please do bullet points, which is incredibly important. The professional summary should read like this: I have 10 years of .NET experience, 7+ years of Angular experience, 3 years of Azure experience, 2 years of leadership experience managing a team of 10 people, Plus, that is what that should look like. Again, most of y'all do this like crazy paragraph stuff. Please don't do that. Also, keywords. Listen, keywords are incredibly important. You need to have the appropriate technical keywords in your resume for recruiters and hiring managers to call you. Most of us do a Ctrl+F search. If you are a .NET developer and you do not have a lot of .NET in your resume, we will not call you. Listen, it's not fair, I know. I don't make the rules. It just, it is what it is. Yeah. Right? Also, tell me what you have done. I'm sick and tired of looking at y'all's resumes and it's just a task list. It's a laundry list. I fixed this bug. I wrote this code. This is what I did. That doesn't tell me a story. Get quantitative as possible. How many users is your application supporting? How, how approximately how much revenue does your application support? Get specific. That really stands out. Also, stop with the double-column resumes. Some of y'all with these, like, double columns, if you know what I'm talking about, stop it. It's hard to read. I reject you immediately. Again, I'm sorry, it is what it is. I don't make the rules. I'm just trying to hire faster. Next slide. Awesome. So it's about networking. Welcome. You are networking. Congratulations. So again, most of this does not apply to you because you're here, but listen, you will You will not land a job if you sit at home. You just won't. If you sit at home and you hope a job finds you, that's not how that works, folks. You need to go out, meet people. Listen, I challenge you, I challenge you over the next 48 hours to get out of your comfort zone, because you have to understand something. One conversation could change your career. Listen, I've talked to some startup founders that are looking to hire. that are looking to raise a round. Listen, their next fundraising could be one conversation away. Your next job could be here. But some of y'all are too scared to have a conversation with the person to the left or right of you, and that could absolutely transform your career. Next, LinkedIn is the most powerful networking tool. Who in here actually uses LinkedIn on a day-to-day basis? Oh boy. On a day-to-day basis. Cool. That's not enough. You have to understand something. The hiring manager, the company that you want to work for is on LinkedIn. Most of y'all, who in here likes to scroll through Instagram or TikTok? That's me, right? I admit, that's what I did last night in my hotel room until I passed out, right? Don't do that. Get on LinkedIn, like a post, comment, engage. Listen, I'm telling you, it changes your career. I was a typical recruiter that recruited engineers. I started to engage. I doubled, tripled down on LinkedIn, as this man knows right here, right? And I've completely transformed my career because of it. It works. Listen, it's the weirdest thing, but now online is the place to network. So if you're not in a Discord, if you're not using LinkedIn, listen, we'd love to have you on the Torque Discord. Quick sell there, but please use LinkedIn. It's an incredible, powerful networking tool. When you're using LinkedIn, there's 3 ways to use LinkedIn to be successful. First off, post. Just post. Now a lot of people are like, Tim, I don't know what to post. What should I post? I don't know. I'm not a content creator. Listen, neither am I. Neither am I. I'm not MrBeast, right? Listen, all I'm asking you to do is to document your day. Who in here learned something interesting today? Raise your hand. Anybody? Great, 3 of y'all. Perfect. So write about it. Hey, listen, I went to Taylor's talk. He's the best speaker ever. This is what I learned about LinkedIn. Boom, post it. Tag me. You know what happens when you tag me? My 30,000 followers see it. There you go, my man gets it up here, right? So please post. Next thing, slide into people's DMs. I am openly encouraging people to slide into DMs here. Be professional, don't be weird, right? But listen, go for the ask. Hey, hey, so-and-so, I saw you've been posting about hiring. I actually do that. I do that. Like, I had that skill set you want. Here's what I've done. Would love to talk, right? Listen, I go for that. I just had a podcaster founder of a startup in LA who raised $40 billion Series B round. I was like, there's no way I can get him. My wife listens to the podcast. I texted my wife, I said, guess who's coming on my podcast? She goes, no way. I said, yes. Because you know why? I just slid into his DMs. I go, hey man, listen to your podcast, love it. Do you want to come on my podcast? He goes, absolutely. Literally, like, I shoot way out of my comfort zone. And it's— you'll be amazed at the people who actually say yes. Next thing, like and comment on people's statuses, right? Engage. It's incredibly important, right? Don't use AI for commenting on LinkedIn, right? Just do an LOL, haha, this is a great post. I don't need some AI slop on LinkedIn. Knock that off. Also, listen, right now in this market, what I've seen is people genuinely want to help. If you talk to me, I will try to help you. That's why, that's why we created the Torque community, because I want to basically bring all my friends from the 13 years that I've been doing this thing, and basically you have access to it. I have hiring managers from some of the biggest companies in our Torque Discord. I have all these people who are willing to help us. If people want to help, use that to your advantage. Go for the ask. It'll transform your career. Also, one conversation today, listen, if Who's it? Who is on the job search in here? Raise your hand. Anybody actively looking for a job? Yeah, listen, y'all, one conversation, right? You're at a conference today. You should have many conversations. But when we leave here on Friday or Saturday, listen, continue that clip. Have a conversation today. Message someone on LinkedIn. Get them on the phone. Get them doing a Zoom call. It changes your career. Next. All right, let's talk about interviewing. Who in here feels like they are good interviewers? Raise your hand. 2 of y'all, great. All right, so listen, let's go over some interview tips. First off, find some commonalities, right? Go to their LinkedIn, see where they went to school, right? Look at some of their past posts on LinkedIn. Incredibly important. Find commonalities. I went to a big football school. in the States, University of South Carolina. If you message me about football, I'm gonna respond back to you, right? Not soccer, football, not proper football. Anyways, do the small stuff, all right? Listen, I can't tell you the amount of hiring managers I talk to that interview people that do not know what the company does they're interviewing for. Knock that off! What are we doing? Research the company. Do the small things. My big thing right now is people that are getting jobs over you are not better than you. They're doing the small things better than you, right? And so this is incredibly important. Next thing, figure out the problem they are trying to solve. I recently went through a job search, right? I bring a lot to the table, at least I think I do, right? And so when I interviewed with the company, I said, hey, what are you trying to solve? They're like, well, we've never done really social media. I said, well, I got that locked down, right? They're like, we've never done conferences. Okay, I got that locked down. And we're actually looking for somebody to help bring in sales. So I can do that, right? And then so guess what I did the next interview? I came up with key specific things where I've moved the needle and I said that in my interview. Right? Find the commonalities, find the problems they're trying to solve, figure that out, and speak to that specifically in the job search or in the interview. Turn the interview into a conversation. Listen, some of y'all that I talk to when I interview, I'm like, hey, have you done this? You go, nope. That is incredibly awkward. That was awkward. I hated that just now, right? Listen, if you don't know something, go, hey, I don't know, but I've done something like this, or hey, I haven't done this, but is it like this? Right? It's incredibly important. Keep the conversation going. Bring in commonalities. Next thing, read the job description and bring a one-pager to the interview. What I mean by that is, listen, while I feel like I'm really, really good at reciting my career, I still still can't remember everything. And so, when you go into an interview, jot some things down as it relates to the job. If you're interviewing for a senior tech lead, well, you need to migrate an Angular codebase to React, and you've done that before, give me specifics and walk into the interview with that written down, because I will tell you this, you will most likely black out a little bit. Anybody in here do an interview and just black out? You're like, oh gosh. I've done it, I've done it, it's awful, right? Have some prompts written down in front of you. Next slide. All right, the follow-up. Listen, the follow-up, in my opinion, is the single most important part of the job search. The single most important part. Why? Because you can talk to thousands of people a month, and if you don't check in with them, they're gonna forget about you. Prime example, I was interviewing at a startup before I ended up at Torque, that I worked for a year. And I got to the final round, and the hiring man, the CEO founder was like, hey, we like you, but not right now. And I was like, so there's something called the Nashville, the Nashville no, which is like, it's actually a no, but they never really tell you no, right? Yeah. So I said, okay. I said, well, knowing that, he was like, check in with me At the end of the month, this was the beginning of the month at the time. So because I know how to do this thing, I checked in with the founder a week later and I said, "Hey, Mr. Founder, how did that hire go for you? Are you still open to hiring me?" He goes, "Taylor, thank you for your follow-up. We'd love to go ahead and bring you on board." Right? And here's the deal. What if I never sent that email? What if I never followed up? I would have never gotten that job. Now granted, that job sucked, but that's not the point. So all that being said, make sure you follow up. Who uses Trello? Right? Trello? Anybody? No? Well, that's weird. All right, 3 of y'all. Great. So I use Trello. I think that's great. There's a lot of other tools. We're working on some tools here at Torque to help as well. But again, make sure you know who you're interviewing. It's not always quantity, it's quality. Let me say that again. It's not always quantity. We as human beings confuse activity for productivity. Spitting some bars right now, right? Let me say that again. We as human beings confuse activity with productivity. Just because you shake a lot of hands and kiss a lot of babies doesn't mean you're going to find a job quickly. You got to shake the right hands and kiss the right babies. To find a job, don't publicly go around kissing babies. That's weird. All right, thank you notes. Listen, when you are talking to people and you interview with them, nobody sends who sends thank you cards anymore? Anybody? My mother made me send thank you cards back in the day. No, that's what I thought. Send a thank you over LinkedIn, right? Hey, hey, Mr. Manager. Hey, Mrs. So-and-so. It was great to speak with you. Really want to be considered for the next opportunity at your company? Let's stay in touch. Send. Right? It's another touchpoint. It's another touchpoint. Use that feature. Again, 90% of your job search— I made that number up, but 90% of your job search really relies on follow-up. Next slide. Sweet, that ends it. All right, that being said, let me wrap it up. A few more things. Community is everything. All right, listen, we're big on it. torque, we're huge on it. We want to be here for you, but at the end of the day, we cannot go through the job search alone, right? We need the people around you. Listen, I encourage you to start a meetup. I challenge everybody to start a meetup. Now you're probably wondering like, Taylor, listen, I don't know what to talk about. I don't start meetups. Listen, start inviting people out to lunch. I love food. I love Mexican cuisine. It is unbelievable. Big fan, right? Start inviting people out. If you love— I don't know, if you love margaritas, right? Invite people out on Thursday and go drink a margarita together, right? I used to start— I had a lunch in Nashville where I invited 10 engineers every, every month, and we just broke bread together, and it was the most impactful thing I have done in my career. I will tell you this, people are lonely more than ever. We see it in Torque time and time again, and I think people really, really need help. So again, I'm gonna finish it out here. Go be fearless. Go have conversations. Shake some hands. Make some new friends. Join the Torque community. I appreciate y'all. Thank you. And now for the winner of the Taylor Desseyn Award, and for the winner of the Taylor Desseyn Award, and now for one of the