Guidance Counselor 2.0 (Solo Show) + How to Network on Linkedin

All righty. Good morning. Happy Monday. We got the candle going this morning. Tell you what, I think, I think one of the issues with burning candles is that You don't burn it all the way right the first time. I learned this from my wife. You have to like burn the candle all the way like the first time you use it. Um, it— I, I've got a little, little hole issue going on here on this candle, but still smells good. Um, trying out a new brand. Uh, just ordered a gingerbread candle, so that should be great. Excited about that. Uh, all my candle fans, check in. Um, especially around the holidays. But good morning, it's good to see y'all this morning. Please comment, say hey, would love to hear from you, would love to know where you're tuning in from. Um, you know, we, we have people all over the globe, um, tune in and, uh, it's pretty cool. Um, so let us know where you tune in from. Uh, let's see here, I'm checking, make sure everything looks good. We're live, we're live, looks good. All right, cool, there we go. Jeff, good to see you this morning. Ricardo, it's good to see you this morning as well. I'm excited for this episode. So again, for those of you tuning in, first and foremost, I want to give a quick rundown on what Guidance Counselor 2.0 is. So I've been doing this live show for almost 6 years. It'll be 6 years this March, which is crazy to think about. And really, this live show kind of started just as a way to give back, right? So I started this during COVID Um, you know, I would— at the time I was hands-on recruiting in the Nashville market. Um, and, uh, once COVID hit, I saw that really the developer economy and the developer market as a whole was going to be distributed across the country, if not the globe. So I realized I needed, I needed something, um, to, uh, basically share at scale. And so, uh, that's why I started this thing. It was just me, myself, and I, kind of very similar to this, just yapping on the internet. Every day. And then, you know, had people come in and want to interview with me and tell their stories. And so it's kind of morphed into what it is today, which is, you know, which has been awesome. I've had some amazing guests from bootcamp grads who've had success finding a job all the way to, you know, folks at Netflix, Google, et cetera. So, but as of late, admittedly, one, I just haven't done a good job at getting guests on the show. But also too, um, I— it kind of, uh, kind of aligns with what we're doing at Torque and wanting to, to really create a lot of resources, um, uh, to help people throughout their job search. And I get a lot of questions. I mean, my DMs, um, I, I'm trying to get better at them, but I'm usually about 2 to 4 weeks behind on DMs. And there's so many questions around the same thing. It's like, hey Taylor, uh, can you help me with— can you help me with this? Or How to better position myself in a job search or how to use LinkedIn, which is what we're talking about today. So I have a variety of questions. So what I try to do is I try to go— the reason why we do content is try to help people, right? And so between me not getting guests on, I also, I just did— my third kid is gonna be here at the end of December. So really what my goal is over the next few weeks is to really do these live streams and help guide people throughout the job search. I mean, even I'm helping my dad right now as it is, kind of guide him through the job search. And, and there's— whether you're in the restaurant industry or the tech industry or the, the, the, the marketing industry, finding a job is pretty much applicable throughout any industry. And so, um, so I wanna— so I'm going live every Mondays and Tuesdays to basically walk you through the job search. So when I'm done with this series, you should be able to watch every single one of my videos and at least have a very good understanding, a very good base on how you should find a job. So today we're gonna go over how to use LinkedIn to network. I still think LinkedIn is an incredibly undervalued tool resource, and not many people know how to use it. And so today we're gonna talk about how to— so today and tomorrow are LinkedIn focused. So today is about how to kind of network how to use it. We've already talked about how to create it. If you go to Torque YouTube, I have that livestream on there. But today we're gonna really kind of get into tactical things and staying tomorrow, there may be some overlap just because it's LinkedIn as a platform, kind of dive into it. But today we're gonna talk about really how to effectively use LinkedIn just to network, to find people, to connect with people, you know, how to send a DM. So that's what we're gonna go over today. So again, please say hey if you're tuning in. Again, I usually tell people this is a networking session, right? So what I would do if I were you is I would DM every person in the chat and be like, hey, it was good to see you on Guidance Counselor 2.0 this morning. And if you stick with me, right, if you stick with me and if you stuck with me for the last 6 years and DM'd every guest and every person in the chat, your network would be incredibly expansive, which is again, is the goal for what we're doing at Torque. You know, Jason's doing the same thing at Tech Commute. So Uh, again, have some more people tuning in. Uh, Ricardo, Chris, and just good to see you. Cool glasses, they make you look more technical. Great, that's exactly what I was going for, Emory. I appreciate that. Um, Chris, it's good to see y'all. Good to see you this morning as well. All right, let's go ahead. Oh, first and foremost, want to give a few quick announcements. Uh, I want to give a shout out to Appwrite. Um, I am a hero. Um, go check them out. Uh, love the team out there. Um, great, great little product they have. So, uh, I know Jason is at Appwrite here as well. So if you do go check out their product, you jump into the Discord, If you talk to anybody at Appwrite, tell them the Torque Boys sent you. Also, do you want to give some shoutouts— not some shoutouts, some announcements for the Torque land. First and foremost, if you have not checked it out yet, torque.community, our new community site. It looks great. It's pretty. It's got colors and things. But 2 quick announcements. One, we have our ambassador signups open, and they are still open until December 5th. So we finally picked an end date. Um, right now we have close to 60 ambassadors. We are not taking everybody. Um, we are not taking everybody. Um, we really want to pour into the ambassador group. We had a great all-hands last week in Atlanta. I still need to try to find a, find a time to recap that to you all. Um, but, but the, the all-hands was amazing. And basically one of the things that really came out of it was our ambassador program and really pouring into ambassadors, giving them more resources to, uh, not only, um, network and and expand the Torque name, but also again, pour into them as individuals. And so if you are interested and you wanna rep the brand of Torque, please go sign up on torque.community. If you scroll down a little bit, it's there, but signups are closed December 5th and we will not open these up probably for another year. So this is it. And then also too, we have our mentor-mentee program signups open. So if you are looking for a mentor, please go sign up. If you are a senior individual in tech and have always wanted to be a mentor, Um, but you just don't have the time, we are going to basically get you to the finish line. So we are going to pair you up with people, we are going to help manage, uh, your meeting cadence and really help make this mentor-mentee program successful. Right now we have around 11 mentors, uh, and 22 mentees, which is great, kind of a 2-to-1, uh, very intimate style setting there. Um, but that also closes up December 5th. So December 5th is the date you need to know on both the Ambassador Program and the mentor-mentee program. Also, if you want to know when I go live with things like this, just text LIVE to 615-235-5650. This is my number, it's me, and I just shoot out a text every morning when I go live just so you know what I'm talking about if you want to hop in. We got a few more comments this morning. Jason's here. Hello, Jason. Michael, it's good to see you. Mazen, good to see you. Again, got to give a shout out to React Native. podcast or React Native Radio. Mazen, what do you call it? It's React Native Podcast, right? React Native Radio, I don't know. Mazen, chime in. But anyways, I was with the crew last week talking about job search and mobile hiring, and it was a great conversation. Mazen is a fantastic guest with Robin and the team at Infinite Red. So it was a great chat. Can't wait for that to drop. Let's see here, what else? There we go. Just wanna say all hail Torque. Yep. Love it, love it, Naz, love it. All right, so let's go ahead and dive in here. I'm gonna go and share my screen and let's just dive into how to network and actually use LinkedIn to network, okay? So we need to scroll in here. All right, so I wanna go over kind of a few basic building blocks here, right? So again, there's kind of 3 ways to use LinkedIn to network, right? React Native Radio, thank you, Mazen. I knew that I was close, React Native Radio. Anyways, go check them out in the podcast store, podcast app. All right, so first thing I wanna talk about is how do you network effectively on LinkedIn? And I always tell people there's really kind of 3 ways to use LinkedIn and really social media for that matter to find a job is one, you can post, right? I mean, literally just post. We can talk about what to post, how to post. We can definitely talk about that. The second thing is— Mm-hmm. Is like and comment and engage with people's posts, right? I think that is a highly underrated tactic. You know, we talk about a lot of times that, you know, when we show up to a meetup and we shake hands and introduce ourselves, um, you can do that. Like, the equivalent of that, right, the equivalent of shaking someone's hand at a meetup is literally going on LinkedIn and commenting and liking a post and leaving a thoughtful comment. And then the third way is the DMs, right? So, um, I, I do want to break down first off when it comes to posting Listen, I'm not asking you to post 3, 4, or 5 times a day. What I'm asking you to do is post once a day. Now, the biggest thing people ask is, Taylor, what do I post? The first thing I would tell people, I'm gonna stop sharing my screen 'cause I'm just gonna kind of give a little lay of the land here. When I say post, I mean document your journey, talk about what you're building, talk about what you're learning, talk about maybe something where you messed up on. or you're having a hard time with. It really cuts through the noise, especially on LinkedIn. I know LinkedIn's spammy and there's a lot of like just stupid posts out there. But for me, you know, if you want kind of prompts, right, 5 prompts every week. First thing is, hey, if you're employed, what are you doing at work right now, right? Like what's interesting right now? The pushback is, I guess, is, Taylor, if I start posting on LinkedIn, will it alert my employer? No, there's literally nothing that's gonna alert your employer if you talk about what you're doing at work, right? Literally, that's what my job is, is posting about what we're doing at Torque Community. It's not a sign of me leaving. If my boss is watching this, I'm not leaving, but it literally, I just talk about what we're doing at work right now. So that's Mondays. Talk about what you're doing at work. Talk about something interesting. What did you implement from a tech stack perspective, right? What did you, is there new enhancements you're doing? Talk about what you're doing, right? If you are laid off and you don't have a job, that Monday post should be something along the lines of, hey, here's what I'm building, right? The second thing I would post on Tuesdays is, hey, I would literally just talk about one thing you're hung up on, right? One thing you're hung up on. Hey, I'm having problems doing this, or hey, I'm trying to learn this skillset and it's not working. Can someone help me? People want to help other people, especially in this market right now with the way the job search is, people genuinely wanna help people. So use that to your advantage, right? Talk about, hey, I can't figure out Kubernetes or I can't figure out this feature in AWS, right? People will jump in the comments and help you. It's a great way to crowdsource information, right? So that's the second post, right? Talk about what you're hung up on. The third post is maybe an accomplishment, right? Hey, listen, last week I was able to do this, right? So again, Documenting and accomplishments are a little bit different, right? Accomplishments is bragging on yourself. I think there's a lot— I don't think, I know after talking to a lot of people, people have a hard time talking about yourself, right? So what I would do is I would set aside one post a day just for the sake of this exercise on Wednesdays to be like, hey, here's what I've done, here's specifically how I moved the needle. What that does is 2 things. One, it draws attention to you and what you've been doing, and 2, it allows you to flesh out your ideas when you get into an interview and be able to brag about yourself, right? One of the biggest unlocks for me as a public speaker and a communicator is to just start writing, right? Like start making yourself type out things, right? I mean, literally people are like, well, how'd you get such a great public speaker? To me, actually Twitter, like Twitter or X has allowed me to become a pretty good speaker Because I have to give my thoughts in a very concise, what, 280 characters is what it is now. So if you can start framing about how you describe things in 280 characters or less, it allows you to become more of an effective speaker, right? So that's day 3. Day 4, I would literally, so on Thursdays, I would literally take a piece of content that you are watching, that you are reading, give that person a shout out and give your thoughts on it, right? So for example, let's say you listen to or watch my How to Write a LinkedIn the other day, right? I would literally say, hey, I tag Torque, tag me, because the way the LinkedIn algorithm works is that when you tag those people, some of their followers see it, right? And then give your thoughts. Hey, I love that Taylor said this, but I don't agree with this, right? Give a little discourse there. I think it's incredibly important. And then the 5th day can be a wildcard day. You can repurpose some documenting stuff. And/or talk about maybe something you're getting hung up on. But at least those are 4 things that you can really, really start to get going, right? Um, there, there are some comments here. Hold on. All right. Uh, I mean, yes, it can alert them if they follow you, but again, building in public and learning in public doesn't imply you want to dip out. Just maybe think about what you're posting. Yeah, yeah, 100%. Like, be smart about it. But again, like, the biggest complaint I get is, hey, if I'm going to talk about something I'm struggling with, or hey, if I'm gonna talk about what I'm doing at work, like, that does not signal you're looking to leave. Honestly, I think it'll be a great way again for you to frame up what you're doing. I think a lot of people getting interviews are like, I don't know what I talked— I don't know what I've done, right? So again, it's an exercise. What's going on? It's good to see you, girl. I love the insights on shouldn't talk about what you're doing. Yes, absolutely, absolutely. If you say, boy, my job sucks, probably not good optics. Nope, not at all. Yeah, absolutely. I share most of my project YouTube here. This kind of gets into social media strategy, right? Like LinkedIn still is a great awareness tool in terms of like getting people to find you. I would still leverage LinkedIn a ton. Now I will tell you this, LinkedIn has throttled their reach, which is a whole nother conversation of itself. When I started posting on LinkedIn in 2020, my written posts would get about 15,000 to 20,000 impressions. Now they barely get 1,000. That's a whole nother conversation for another day. I don't wanna get into social media kind of tactics here. But at the end of the day, if you wanna pick one platform to really document your journey, I still would put LinkedIn. That's incredibly important. Let's see here. What was my day 3? My day 3 was documenting your wins, right? So day 1 would essentially be documenting just what you're doing. Day 2 would be something you're getting hung up on. Day 3 is wins. Day 4 is taking a piece of content that you recently watched read or consumed that you really like and add some thoughts to it. And I'm sure I have something for day 5, but I can't think of on the fly right now. It's good to see from you. It's good to see you. It's good to see you as well. I've been sort of documenting the making of my portfolio on LinkedIn. The problem is I don't know how to explain each day or make it so— well, I will tell you this. Listen, any sort of posting publicly is gonna help you, right? I will tell you this, I think what people realize is that you can become known for something just by posting about it, right? Like even my wife the other day was like, man, I just feel like you kinda like cold brew's like your thing with online content. Like that's kind of one of the fun things. And again, the social media strategy and what you wanna be known for, and I won't get into that here. What I'm saying is if you wanna be known for React, even if you're a junior, post about React, post about what you're learning, post about what you're getting hung up on, post React articles. Like if you follow the template that I just said, you'll really start to become known for something even if you're junior. All right, so post is the first way to use LinkedIn, right? Incredibly important. The second way to use LinkedIn is like and comment on people's posts, right? So let me go to share my screen here, but while I do it, again, I think we get too— we need to think about how we operate in person and how we scale that out virtually, right? So when you go to a meetup or go to a conference, you go up to somebody and go, hey, My name's so-and-so. It's nice to meet you. What do you do, so-and-so? I'm a this, right? That interaction can be scaled. When I say scaled, I mean easily across the internet. If you go on LinkedIn and comment and like and engage with people's posts, right? It can be a very simple thing of, man, this is a great post. Or honestly, even if you don't agree with them, I've had a ton of people say, hey, Taylor, I don't agree with you and here's why. I love that. Literally, if you can go back and forth in the comments, it fuels their algorithm, which then gets you more eyeballs on your profile. Again, when it comes to hiring in tech or just in general, it's a lot about top of mind, right? So if you're out here engaging with somebody consistently and then you talk about what you do over and over again, that person sees you or follows you, then all of a sudden, if you talk about React nonstop and that person has a React job open, they post about it, and you slide into their DMs, they're gonna know about you because you've been engaging with them consistently, right? The 3rd way to use LinkedIn is the DMs, right? Craft meaningful DMs and we'll go over that here in a second. So I'm gonna go and share my screen. So here's some kind of few ways. So first off, what I would do if I were you is I would always start like, if you just like, I answered some DMs before I went live. And I got some DMs of, hey Taylor, I got laid off today. What do you think I should do? And it depends on your background, but if you went to a bootcamp or college institution, I honestly would start there. So what I would do is I would go to up here, I would type in the search bar University of South Carolina. That's where I went. So then, so when you type in the word University of South Carolina on the search bar of LinkedIn, I'm trying to think about the people who listen to this in audio form moving forward. I'm trying to explain this. So obviously you see the people that went to LinkedIn, you see the groups of South Carolina, you know, there's the University of South Carolina alumni, you see people that are companies in South Carolina, and then you see posts from the University of South Carolina, right? I think this is actually a really good dashboard for you to work off of because you could spend an entire day networking with people, joining groups and engaging in groups. You could also engage with people who are talking about the University of South Carolina, right? So let's go one step further here. Let's go to people, right? And then actually, let's not go to people. Sorry, my bad. So let's go to University of South Carolina here. Let's click on the University of South Carolina. Let's go to alumni, right? So again, this goes to boot camps too, right? So first off, at University of South Carolina, there's 189,000 alumni for the University of South Carolina on LinkedIn. Then I can drill into specific cities. So let's do Nashville. All right, let's do the greater, let's do Nashville here. So right now there's 63 people in the Nashville area that went to University of South Carolina. So literally what I could do, and look at this, Jason Weinstein, he went to University of South Carolina, he's a senior VP of IT architecture. Right. So what I would do if I were you, I would— so South Carolina football, we just, we, we just, we, we, we had an awful loss on Saturday. I would play to that because again, people who go to South Carolina for the most part love their football, SEC. What I would do— Jason, stop messing with me. I don't know what you're doing, but stop messing with me. Um, what I would do is I would go to Jason, right? So, so I'm going to connect with Jason right now. Here's, here's the thing. And then, by the way, if you have comments, please, or questions, throw them up. I can't see the StreamYard chat right now, um, so I'll get there in a second. But so what I would do is I would press the connect button with Jason Weinstein, and then it says add a note and send without a note. I would always add a note, right? So I would say, hey, hey, hey, Jason, uh, go, go Gamecocks. Hate our loss on Saturday. Um, LOL, uh, would love to connect, um, because I'm in Nashville and in tech. Boom, there we go, right? And I'm actually, I'm actually just, I'm actually just gonna fire it off, right? Boom, done, right? So now the power of the DMs on LinkedIn is that when Jason accepts, it immediately goes to the top of his inbox. People don't talk about this a lot, right? And, and I don't know why. Well, most people just give out stupid advice, but for me, the inbox feature on the Connect is pretty incredible, right? How many times— like, I don't know any other platform that you can connect with somebody, send them a message, and then once they accept the message, it goes to the top of their inbox and they have to click out of your message to make it unread, right? There's a lot of friction there to allow the user to like have to maybe respond to you. Right, which is incredibly important. And literally what I would do here for you or so, I would literally just go through and I would just message people that applied to me, right? So right here, so Adam Duff, Adam Duff's a co-founder, right? So if I'm trying to get business from Adam, right, I'd message Adam, hey Adam, go Gamecocks, right? Would love to chat, would love to meet. I'm in the Nashville area, right? And I would go down this list and message people, right? Get to a coffee, get to a lunch, get to a breakfast. Something, right? Again, same thing here. So let's go to another one, for example. So Nashville Software School, a great bootcamp in Nashville, right? What I would do if I graduated from Nashville Software School, I would go to Nashville Software School, I would go to alumni, right? And then I would literally go to Nashville. There's 1,600 alumni in Nashville. And literally what I would do is I would message people that have jobs that went to Nashville. So like Morley right here, She's just senior software engineer. In my opinion, I think it really boils down like, like if you are junior, more junior on your job search, or you're in college and trying to graduate, I feel that you have the best opportunity to cut through the noise. And the reason for that is because everybody wants to help junior folks, right? So, so, so if you are out here and you feel like you're at a disadvantage 'cause you're a junior, you're actually not. Because more likely than not, if you message Morley, who's a senior software engineer who went to Nashville Software School, and be like, hey, Morley, I'm currently at the Nashville Software School cohort, whatever they're at now, I'm looking to figure out how to get my first job in tech. Do you have a minute? Would love to pick your brain on how you found your first job in tech. I will argue that Morley, I would say 60, 70% of the time, Morley will get back to you. Because literally she wants to help you because y'all are both bonded by the same thing, right? So like for me, like, like if I, if I was ever laid off, right, I would go to my Ronstadt network or my Vaco network or my Gun.io network, right? You always want to start because at the end of the day, like, it's kind of shared suffering, right? It's this whole idea of building community is that we all went through the trenches together and use that to your advantage. All right, we have some comments here. I wanna, I wanna get, I wanna get to these. Hold on real quick. Um, hold on, we have a lot of comments while I was gone. Let's see here. I disagree with too many people on LinkedIn to comment on posts. Well, I hear you, Jeff. I hear you. Do it, do it tactfully. You gotta do it tactfully. Um, let's see here. I've never DM'd anyone on here, so let me take notes. Yeah, again, I, I think DMing on LinkedIn is incredibly, incredibly powerful tool. Roxy comes in. I started the process a while ago, need to continue. Too many folks I add when I had no idea what I was doing. Yep. Yeah, I mean, and you need to be pointed, right? So I, I want to go over a good DM, right? Especially if they're a stranger, if you have nothing in common, I'd get very specific, right? So let's say, let's say I'm a mid— so I, I go back to my buddy Connor Bush. Connor Bush is in Nashville. He was at Evernote at the time. And he was like, how do you think I should get a job at Netflix? And I said, I said, here's what I would do. I said, I would message people at Netflix in kind of the same area of engineering that you're doing at Evernote and ask them something. So Connor went back, he thought about what he was doing. So I guess at Evernote they were trying to implement something that Netflix was using, right? So what Connor did is he went on the search bar, went to Netflix, typed in the search of the, the tech thing that they were implementing at Evernote. And started messaging Netflix managers. So what I would do in this case to craft a really good DM is one, check out their profile, right? Admiration and flattery goes a long way, right? So if you message me and go, hey Taylor, I love all the content you put out, right? That to me shows you have some sort of invested interest, right? So the way you do this is if you go to a person's LinkedIn page, This is where I would really, really leverage their activity, right? So one of the things— so the activity portion of LinkedIn has gotten a huge boost lately. This was a recent drop, and, and they're bringing past posts more to the forefront of your LinkedIn. To me, that is not a coincidence. To me, they probably did that so users can find past activity to use that to your advantage to network, right? So For example, what I would do is if you're trying to DM me, I would say, hey Taylor, I saw where you recently did a live on how to go over LinkedIn to network, right? Use that to your advantage. So what Connor did is what he did is he went to these Netflix engineering managers' profiles and looked at their activity to mention something in the DM. So that's the first thing, admiration, flattery. The next thing is be specific. So the way Connor DM'd the Netflix engineering manager was, hey, We at Evernote are trying to implement this tool that you guys have at Netflix, right? That's very clear, concise. Would love to pick your brain on how you guys implemented it, right? So that right there, it's admiration, flattery. He's bringing it, he's gonna be mentioning something on the LinkedIn profile that they posted. Then he's going to a specific ask, right? Those are the 2 biggest things, right? Most people message people on LinkedIn and they're very long. That's another thing, be clear, concise, 3 to 5 sentences. Probably wouldn't even get 5 sentences. I'd probably do 3 sentences. People just don't read. They just don't. People— I've, I've TL;DR'd my own emails before, right? So keep it short, keep it concise. Ask for something too, right? So admiration, flattery, go for the ask, be specific in the ask, and, and what you want. Do you want a call? Do you want an email back and forth? Like, what do you want out of it is incredibly important. All right, let me, let me get to a few more comments here. Angie, yes. Angie gets a lot of DMs, I would imagine. So she's a great resource here. As someone who receives a lot of candidates sending me generic notes regularly, I love when someone has sent me something more personalized. It shows they have looked at my profile. Yes, yes, yes. This is it, Angie. Thank you. Also great headshot, Angie. Let's see here. What else? Let's see here. I'm kind of going through the comments here. I do that. From Gianni, I do that, I send DMs to some people, but I need a job now. How does this benefit me in the short term? Nothing you do outside of applying for jobs specifically is going to help you immediately. Let me say that again. If you are actively in a job search mode right now, nothing's gonna help you immediately outside of applying for jobs. The job search time frame is a long time frame, right? I mean, it can be. For some, it's short. For— I would say on average, I'm seeing, I'm seeing around 9 months of the job search, right? So for me, I say this time and time again, there are 4 ways, 4 ways to, to basically build your job search out, right? The first is open up, literally open up your phone, your contact list, and start going through it. It's gonna take some time depending on how much, how many contacts you have like me, but I would literally start to reach out to people through your phone. This right here, you know, some— somebody told me the other day, and Angie, I don't know if you're still on the call, you'll, you'll, you'll kind of laugh at this. Somebody told me the other day, they're like, Taylor, I feel like this is sales. Everything I'm teaching you is what I taught my sales team, the, the small team I ran at Bayco, right? This is sales. Your job search is you are the product, so you have to sell yourself. Right? So you have to get in front of people. The people in your phone book— the phone book, I don't know, last time I opened up a phone book— people in your contact list are the most warm contacts you have. Start here, start here. The second thing I would say is then apply to jobs. But remember, we've talked about this in my past streams, do not apply to generic postings on LinkedIn. Find the job opening on LinkedIn. We'll probably talk about this tomorrow because we're technically already at time. Time flies, but this is a lot of information. Find the job on LinkedIn, go to the company page and apply to the company page. So that's the second thing, cold apply. Third is like be involved in community, right? Getting like, get into Torque Discord, get in multiple Discords. If you're a designer, get in designer Slacks or Discords, right? That's incredibly important. And the fourth thing is DMing people on LinkedIn, right? Incredibly important, using LinkedIn, commenting, liking, DMing. Again, you don't build a house with just a screwdriver, right? I'm not a handy person, but I barely know what a hammer is. But I do know that you can build a house with just a screwdriver, right? So you have to use all of them. So Gianni, so the things I'm telling you now is you need to do on day 1 as well as apply to jobs, right? It's all of it, it's all of it. Let's see here, what else? Let's see here. I have a lot, over 500 connections. I had my LinkedIn profile since the days of my prior career in real estate. I have many contacts from trying to network in that industry. Should I now audit my friend list and delete people? No, no, that, that's just— just leave them. Just, just leave them. That's the, the time you spend doing that is time that you could be doing more outreach. Don't, don't worry about that. Um, add a note to connect has a max limit, so that's a plus. Doesn't mean you need it though. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Be short, be consistent, be concise. It can be tough hearing from folks that can't help. It can be tougher when folks aren't replying at all. Don't take it personally. Yes, listen, most people don't reply, but again, you have to consistently fine-tune your DMs to try to get a response. But again, if you are, if you like, for Chris, right? So Chris helps run DevOps Days in Atlanta, right? So if you do a little research, Right? I'd be like, hey Chris, saw you run DevOps Days Atlanta. I'm a huge DevOps guy, right? I'm looking for a job right now. Would love to pick your brain on what do you think I should do, right? Again, incredibly important. Let's see here. Yeah, da da da. Yes, I feel like I'm on one right now. Jill, of course it wouldn't delete just yet. Yep, 100%. All right, what else? So this is, so tomorrow I'm going over how to find a job on LinkedIn. I do wanna go here, right? So, so again, if so, so, so if I go to Ben's post, right, so I would comment here, but I think it's curious too. You'd be like, all right, Rakesh liked Ben's post, so Rakesh may know Ben. So let me go to Rakesh, right? So Rakesh is a director of enterprise architecture, right? Oh, and he's at Kurantis, which Ben was formerly at. So you can message Rakesh and be like, hey Rakesh, I saw you liked Ben's post on Kubernetes. Would love to chat with you about Kubernetes. I'm a huge fan. Again, that could go well. And now he may not respond, which is totally fine. Again, so Julia here, I know Julia. Ange, our Tork Ange, liked the post. If I did not know Ange, I could go to Ange's profile and see what he's up to. Right? Like, like, look at this stuff and, and, and, and really, like, uh, you always want to message people with, with like that warm lead, right? It's, it's— most people will not respond back to you if you just cold DM somebody with like no sort of common connection, right? So whether it's a college, a boot camp, a similar connection A passion about the same technology, something, right? You have to do something. You have to message them and reference something, right? That is the way to really cut through the noise. So for example, if you are a salesperson looking for a sales job, Angie heads up sales for, you know, Ronstadt North America, I would message Angie and be like, hey Angie, I saw you on Guidance Counselor 2.0 today. I saw where you head up sales. Would love to chat with you about sales tactics. I'm sure Angie will most likely get back to you because you have taken notice on what she's involved in. Um, yeah, big, big fan, Jason. All right, what else? Um, we talked about DMs. Again, liking and commenting goes a long way. I, I also do want to— I do want to showcase something real quick again, right? So, um, I'm trying to go to a like and comment. All right, well, how about let's just go back to Rakesh here, right, with Ben, right? So Rakesh He liked Ben's post and commented. Which name do you see more of? Do you see Rakesh or do you see Ben? I see Rakesh. I see Rakesh, right? Like LinkedIn incentivizes you to engage with people, right? 'Cause it's all about name, it's all about brand, it's all about top of mind, right? So if you are somebody who wants to be known for Kubernetes or no, yeah, known for Kubernetes, and you consistently engage with individuals who post about Kubernetes, the algorithm and the way social media works is that you're gonna get fed more Kubernetes, but then also the Kubernetes people are gonna see you more, right? Again, being known for something. Whenever people hire, they're like, hey, we need a backend database guy. Who should we hire? The first guy that pops into my brain because he put out so much content around database stuff, it's Aaron Francis, right? So I'm probably gonna go to Aaron Francis and be like, hey, Aaron, And obviously you do your video thing, you're probably not looking for a job, but who do you know, right? Again, you need to be known as like the Kubernetes guy or the React girl or the design, so on, design systems, right? Dan Mall, right, with design systems. He posts about design systems all the time. Again, it's being known for something in your job search, which cuts through the noise. All right, so again, to recap, if there are any questions, please ask them as we wrap up here. To recap, To use LinkedIn to network, you mainly use it by 3 ways: posting, liking and commenting people's posts, and tactful DMs. Those are the most important ways to use LinkedIn. When you message somebody on LinkedIn, always make sure you add a note, make sure it's customized, make sure it's around 3 sentences: admiration, flattery, a specific ask, And move on. I will tell you this, and, and Angie, I don't know if you're still on, but I believe that most recruiters' DM responses are only 25%, right? So like the, the people whose job it is to cold DM people, their responses are only 25%, right? So don't think you're going to get a ton of DMs back. This is a little bit of a volume play. But again, the more specific you can be and the more tactical you can be, the better opportunity your response rates are. My response rate at Vaco when I was a hands-on recruiter were over 50%. Why? Because I, I took time and my messages were well crafted, right? So again, incredibly important. Um, finally, leverage— um, oh, oh, another thing, another thing I want, I want to share too real quick. So is again, go to somebody's profile before you message them and just see like their passions. Here, if you go down here, South Carolina, you can see I was VP of .NET User Group, some of the people I follow, some of the groups I follow. Literally, use this to your advantage. A lot of people have these built out a lot more than I have, but you can message me like, hey, I see you follow Chris Do, give me your thoughts on him. What are your thoughts? Or, hey, I see where you follow Lucas, and I'll tell you, yeah, I actually introduced Lucas at Render ATL. Right, again, you always wanna make sure when you're DMing somebody, you tie something together on their profile or post to help cut through the noise. All right, I think that's it for today. I think that's it. Y'all have a good one. Tomorrow, 9:30 AM Central, we are going to specifically go over how to find a job on LinkedIn. That's a whole other thing. We're gonna search jobs, we're gonna figure out how to talk to people who posted jobs, So that's tomorrow morning, 9:30 AM Central. If you like this episode, feel free to share it. Um, if somebody in your network needs to hear this, which most do, uh, feel free to share it. Otherwise, thank you so much. I appreciate you all, and, uh, we'll see you all in the Torque Discord, and, uh, we'll see you all tomorrow. Peace.