Landing an Interview (Solo Show)

All righty, good morning, good morning, good morning, good morning. Happy Friday! We made it, we made it, y'all. Happy Friday! Say hey, we'd love to hear from you. We are live across all the different platforms this morning— Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, X, Twitter, Instagram. We are live. It's great to see y'all. Say hey. We'd love to hear from you. Excited to hang out with y'all today. So Fridays are solo shows. Fridays are solo shows. So Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, I like to have guests, right? I love to have guests. That is my way to network. It is a way for you to ask questions to people who are doing it. But one thing I wanna get back to, and so for a while there, I was doing guests on Fridays. But I really, really miss just hanging out with y'all on Fridays and just like talking tactical, very tactical job search stuff. Because when I bring on guests to the show, I don't always get to talk job search stuff, right? We can talk high-level career stuff or we can talk, you know, just various things, right? And so Fridays are always focused on the job search, especially right now in this market. I probably will never get away from talking about the job search because I want to help as many people as possible. Please say hey, we'd love to hear from you. Again, the reason why I tell people to say hey is this is a networking platform, right? I mean, this, it just, it is what it is. Um, and so, uh, my advice to you is to comment every single day that you're here, go through, network with people, send people DMs. You know, I tell people, I said, my really what I want this to be is, is I just want this to be a place where you can come hang out 30 minutes every day, DM some people, say, hey, hey, it was great to see you on the shows. Hey, it's great to see you on Taylor's show. Let's stay in touch and just build relationships. Again, I've been doing this for 4 years now. I've been live streaming this thing for 4 years. Can you believe that? 4 years. It's nuts. And so like I've had a lot of people come and go, right? But I will tell you this, like if you have stuck with me for 4 years and you have networked with every single speaker I've had, I mean, I mean, to be totally transparent, I bring on speakers that speak at huge conferences, right? Like the Angie Joneses, the Anthony Mayses, the Ryan Burgess's, right? Like, like I bring on like big conference-level speakers onto my show that, that you have the opportunity to DM and network with after every single time. So again, I encourage you all leverage this show for your job search. Say hey to people. Again, I know 2 people who have found jobs, uh, indirectly because of this show. Uh, Ricardo, it's good to see you. Taya, it's good to see you. Mark, Katie, Eric, Bonnie, Chris, it's wonderful to see y'all this morning. Thank you all again for hanging out with me this morning. All of TikTok, I see a bunch of users tuning in, so it's good to see y'all. And Instagram, as always, it's great to see you again. We are all over the place. Kind of a crazy morning, not that y'all care. So I bought a new Dell monitor last month, literally last month to the date, July 16th. I bought a new Dell monitor and I was so excited. So, so I, I was using this huge 34-inch curved monitor, and while it's good, I'm like, I just— it's so big. I just want smaller, right? More compact. So I bought like kind of like the, uh, the, the one step below like the Studio Display for Dell, right? And literally, I'm not kidding y'all, it just died on me. I, I'm back on my old monitor, 34-inch curved monitor. Thank goodness I hadn't sold this yet, but literally it died on me. One month, one month, one month, and, and, and the Dell died on me. I think I'm just gonna go Studio Display after this, to be totally honest. All right, few things, uh, this morning, a few housekeeping things. I wanna give a shout out to, of course, Gun.io for hiring me. If you need hiring in your organization, especially on a fractional, like quick side of things, like we can definitely help you with that. Endorsed AI is another company I really, really like. Endorsed AI is a software company. This is mainly for my recruiter friends. If you listen to this, basically they do software to where if you, so typically the way resumes, Typically, the way resumes get found right now is, is, is it's timestamps, right? So let's say the job's been open for 3 days and you submit your resume in the first 24 hours. Depending on how the recruiter searches, they may never see your information because you submitted it first. And they could be looking at, well, who are the people who submitted it most recently? What Endorsed AI does is it uses AI based off the criteria you— it's important resumes, and it bubbles up the best person to the top, which is incredibly important right now. Brian, my guy, it's good to see you this morning. A former guest of the show. Go connect with Brian. Hope you're doing well, man. What else? Dads in Tech. I have a dads meetup in tech. Our first meetup is a few weeks away. Do I have a link on here? I don't. Let me hold on real quick. Let me do a quick search. So basically, so I have felt called, I guess you could say. Listen, I talk with a lot of dads, right? Typically dads are a little bit more senior in their career because at that point, you know, They have kids and yada, yada, yada. And I talk to them just about the challenges they are facing, right? Like, hey, how do you balance working from home? How do you balance turning off work in the evenings, right? I mean, I was talking to my barber yesterday about how me as— how us as dads get impatient when our kids don't listen after the 16th time, right? And how to be you know, gentle and respectful with them, right? So basically, all that being said, I created a dads group, right? So go to this tech-dads.beehive.com. That's, that's a mouthful, but go to tech-dads.beehive.com. Go sign up. Our first meetup is, um, our first meetup is September— first meetup is September 6th. September 6th, 12 to 1. I have no idea what I'm gonna do, to be totally frank with you, but it's gonna be a blast and we're gonna build this thing together. There's already 190 dads already signed up. So even if, even if you're not a dad and you wanna be a dad, would love to have you. If you're a dad and all your kids are grown and out the door, would still love to have you. Actually would definitely love to have you 'cause I need to learn from you. So again, please go sign up. Ian, it's good to see you. Yeah, I don't know what to do with these lives. I don't know to do LinkedIn, to do YouTube. So if you are not in my texting community, Let me know. Text live to 615-235-5650. Again, 615-235-5650. Text live and you get direct notifications when I go live if you want to be kept in the loop. JC, it's good to see you this morning. And Sally, absolutely. Again, it's good to see you this morning. All right, so let's get into nuts and bolts. So I tweeted yesterday. I'm going to pull up this tweet real quick. I tweeted yesterday and I said, all right, y'all, would love to know what you're dealing with, wanna help you, yada, yada, yada. And somebody said, getting interviews. And I said, you know, what's your biggest bottleneck you think? And then this guy says, I have to think it's with my resume, which sucks because I've revised it countless times and to get it where it's at now, I ought to pay someone to go over it with me, place to put up for improvement. So we're gonna talk, we're gonna break down some things on this. And basically, like, I wanna just kind of get nuts and bolts with it. First off, your resume's incredibly important, right? So let's, let's, I don't have a resume immediately available, but the one thing that I say all the time and, oh, final thing I forgot to tell you. I forgot to tell you. So sorry, I'm all over the place this morning. So basically Kelly Vaughn and I, Kelly's sister's actually in the chat. Katie. Hey Katie. So Kelly Vaughn and I are launching a Discord channel where you can come and network, but also get help with your resume and stuff, right? So literally it's called thefriendzone.lol. Yes, we did that. Go sign up. We are gonna launch the Discord in 2 weeks. Basically the way it's gonna be is like there's gonna be a free tier where like anybody can join. Think of it like kind of like a, like a Twitter. Where like people can post all the time. I'll be in there posting all the time. It's just gonna be general stuff, right? Then we're gonna have different tiers based off what you want. Tier 1 is gonna be resume, LinkedIn reviews. Tier 2, you're actually gonna have seminars, webinars that we're gonna host for people, recruiters, hiring managers to help you. And tier 3 is direct access to Kelly Vaughn and I for your job search. So we're launching that here in 2 weeks. Go check on that. It's gonna be great. Kelly's fantastic. And Katie, Katie is in the chat right now. Katie, it's so good to, so good to see you. All right. So first off, resumes, incredibly important right now. So getting the interview is very difficult, right? And I will tell you this, mass applying your resume is not gonna happen right now. And again, I'm gonna go back to Kelly. You know, one of the reasons why I'm going in with this with Kelly is because Kelly's a director of engineering. I'm a very senior recruiter. We've seen it both ends. We both share our war stories together. So I was like, why don't we just have a community and share it together? But the biggest thing is that Kelly sent me a screenshot. this week is she's hiring a mid-level engineer and she had over 1,000 applicants. 1,000 applicants for a mid-level engineer role. Do you really think your resume is gonna get seen? Right? So here, so, so this is why it's so important to network, right? And when I say network, let me break this down, right? So Brian, Brian's in the chat right here. Brian, I, I know Brian. Brian's been on the show. Brian Walter. Brian, Brian is a VP of engineering. Brian, I don't know if you're working yet, But he was a VP of engineering, right? So like, if I were you, I would message Brian. Brian, I'm sorry about this. I would, I would, all of us, if you're on the job search, message Brian, be like, hey Brian, Taylor told me to message you. Hope you're doing well, right? And, and what I would do, what I would do is I would also continue to engage with Brian. Brian, Brian posts about random things. Sometimes it's marathon running. Brian does marathons or, or hiring strategies. And I would comment and engage, right? So for example, um, I wanna give a shout out to Ricardo. Ricardo, he is always here. Ricardo, I need to like bless Ricardo with some swag or something because Ricardo literally is like always the first person to comment on this show. If Ricardo ever needs something, I am going to do my best to help him, right? Taya, another person. Taya's always here. Taya needs help, I'm gonna try to help her as much as I physically can. Same thing with Mark. Mark's always here. Mark from Minnesota, I know that. Why? Because Mark is consistent. He engages, he stays on it. Katie, I know Katie. Kind of a cheat mode because I know Kelly really well, obviously, and AK's sister, right? Eric, Eric's been popping in recently. I'd probably do stuff for Eric too, right? Again, like, this is how you do it. You engage, you network. You have to understand something. The internet, the internet— when I say the internet, I mean LinkedIn. LinkedIn is like going— if every time you open up— I think the coffee's kicking in right now, I apologize— every single time that that you open up LinkedIn every time is like going to a networking event. Do you understand that? Let me say that one more time. Every time that you open up LinkedIn, it is you going to a networking event. The problem is, is most of y'all just scroll and don't engage. Literally, I wanna give a shout out to Dominic. Dominic's another great one, right? Dominic has always been consistent. He has also always like, you know, helped me and engaged with me and like, and like, and like, I will always help Dominic. Dominic, right? Jason Torres, another guy. Again, these guys and gals are always here, always engaging. That is what networking looks like, folks. That is what's gonna get your resume to the top. That is what's gonna get your resume to the top right now, right? Kyle, it's good to see you. Ryan, it's good to see you as well. So for me, like, you, like, you gotta do the work like that. Now, now you're probably telling me, Taylor, Taylor, what you're saying though is like, what, what you're saying though is like, You're, you're, you're basically saying that like, this is, this, this isn't gonna be overnight. That's why I'm saying there's no quick fix to this. This market sucks, right? Trying to find a job right now sucks. Like, I'm, I'm not gonna sugarcoat it, right? Like, it is hard work. And so you have to be different. And if all you're doing is writing a generic resume, right? And I have a bunch of lies. I'm not like, again, I can go over an entire resume. Like, I have so many resources on Resume Runner. I'm not gonna talk about it. The big thing for me is like that first part, that professional career summary where you edit the entire summary of your career based off the required skills for the role you're submitting to. That's the unlock right there. And again, I have a lot more content, but all that being said, you gotta do something different and that's the way to do it. So Heather comes in here. Heather, it's great to see you. Good morning from KC. I'm not hiring yet, but the startup scene is ramping up over this summer and fall, folks. Innovation just happened amid the layoffs. Smart folks like to work with us. Exactly. Again, network, right? Like literally Heather, Heather, we need to bring you on the show again just to talk about this stuff. So please email me so I don't forget. Heather comes in again, look at the startups that are profitable without VC, even if they're early stage, as long as they got paying customers, possibly hiring soon. Absolutely. Again, like it sucks to find a job because there's so much supply on the market, right? Because again, you gotta think about what happened in 2021 and 2022. The entire market sucked up every single person that aspired to be a developer. If you were an aspiring developer, they would suck you up and hire you. Now they let go of everybody, right? So then there's this flush of all these people in the system, right? But people are still hiring, right? I'm not saying that companies are still hiring, right? There are still a lot of opportunities out there. The fact of the matter is that You have to go hunt and you have to go network, right? Heather, amazing resource. I would absolutely go connect with Heather, shoot her a DM, say, hey, it was good to see you on Taylor's show. Would love to stay in touch, right? Heather's amazing. Again, also, if I were you, right, here's another networking strategy. Get on my podcast, go to Spotify. I was about to say Shopify. Go to Spotify and go through all 400 guests I've had on my show. What episode am I at right now? I am at episode— 400. I'm at episode 398 now. Now, not all 398 episodes are people that are in hiring, but a lot of them are. And so like, I would say at least 150 episodes are people who are leaders in organizations, in IT organizations. I would use my podcast as a way to network. I would listen to the episode, I would take 3 pointers, and I would message. So Heather and I spoke recently. I would go listen to Heather's episode and say, hey Heather, I listened to your episode on Guidance Counselor 2.0. Would love to connect with you. I love what you said. Bang, bang, bang, bang. I would go listen to Ryan Burgess's at Netflix or former Netflix, be like, hey Ryan, would love to connect. I heard you on Taylor's podcast. Fun fact, Ryan's coming on the show next week and say, hey, I love this, this, this again. Again, that's the intentionality you need to have, people. That's the intentionality. I would Google their names and if they're on a podcast somewhere, go listen to them before you slide into the DMs. Right? Like, you got to do it. You got to do it and stay on people. Like, people are crazy overwhelmed right now. People got— I ain't got time to— like, if you don't message me 3 or 4 times at this point, I love you. I, I do. I love everybody. I really, really do. But realistically, you will not hear from me if you don't hit me up 3 or 4 times. And I'm not even like an actual recruiter right now. Like some of these recruiters are like in the weeds right now, right? Kelly Vaughn, thousands of resumes she's got to sift through. She she ain't gonna remember you if you send her one DM. I'll never forget I was career counseling somebody like a few months ago, and they're like, "Yeah, I just thought like if they didn't get back to you, like that they didn't want to talk to you." And I was like, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no. You need to follow it like three, four, five times right now. Now you gotta be tactful in the DMs, right? And I'd be like." Hey, I've sent you 4 DMs, you haven't responded. Don't be like that, right? Be kind, right? Um, yes, babies, babies do take it out of you. Yeah, we are struggling right now. Uh, let's see here. Heather comes in here too. You will get a much better look from an early stage startup. Yes, I would also agree with this. Highly recommend. I think Heather brings up— again, Heather, please email me so we can get you on the books. This is— you're spitting fire right now, and I want to interview with it. So like, for this, uh, yeah, again, like, see, see, Kelly doesn't even answer her sister's text messages. So again, not a big deal. You'll get much better luck. Yeah. So I think this is an amazing strategy that not many people talk about. Like a lot of people are just going on and like submitting their resumes to like big corporate environments, yada, yada, yada. But like that just doesn't work. It just, it doesn't work right now. Right? I would go to Product Hunt. I would go to TechCrunch. I would go to just Google like fastest growing companies. Inc. 5000 just put out their yearly list. Go to Inc. 5000 and just start searching. There's like 3 or 4 startups in Nashville that are growing like crazy. And like, I would message them, be like, hey, one of those guys, one of the companies on the Inc. 5000 for Nashville was on my show twice. Brian Dowdy, VP of engineering at Snapped. Message him. Crunchbase. Yeah. TikTok. Yeah. Crunchbase is great. Go to Crunchbase, look up companies. You have to do some research. I would abandon submitting your resume. Now that's a hot take. I understand I'm a little spicy this morning. The coffee kind of hit. I would abandon that strategy 100%. Yes, but LinkedIn has 15 DMs per month limit. I would buy LinkedIn Premium. I saw some creator on— I giggle on TikTok Because there are so many career coaches. By the way, there's no— listen, hot take here. I'm feeling spicy. I'm feeling spicy. Career coaches suck. Let me— and let me tell you why. I saw a career— the amount of career coaches on TikTok right now are just absurd. Be very careful with who you talk to, right? Be very careful. Bonnie, Bonnie, are you saying that you have 15 DMs per month limit? I, all right, with premium, let me know about that. But I do have a solution to that. So be careful with career coaches. Like, I'll never consider myself a career coach. Most people who can actually help you in your career are not career coaches, to be flat out, to be totally honest. You need to find somebody who's been in your industry, like who knows it. I would talk to a seasoned senior recruiter. In your market, I would pay them hourly. A really good recruiter, right? I wanna give a shout out to Random Recruiter on Twitter. Yeah, be demure, be mindful. Yeah, TikTok trends are wild, y'all. I still don't know what demure means, but like Random Recruiter, I follow a few recruiters. You know what I need to do? I'm gonna put this down. I'm gonna create a recruiter playlist on Twitter. Twitter for y'all to follow. I'm gonna put that down. Hold on real quick. Recruiter, Recruiter Playlist on Twitter so y'all can all follow them. Uh, Random Recruiter is amazing, right? He's great. I have a few others I follow on Twitter. It, to me, a really good recruiter who's been in the, in your industry for a long time is worth their weight in gold. I would pay them whatever they charge and just sit with them for an hour and learn from them. They are absolutely worth it. I feel like I'm worth it too, right? So if you want to do that, shoot me a DM. Uh, let's see here. So Bonnie, so I want to get to here. 15, LinkedIn has a 15 Per month limit. She— Bonnie says she has LinkedIn Premium. My advice to that is the notes feature, right? So let me go to my LinkedIn. I'm gonna share a screen real quick. Let me go. I need to find somebody who I don't know to show y'all. Hold on. Present. Hold on. I love doing this. It's kind of like riffing real time with y'all. All right, so we see this? See it? All right. So Bonnie, this is how you get around the DMs. So I don't know, I don't know Phil, right? So what I would do is connect, add a note, and hey, hey Phil, I can't type. Hey Phil, looking to connect with .NET devs, just wanted to say hey. Send. Boom, right? So that being said, so what, what that'll do, Bonnie, is you can send unlimited amount of notes if you connect with people, right? And here's why it's incredibly important. Again, do not miss out on this, people. Please do not miss out on this. If you are not sending a note when you reach out to somebody, you are losing out heavily. On the opportunity to network with somebody. When they accept your friend request, that DM goes to the top of their inbox. Let's see here. Plus one on coaching. Yeah, 100%. Thank you. I appreciate this. Advice for recent bootcamp grads trying to get— yeah. So Mark brings up a great question here. My advice for bootcamp grads trying to get that first job, especially in small markets, this is gonna be a hot take. I would try to go around to every single small business, friend, family, and ask if they need something built, right? I'll never forget this story. I talk about this all the time. I never forget it. I never forget this is that basically there was a 2-year React engineer back when I was recruiting a while ago, and that React engineer sent me his resume. And it looked amazing. I was like, dude, your resume's incredible. And I was like, how many years you been doing this? He goes, 2 years. I was like, great. He goes like, so how much you been being paid? And he goes, nothing. And I was like, what are you talking about? He goes, I've volunteered my time the last 2 years to get experience. Now, volunteering your time for free is a very hot take, and I understand that, right? Like, I know people sometimes don't have the ability to. I'm not saying work 40 hours for free, but I'm saying, like, for example, Jordan Ryerson, I'll shout out Jordan Ryerson. Jordan Ryerson helped build the Unicorn Finders podcast website that we use. I didn't pay him. He literally said, he goes, I used that website as a way to get hired at my first tech job because they needed Experience, and I had experience, and he built it. It didn't take a lot of his time. If Jordan, if you're watching, would love to know how much time it took you. I mean, he still goes in and experiments with stuff and fix stuff for us. I need website help. I have ideas. If you're a junior developer, I have ideas. Message me. I'll work on a project with you. I got all, I got all types of ideas. Right? So again, like creators, creators need a lot, like I need stuff built. I think a lot of creators need stuff built. But yeah, I would just ask, like, just ask like, hey, I'm a developer, I'm trying to get experience, right? What do you need built? Right? And then what happens, because again, y'all, I hate to say it again, nothing's ever enough in this market. I know that's very demoralizing, but like just having a capstone project or having just your project coming outta bootcamp like is not enough anymore, folks. Like it's, like it's, it's, it's, it's not enough. You gotta— I, I need to see that you built something for somebody. Um, let's see here. Uh, always send a note. Dudley fansite. Yep, that was it, Jeff. That was it. No, not really. Um, uh, what else? Any more questions as we kind of wrap up here? About 20 minutes in. I usually like to make these a little shorter, but I got on a little bit of a rant. Here's the deal, y'all. You gotta do things differently. You, you got it. Like I would show up to as many streams as you feasibly can. Streams are such a great way to get to know people, right? Virtual Coffee, Danny Thompson has his own Discord. James Quick's got his own Discord. Coder Dads, Emmett has his Coder Dads. Go network with Emmett. I mean, there's just so many ways, but you've gotta be in 2 or 3 Discords or Slack channels at this point. If you're not, you're heavily, heavily missing out at this point. Um, if you need anything, holler. Again, I'm gonna throw this up here if you want to. So you're 615-235-5650, text LIVE. If you want to be kept in the loop of when I go live, shoot me a text here. This is my— this is actually my texting. This is one of my texting numbers that I use, so feel free to, um, join that. Um, let's see here. JC comes in because I learned from a previous Taylor Show about these 2 nonprofit orgs you connect with. Oh, look at this. Sweet. Heck yeah. There you go. I didn't. I don't even remember that. There you go, JC coming in clubs. Look at you, man. I love it, dude. I appreciate you. I appreciate you. So yeah, text live if you want to get updates on these shows, who I'm going live with. I do text out every single morning when I go live who I'm going live with. I don't expect you to be here. I'm just. I just. You know, some people don't want to miss it. So text me. Otherwise, y'all, busy week next week for sure. Let's see here. Who do we have next week? So next week we got. Chris Gardner, Chris Gardner out of Huntsville. He runs DevSpace, so he's coming on the show Monday. Tuesday, I have an amazing recruiter. I saw her post, I don't know her, her name's Liz, but I saw her post some really good content, so I shot her a DM and we're gonna talk about follow-up strategy for candidates on Tuesday. Wednesday, I have my dear friend Ryan Burgess, former engineering director at Netflix, coming on the show. So yeah, it's gonna be a heck of a week next week. I appreciate y'all. Y'all have a good one. Um, if you need me, uh, email me or text me on this number and, uh, have a great weekend. We'll see you on Monday. Peace.