X's and O's of Networking (Solo Show)

Alrighty, good morning, good morning, good morning. Let's see here, before we go live, just want to make sure we're good on all of the platforms. Say hey, we'd love to hear from you as always. Let's see here. Hello, hello? Looks like we got nobody yet. Say hey, we'd love to hear from you. Just also, one, I'd love to hear from you, but also two, I just wanna know if you're here. All right, it looks like I'm live on LinkedIn, so that's good. We got some people tuning in, that's good, from Twitter, that's great, YouTube, good to see you this morning. Good morning. Excited to be with y'all this morning. Uh, you're probably like, Taylor, hey, you like posted yesterday that you were gonna have a guest, and, and I was, um, but he had to reschedule. So Luke, if you see this, he's across the pond right now. It's like 3 o'clock his time. Luke, if you see this, uh, I miss you. Hopefully you reschedule. Um, but the show must go on, you know. I, I always think about like, should I, should I, should I stop? Should I not go live? Should I go live? Like You know, if I don't have a guest, here's the deal, right? And I always, always go back to the thesis of why I started this. And this is, uh, I am doing this for 2011 Taylor, right? I'm doing this for 2011 Taylor who didn't know how to find a job, who didn't know how to network, who didn't know how to do anything, who didn't know how to use LinkedIn. And so, um, I, I will always try to go live. Um, I think that's really my goal, whether it's 5 minutes, whether it's 15 minutes, whether it's with a guest for 45 minutes, I'm always going to try to go live, um, and give back to anybody who's watching. So we're live, we're live on a Monday. Hopefully you're having a good morning. Uh, Christina, it's good to see you. It's great to see you, girl, as always. Hopefully I can make it out to Vegas soon. It's great to see you as well. Good morning, my friend. Um, so we're talking about networking today. So I made a bunch of Slacks now, or Discords. Um, and, uh, if you're not in one of my 2 Discords right now One is Dads in Tech, the other one is Friend Zone with Kelly Vaughn. And, you know, I always watch, I listen, I see what people are talking about, and there was kind of a conversation going on today around networking and really how to do it. This thing also too is gonna drive me nuts, so I'm gonna try to scoot over this way. No, this way. Yeah, this way. So I'm gonna talk about networking today just based off what was in the chat. But first and foremost, before we get started, Say hey, we'd love to hear from you. Again, Chris, good morning. JC, good morning. This is a networking show, right? Yeah, that's what it is, is a networking show. It is a time where I go live, but then it is an opportunity for you guys to network. Joseph, please say hey, we'd love to hear from you. I want to give a shout out to a few things this morning. First and foremost, I want to give a shout out to thefriendzone.lol. This is a really cool community Kelly Vaughn and I launched a few weeks ago. We are up to— I can't— how many members are we at? We're up to— I don't know how to find it quickly. I think we're close to 200 members already on the Friend Zone. We actually just did an update from a paid perspective. We don't have a bunch of tiers. It's either free or paid, and you pretty much get everything. We just simplified it for ease of use. And so we'd love to have you a part of it. There is a free channel. You get a lot in the free channel. We just love to have you part of the community. That's our first and foremost. If you do want to lean into us a little bit more and leverage our network. Obviously, that is what the paid tier is for, but you can be very, very happy in the general free section. So we'd love to have you. Close to 200 members there very soon. Also wanna give a shout out to Dads in Tech. Actually, that is the wrong link. I'm gonna go ahead and delete that one. Dads in Tech. So if you go to guild.host/events/dad— this is such a long, thing. Uh, if you're a dad in tech, just message me and I will get you the information. We have a Discord. We launched a Discord. Uh, the Discord's got like 50 or 60 dads in it. Uh, we're all making intros. We're kind of creating the Discord as it is. Uh, we do have our second meetup coming. It is going to be October— our Dads in Tech meetup. Let me see here. October 2nd. October 2nd at 11 AM Central. Um, so I was trying to help the Eastern folks out during their lunchtime. Then ultimately it's like first thing in the morning for Pacific dads. There's never a best time to do it. But again, Dads That Tech, if you are a dad techer, you know, and you could be like, you could be an upcoming dad, right? Like you could be single and want to be a dad one day. But at the end of the day, this is for dads and would love to have you in the conversation. It's been great as well. Also, final thing is, listen, the live streaming has become a little bit of an issue in terms of When I'm going live, who I'm going live with, what platforms am I going live? Some platforms working, some platforms not working. And so text this number, text LIVE 615-235-5650. I text this group every day whenever I go live. I text who I'm going live with. If it's just me like today, I tell you what I'm talking about so you can decide to tune in or not. I've had a bunch of people say they've missed my LinkedIn Lives. LinkedIn is just very, very buggy when it comes to live streaming. I do use YouTube a lot, but some people just like LinkedIn. So text me, um, and, uh, would love to have you there. Uh, let's see here. Also, I am changing up my newsletter a little bit. Um, so go to gc220.dehyde.com. Um, I'm moving away from Guidance Counselor. When I say I'm moving away, I'm not moving away from my podcast, still keeping the podcast, but I'm moving my newsletter kind of around a little bit, a little bit more of kind of what I'm doing. and kind of who I'm talking to. I want to turn it to more of, again, of a network community. And so, I'm kind of low-key making introductions on my— so, I have a section now in my email newsletter where if you tune in, there's like an entire section linked to people on my show that you can just go connect with them. So, again, I just want to help you network easier. So, let's see. We got some more people tuning in. Kelly, it's good to see you. Christopher, it's great to see you. Devon, it's good to see you. Chris, it's great to see you as well. All right. So I wanna talk about networking today. So, uh, this was in the Discord in the paid channel this morning, so I'm gonna talk about a little bit. Dane, my guy, what's going on, big dog? It's been a minute. Hope you're doing well, dude. Hope you're doing well. So networking is hard, and— but networking, I think, async online is so much easier. The problem is, is the thing I continually hear time and time again— uh, what's up, Jason? Hey, quick announcement, Jason's coming on the show on Thursday. I think it's Thursday. Isn't that right, Jason? I think it's Thursday. Let me check one more time. Uh, yes, Jason's coming on the show Thursday. It's gonna be a hell of a show. You won't want to miss it. Um, so we'd love to have you. And Pat, my guy. Yes, that's easy. Thank you, Pat. I appreciate that. I didn't know how to put that on here and make it linked. Um, so Pat, if you're a dad in tech— yeah, yeah, Pat Clark coming through. Pat also is helping set up the Discord. Pat, I appreciate you more than you know because I have no idea what I'm doing whatsoever. So again, this is why I like networking. I just surround myself with people who know what they're doing like that. So yeah, Jason is there. I just checked. So networking. All right. So when it comes to this stuff, I think there's a few ways to networking. There's like the Slack and Discord channels. Again, Dads in Tech group, the Friend Zone, those kind of tackle 2 things. There's gonna be another Discord I'm gonna start mentioning with my new job. But again, just waiting on everything to go through. Can't wait to announce that. So I would say if you're not in a Discord at this point or Slack, like Virtual Coffee with Becca and that crew is great. And I know there's some other really, really successful— uh, Tay, it's great to see you this morning. I know some other very successful Slack, uh, yeah, 100%, dude. I also do that in hockey too, right? I just back there playing defense. I have no idea what I'm doing. Um, get in a Slack or Discord Discord. Like, if you're not in one, you're, you're not even networking. Like, that's just where it is, right? Um, you know, I've talked with a lot of people, really Slack and Discord networking is really— I would say come online since COVID You know, I know some people that are part of 15 channels. I'm not saying you got to do that. I do think it's better to go deeper in one than more shallow in a few, even though I don't take my own advice. But the thing I want to talk about today is networking on LinkedIn, right? And so I'm going to go and share my screen this morning, but what I want to go over is the tactical advice on how to network, right? So I'm not talking about networking for a job right now. And I've talked about this time and time again. You should not network for the— like, you should not slide into people's DMs for a job, if that makes sense. If you see a job posted and you immediately message that person and you don't know that person and you're like, hey, I want this job, uh, that feels very dirty to me. Like, that feels very skeezy, slimeball-y. Don't do that, right? The way to network is to build rapport over time based off certain topics. And so what I posted in the— what I talked about in the Friend Zone community this morning is, let's say that you're implementing TDD in your test— in your dev environment, right? So test-driven development. And so I'm gonna go and pull up— I'm gonna go and pull up my LinkedIn, and we're gonna walk through this together this morning. Need to zoom in a lot. All right, so y'all can see that, right? So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go up here, I'm gonna go test-driven development in jobs, right? So these are all of the jobs that pop up. And again, now you're like, Taylor, well, don't, don't network about a job. I'm not networking about a job. I'm networking with people at a place that has a job open but around a certain topic, right? So let's do test-driven development. Let's do date posted. You always wanna go in the past 24 hours. You really always wanna make it very narrow because LinkedIn does a really poor job of data quality around job search and job stuff, so you really wanna make it narrow. So this one, you know, this one, so there's, so a few things I look at, right? So Photonics has Photonics QA engineer, right? It's a design tool, and again, I'm not gonna get caught up in the job. What I wanna do is I wanna do a few things here. Always look to see if you have connections, right? So here there's 7 people that went to the University of South Carolina that work here. So I'm actually gonna click— can I click on that? Can't click on that. So I'm gonna go to— so there's 7 people. So I wanna go to Synopsys right here. I wanna go to people, right? And we've done this before, but just follow me here, okay? So I want to, let's see here, try to figure out where they studied. Here we go, where they studied. Here, I'm gonna click on this. All right, so I'm trying to do this on the fly for some reason. There we go, 7 people. All right, so these 7 people, I believe— let's see here. I don't, I don't think we're doing this right here. Let me see. This guy go to South Carolina? Doesn't look like it. No, he did not. Oh yeah, he did. Well, he went to USC. That's not quite the same thing. Let's see here. Let's go to Chang. So basically, all right, so the search is not quite working. This is a little buggy. I don't wanna waste too much time on it, but so let's do this, right? So let's do— so let's say I do find somebody who did actually work at— go to University of South Carolina. So first off, let's just say Dawei actually went to the University of South Carolina, right? What I would do is I'd message Dawei and be like, hey, Dawei, I went to University of South Carolina. Go Gamecocks. I'm looking for a job right now. Or, we're trying to implement test-driven development into our environment right now. We'd love to chat with you about test-driven development, right? Same. And so I would message them about that, right? And what I would do is I would go through, because they have a job open that has test-driven development in it, so I would go to people who potentially could help you with that, right? So, you know, Probably a staff engineer, hit up Nirav, right? Maybe hit up Ben, right? So that's just one thought here. Again, same thing here. So let's do another term. Trying to think of another term. Is there— I'm blanking here. Is there another term that I could use within tech, y'all? Y'all chime in here. But Chris, it's great to see you this morning. So again, the whole point is really trying. So here's, I don't know why, hold on. I don't know why I can't figure out people at South Carolina. I should be able to click. All right, here we go, here we go. Here we go, found it. All right, so these 8 people here all went to University of South Carolina, right? And look at this, they're all mainly recruiting, right? There's a product owner, right? So what I would do, is I would always start out with people who you went to school with first, right? So, hey, Andrew, saw where you saw, you know, go, you know, go Cox, go University of South Carolina. Let's talk about what you're, you know, hiring for, or maybe somebody on your team. You always wanna start there. But again, the main thing, I feel like I'm blabbing a little bit. The main thing I'm trying to get across right now is you need to focus on networking with people around a topic and ask questions. I'll never forget Connor Bush, he was on my show like 2 years ago. Connor, we probably need to get you on if you ever watch this again to talk about it. He wanted a job at Netflix. So what did he do? He did not sit there and just message people at Netflix asking for a job. What he did is he took something that they were trying to implement at Evernote, the place he was at beforehand, and started messaging hiring managers on LinkedIn at Netflix around how they implemented this tool or this system or this test-driven approach, right? And what happened was is that he continued to do that and he told me, he messaged, he would like update me every day. And so many people did not get back to him, but a few people did. And one of the guys, they had so many conversations, that guy was like, oh, I think you'd be great working here, went through the interview process and now Connor Bush is at LinkedIn. I mean, ah, Netflix, I need more coffee this morning. So again, incredibly important when it comes to networking on LinkedIn, pick a topic, pick something you're trying to learn, right? Let's say you're trying to learn AWS S3, the S3 portion of AWS, whatever that means, right? What I would do is I would literally, first off, I'd probably find AWS communities, right? My buddy Ben, who's in Dads and Tech, Ben Pyle, he's like a big AWS guy. I know they have Discords, hit up AWS Heroes, and I would just message, I would just start messaging people with AWS S3 experience on their LinkedIn, like, hey, you don't know me from Adam, I'm trying to implement AWS S3 with my dev environment right now, do you have a few minutes to talk about it? Would love to talk about it, right? That is how you network, right? You don't network by saying, hey, so-and-so, I see you have a job online, would love to talk about it, right? No, you network with somebody adjacent to it. Again, that's what I've done, right? When I started, My recruiting career, when I started my content career 4 years, 5, 4 years ago, 4 and a half years ago at this point, I didn't start a recruiting podcast, right? I tried to go after my, what people call ICP, ideal customer profile, or yeah, ideal customer profile. And I went after what I wanted, which is basically I wanted to bring on decision makers onto my podcast that would hire from me, right? So what did I do? I created this podcast I never talk to my folks about hiring or me hiring for them. I bring them on the pod, they get to know me, they know I'm a recruiter, and then if they need me, then they hire, right? I mean, to be totally honest with you, if you're on the job search, I think you should have a podcast. I think it's the easiest thing to do, or not even a podcast, like a Twitter Space or a LinkedIn Live, right? 'Cause a podcast, I think in a lot of people's brains means a lot more. Just go live with somebody on LinkedIn every day like I do and just talk to them about, what they're working on or you're trying to learn something, right? Like if I was a junior dev, here's a content idea. If I was a junior dev, I'd start a LinkedIn Live show called Learning Me, instead of Teaching Me, Learning Me. And I would basically interview senior folks on topics I'm trying to learn real time, live. And it'd be like Learning Me AWS S3 with so-and-so. And like, basically, you would just interview somebody like you're trying to just learn from them, right? And then what's gonna happen over time is you are gonna endear yourself to these senior engineers, and if a senior engineer has a spot on his or her team and they need to hire somebody, they're gonna think of you because you're doing it very untraditional, right? Nathan comes in here, so true, I say this all the time, if you're waiting until you need a job to start networking, you're already working from behind, 100%. Again, If I were you, I would try to have a conversation in the DMs, in the chat. I know one of the things that I was really big on when it came to networking early on during COVID is I said, message everybody and have a conversation for 15 minutes with them or 5 minutes with them. After talking with a lot of my engineering manager friends, specifically Kelly Vaughn— What's going on, Tiana? It's great to see you this morning. I— no hiring manager has time to do anything right now because all of the middle manager engineering leaders are gone, so everybody's overworked. So you're gonna have to build rapport in the DMs, right? So like, let's say again, Kelly Vaughn, for example, she posts a job, you message her in the DMs, say, hey Kelly, I don't know if I'm a fit for this role, I'm a big fan of The Friend Zone, right? What that shows to her is that you're paying attention. One of the ways to really You know, level up. So like Pat, I'm gonna use Pat for example, right? Pat, you're probably still not watching, but Pat, for example, Pat's a director of engineering, right? So if Pat posted that he was hiring for a role, what I would do is I would say, hey Pat, I'm actually in Dads in Tech with you, right? What does that do with Pat? That immediately builds recognition and rapport, right? When you message somebody and do not build rapport, like you could be in the Dads in Tech meetup with Pat, And you could be like, hey Pat, I see you have a job posted on your website. We'd love to talk with you about the role, right? Pat's getting 15 of those DMs a day if he has a role posted. But what's really gonna make you stand out is if you're a dad, you go join Dads in Tech, you comment with Pat, go back and forth in our Discord a little bit, then Pat posts a role 3 months from now and then message Pat on the Discord or message him on LinkedIn and be like, Hey Pat, you know, it's Taylor from Dads and Tech. Saw you had a job posting up. It seems like I'll be a fit. Would love to talk with you more about it. Pat's immediately gonna remember you from Dads and Tech. Do you see what I'm talking about? In today's world, the cold DM, the cold apply, the cold everything very rarely works. I would say less than 5% it actually works. And that's why you gotta keep like, you know, go to a meetup, go, you know, go to in-person. Raleigh has a bunch of meetups, right? At least they did when I lived there. For a year, right? Um, you know, all the Discords, right? Every Discord I'm in, we're eventually going to start going live in the Discord, right? Like, you just have to show up, and it's kind of like planting the seed, right? Every time you show up to a meetup, every time you show up to a live stream, every time you comment in the Discord, it's planting a seed, right? Um, got a few comments, especially from Pat tuning in. Uh, let's see, let's see here. Tiana, oh, you know, I decided to leave the job, take a vacay, but we work hard. I'm around poker. Hey, listen, Tiana, girl, I hear you. I would do the same. If you left your job and decided to take a vacay, I'd be on LinkedIn too. Also, hot take, total sidebar, I love working on vacation. I feel like my creative juices are through the roof on vacation. I have to talk to the wife about it. I don't do it all the time, but if we go to the beach for a long time, like a week, I usually work out of a coffee shop for a little bit just because my juices are obviously flowing. Pat comes in talking about kind of our networking structure. We talked about if you can help me make a connection back to you, it'll pop out in the crowd 100%, or you could be in the back of someone's mind, they reach out for 100%. So yeah, again, very, very key here. You know, Tiana, I've been soft searching for the last 6 months after, you know, I get my R&R, I'm going to dive back into jobs. I love that. Again, I think, you know, I joke about it with Jamin. Jamin posts— Jamin Holmgren is CTO of Infinite Red out in Portland. He posted he posted this tweet a while ago, and he was like, "I'm trying to get better at LinkedIn. How do I do it?" And I tweeted, and it got a lot of attention. I said, "Delete every single other app off your phone, social media-wise, other than LinkedIn, and you'll eventually the muscle memory will you'll eventually learn to go there." I think that's the truth. It depends how serious you want to take networking, right? If you are really big into networking, I would literally take I would literally dive into Discord. and dive into LinkedIn. If you're good at Twitter, keep Twitter on your phone, but Twitter can be more of a distraction than anything else. So again, like, in my opinion, so I made this shift 4 years ago. Everything on social media was around networking at this point, and I just made that shift. And so again, and also give back, right? If you're in a senior spot like Pat or you're senior in your career like myself, like, giving back is also another form of networking, right? The reason why I do this live show is to give back to the community. community. It is another way of networking. So sweet, awesome, cool, perfect. I think that's it. I think that's enough of me yapping today. Robert, hello. Sorry, I'm just wrapping up. So again, recap on networking for the people who just tuned in late. Network with like a question, comment, etc., right? So like literally if If you reach out to somebody, never mention the job, right? Never mention the job. Always mention, hey, I would love to learn from you. Hey, I have a question about this, etc., etc., etc., right? Second thing, get in the Discords, get in the Slacks. They don't have to be mine. They don't have to be the Friend Zone. They don't have to be Dads in Tech, right? They can be any virtual coffee with Becker. You— there's a good— James Quick's got one. Danny Thompson's got one. Right? Just get in one and start commenting, start engaging. And then finally, again, just give back, right? Give back at scale, I think, is the best way to do it. Post on LinkedIn consistently. LinkedIn right now is— LinkedIn right now is like the professional version of TikTok. Like, you can gain so much traction on LinkedIn right now because of the organic reach. So please do that. Cool. All right, y'all. Well, again, William, it's good to see you this morning. Katie, I appreciate it. It's good to see you. Yeah, I absolutely love this, Rob. I usually ask what they use, what their job's like. Again, never ask about the job. Ask about the person. Make them feel special. Everybody likes talking about themselves. Why do you think I do this live every day? So y'all have a good one. Thank you again for tuning in today. Tomorrow I'm off. Got some stuff to do in the morning. Wednesday I'm back with John. Hold on, John. Hold on, he put his name, full name. John Vanderveer. He is a senior AI engineer, staff AI engineer. We're gonna talk some AI stuff, but we're also going to talk about his latest job search. And then we have my guy Jason Torres on Thursday. So y'all have a great one. I appreciate you all. Have a great Monday. If you need me, check me out on Dads and Tech or thefriendzone.lol, and we'll see y'all.