Searching job boards by skills

Hi and welcome, this is Tina Persson from Passage2Pro in collaboration with Prosper. I’m excited today because I’m going to give a short preview of a new way of looking for a job, which is called how to headhunt your own job by using an agile method for searching for skills, instead for searching for job titles. So, hang on, I’m going to share the screen, and I’m going to start the presentation here. Just a second, and here we have it. Headhunt your job, or headhunt your own job, how to skill search for a job, an agile job hunt approach.

A little bit about me, and we can remove that, so here we go. The power of working out a strategy. The power relies on today that you have to create a self-awareness. You need to figure out at least the area or the job field you’d like to go to, instead of randomly sending out your resume and randomly applying for jobs, that’s not a successful career.

It’s super important to start to explore, investigate yourself, your drives, your motivation, what you like to do, your strength, your weakness, reflecting back, and I will go back to that a little bit more in the presentation the further they come here. I’d like for you here listening, instead for just starting to apply.

What you see on the picture here is that you go to the sun, as they call it. The sun, you get a vague feeling of what kind of people you like to surround you with, what you can see yourself doing on daily basis. How you apply problem solving, analysing. If you like to be a team player, if you like to work more enterprising or more practical. Have a job that is more creative or more administrative. These things you need to sort out before you start to apply. This is what I say, you start with self-awareness training.

Your next step, by reflecting back on your career and lifestyle, you will learn about how to identify your future career, your next step. It doesn’t have to be the next five years, it’s perfectly fine, but it is the next step, and then from there you reflect and you take the next step. By thinking too far ahead or too much into the future, don’t do that.

The labour market today is super agile, and it’s happened so much, not what’s happening here, Corona, pandemic, and now we have the war in Ukraine, you really don’t know where the job market and the labour market is going. But it will happen a lot, so take more steps, otherwise it’s easy to fall into the trap to feel anxious, and you shouldn’t do that.

That means you’re going to build resilience; we’re going to need the FIT management that I talk about in my book. FIT is staying focused, stay focused and be positive, incorporate exercise and meditation, and think gratitude, that’s a success story. That was the wrong slide. Now we go here. So we have what I say a new paradigm shift in the job searching strategy. That is the paradigm shift, is that we can’t any more just apply for job titles. I will come back to that, why it is like that.

You are overqualified, you don’t have the experience, or you are missing skills. Common things that we hear when we start to apply for jobs, but now remember, overqualified means that they’re not sure you’ll like the job or that you have the wrong expectations of the job or the salary. You don’t have experience, you are missing skills is an excuse that many hiring managers and recruiters are using because they can’t say something else, because they take the risk to be sued. So, they take the safe card and stay with, you’re missing skills or you lack experience.

Then you’re most likely, when you start to scroll the job boards, you most likely find that many jobs out there at the moment, extremely many jobs. if I check UK and particularly London, that they maybe don’t match the skills. They do, but you have to read the job ad in a different way.

So, with COVID-19, the labour market has changed dramatically, and the transformation has exploded during the coronavirus pandemic. Many of the jobs that are advertised today, they didn’t exist before corona. Jobs you’re going to have in the future, they don’t exist today. So how to keep track on them?

That requires the new job searching strategy. It’s a paradigm shift. So, before you start to apply, create a proper resume and don’t mess up your brand by just randomly sending out your resume to companies and organisations, because it’s not good for your brand. They realise that you really don’t know what you want.

Not only that, today we have to rely on artificial intelligence and algorithms. So, by just sending out your CV or your academic CV that is not tailored to the jobs, not even indicating what you’re looking for, the algorithms and the AI don’t know how to select you. So, you are ranked down. If you don’t have the job titles and the skills for your future job on your LinkedIn profile, LinkedIn will kick back the wrong job ads. So don’t screw up the ranking in the digital platforms.

Not only that, companies today, they communicate through the same sort of digital platforms. People know each other, the world has become smaller using digital platforms, so don’t start to test your resume, take a step back, do the exploration phase first, and then you write your resume, and then you start to apply.

You need also to adopt a more agile job searching process. You must identify a job field that you go into. Whether you work more with enterprising companies or organisation, whether you’re more supportive administrative, or if you’re creative administrative, or if you are creative enterprising, or you are very practical investigative. You need to sort that out so you get, let’s say a package of job titles that you typically would like to work with, so you can communicate that with recruiters and hiring managers.

Then number three here on the spot is that you can negotiate your job title. You apply for a job, you don’t fit all the competences, and that’s perfectly fine. If they invite you for an interview, you are not qualified, it could very well be that you can negotiate the job, so they change the job title, or they even change the description of the job. Always have that on your mind. Today there is such a huge lack of competences, so you can negotiate your job title. That is an ace for discovery and informational interviews.

If you’re not really sure, if you can do the job or not, take the risk and say yes, I can do it. Take a decision, yes, I can do it. Remember, you never fail, because the whole process in your career is a learning process, and the job journey is a long journey. Your first job beyond academia is just your first job beyond academia, and you’re not going to end there.

Just showing you the career coaching guide. What I talk about here today is that it’s important to start with your transferrable skills and how you apply them for your next employer. When I say how you apply them, it is translating your academic skillsets to a terminology that future employers will understand, so they can see the value you can offer them.

Then you need to learn much more about the labour market, so you know what companies are looking for, you know what kind of job titles exist at the moment. The rest what you see in this career coaching guide is tools, because in the centre is you. You always start to work with yourself, that’s super important.

This is just a slide where we briefly show everything that you gained and learned in academia. You had communication skills, management skills, problem solving skills, fundraising, self-motivation, multitasking, and networking. All of that you can do. The question in the future is more directed to what you would love to do in the future. So, you most likely will have to start to select, so to speak, be select. It’s not about you can do everything; it is really to select what you would love to do on an eight hours’ basis in your future job.

Having a look on this job ad here, I have coloured them in green, yellow and blue, and this is something I highly recommend that you do. This gives you a much clearer picture of what’s really relevant in the job title. Everything that’s green here is something that you most likely have. The blue part is transferrable and soft skills, and the yellow is pure let’s say technical, transferrable skills.

If I as a head-hunter and recruiter would start to select you, number one would of course be if I find a person that has been working as a medical writer previously. However, I know that it’s such a huge lack of competences, so it’s most likely I don’t have a person applying with that background. So, I need to take a step and look on people that might be interested in writing.

Now you have the $10 million tip I give you. I would absolutely choose candidate to interview if the candidate can answer the following questions. “Do you like to write, and how do you know you like to write? Can you give an example of when you are writing, and what value would you bring to the company?” In this job you must like to write. Then I would like to figure out with you whether you really understand what a medical writer are doing on daily basis.

My other question would be, “could you describe for me what a medical writer are doing on daily basis?” This indicates that if you as a postdoc or PhD or academically trained person have talked with people being medical writers, you most likely could figure that out. It’s very well fine to say, do you know what, I haven’t worked as a medical writer, but I have talked with medical writers, and they describe the job as following. That would convince me as a recruiter that you actually know a little bit, and that you yourself can evaluate whether you would like that job or not. That strengthens my belief that you might be a top candidate for me.

Trick one, figure out what the daily day work like so you understand what the people are doing if they work as a medical writer in a company. Then convince me that writing is something that absolutely you can see yourself doing on eight hours a day. That’s my tip to go through to the second step on an interview.

Time to check on the agile job searching technique. Ten years ago, commonly you looked for job titles on the internet. That was not so many job titles around, so it was possible. Today that too many job titles, and the job titles they come and go. So, it’s very hard to keep track on them. There are two ways of using skills search instead. That is either you use very technical, and this is a common mistake for people in STEM in particular, they only search for hard skills. Python, life science, artificial intelligence, AI, molecule biology, cell, etc. It could be very clever to use transferrable skills instead and say problem solving, writing, manager, supporting, so you put in problem solving, management, and then check what sort of job comes up.

This is a completely new way for many to look for jobs, but it gives you a much better idea of what new job title comes up. But now before you start doing this, it’s important that you write in transferrable skills that are commonly used in the job field that you would like to go. That’s why it’s so crucial that you use your exploration phase in the beginning.

This is a slide, on transferrable skills and why to use them. Transferrable skills are particular skillsets that doesn’t belong to any particular niche or job or industry. That’s why they are so important. They are general skills that you can use and apply, and they can be transferred between job departments and even industries. It is for this reason they are known as transferrable skills. This is exciting. That’s why they are so important in any transition in industry, or from academia to industry or within any organisation whether you work in an NGO, small-medium enterprise, or in a governmental position.

Going back, how to start to reflect over what you like and what you don’t like. I think doing an academic career it’s always that you start with a project, and you end up with writing an article, and that is a process itself. You start by reviewing articles, you do experiments, you learn about your research, and then teaching, collaborating, thinking, conferencing, setting up projects, and then editing manuscripts, and then you publish. In all that process, that can be up to a year or maybe even two years, you do a lot of stuff.

Now it’s time to really nail down on paper what you love to do, what is sort of interesting, and what you can skip. So, you clarify for yourself much more what you would love to do in the future. This is a way not only for yourself but it’s also so you can express for other people so they can help you. So, you can tell me loud and clear that for me it’s important to have a job, where I can collaborate, where I can create many new ideas, I have a supportive team around me, and I would love to travel. It just gives me an idea.

Not the exact job title, but you help me to understand what you like. This is the key, when it comes to both networking, creating your elevator pitch, or for informational interviews. Transferable skills indicating your drives and motivation, what you can start doing is to write your own priority list, what always is on the top and what you tend to procrastinate. Because things that we don’t like to do, we tend to procrastinate.

Here you have an assessment that I use that helps you to find whether you’re practical, investigative, enterprising, supportive, creative, or administrative. You can also think like the following. Experiment failed, but I analyse the data and try it again, and that shows that you have a problem-solving attitude and you’re good in analysing.

It could also be that you write, participated in public conferences, including speaking engagements. That’s ability to communicate to a diverse audience. That’s another way of expressing it. Coming to the step-by-step guide, and this is the end of the presentation.

In the next video I’m going to show how I use the step-by-step guide in reality by doing a search live and record it here. In video two you can see how I work myself through by using Indeed and LinkedIn. But I use what I call transferrable skills, I select the skills, and then I go to the platform and use more of the transferable skills. If I put it that way, start to search to find the jobs.

Then eventually I go to LinkedIn, and I can Google, and I start to track down and read the job ads coming up to identify even more skills that could give me new key skills and new job titles that could be of interest to me. With that said, I say thank you very much, and see you in video number two. Okay, take care, bye.

[END OF TRANSCRIPT]

Hi, welcome, Tina Persson is back, and this is video number 2. I’m going to show how I do the Agile skill-searching technique or how I apply it by using preferentially Indeed – it’s a job-searching platform – and LinkedIn. I’m going to try to use different kinds of skills, but this is open for you to test and try yourself. This is a super Agile method, so I really hope that the way I show it, that you’re going to catch it up as – you can’t ask me questions, but okay, let’s go on, and I will dig down into the computer here. I will share the screen and I go into what I call Indeed, which I think is the best platform to play around with, but there are other platforms that you can have a look on. There is Glassdoor, for example. Then, of course, if you look for specific countries, you’d need to maybe go and be country specific. That could be, for example, you know that you look for European jobs, on governmental jobs, then that could be different platforms. But for the Agile job-searching technique using these skills, Indeed, I consider, and Glassdoor, are the two best platforms to play around with, so let’s go and put in the first skill here. I thought I’m going to look and take a skill that I call coordination, so I put ‘coordination’ in, and I decide also that this is a person that likes to coordinate and have a supportive nature. So we say ‘coordination’ and ‘supportive’, and let’s see what happened here and what comes up. I happened to go to the London page and there we go – 388 jobs, and that’s a little bit little. That should be more, so I write ‘coordinating’ instead – ‘coordinating’ and ‘supporting’. Coordinating and supporting, and as you see, I used that before, and now I go and find jobs, and now you see, just by changing that little, I got 2411 jobs. The first thing I do is I check without adding PhD in, and I check what kind of titles actually come up. I see it’s Policy Adviser, Lived Experience Adviser, Project Manager comes up. I go for… Project Coordinator comes up, Market Intelligence Associate, Quality Standards Officer, Analyst, Talent Assistant, Training and Awareness Analyst, Research Analyst, Customer Success Engineer. As you notice here when you read these job ads, it’s like it’s not one single job title being the same, so only there – I’m putting in ‘coordinating’ and ‘supporting’ – you get fairly many job titles coming up here. Now, you note we had 2411 and I put PhD in because I decide that, okay, we’re academic. We have a PhD title. Now we are down to 21 jobs, so by adding PhD, there are far less jobs, but still fairly many. Then I go again and check Lived Experience Adviser. Consultant IQVIA is a Real World Solutions job. Senior research economist, Doctoral Student comes up, Business Information, Academic Affairs, Biostatistician, Senior Data Scientist, Lab technician, Chief Data Scientist. Still, not a single job title is the same, and now it’s time here for you to open up a job ad and read further. Let’s say that we take the Consultant job. What I do is that I click on these three dots and I do a right click and I open in a new window, which means I have to do a new share here. Now you should see Consultant – Real World Solutions. What I do now is I start to go through the job ad. This is the moment you should be calm. Don’t get irritated. Don’t be frustrated that you don’t understand what’s in the job ad because this is not the moment where you think, I’m going to apply for jobs. This is your exploration phase. This is when you start to think, okay, could that be something more for me? You are there to learn skills and keywords and read in general if you can figure out the work style of the job. So you go to the role summary. You start to read that one: ‘Consultants in our Client Engagement team are involved in managing and delivering Real World Evidence projects for our clients,’ and you’re going to work towards pharmaceutical and biotech business, but it could also be academia and health industry, so this is obviously a job that fits very well for a PhD to do. ‘Our Consultants work as part of the team and are expected to be self-motivated individuals with excellent communication, task management, collaboration, presentation skills.’ Only there you can write down on a separate paper many skills. You could write down, for example, ‘communication’. You could write down ‘collaboration’, ‘presentation skills’, and then ‘high-quality input’. High-quality input – it’s also something interesting here. Then you go to Responsibilities, and there it’s like planning, organising, managing discrete components, etc. Here you have more skills – planning and organising. So, planning and organising, if you are a person that likes to plan and organise. Well, that’s maybe skills you could go for Indeed and search as well and see what kind of job comes up then. You remember that and you say, ‘Okay, planning is something that I will put on my list as well.’ Here I get curious about presentation and planning. What happens if I write that down? Then providing day-to-day support to project teams, so project is something interesting here, analysing, time, budget. Time management could be interesting here. Designing and structuring client reports, development… You start to read here. Okay, this might be something that fits to me. This could be something I’m interested in doing even though I don’t exactly know the job. Planning, organising, client face-to-face, supporting – that’s something I like to do. Okay, and when you come that far, you can see what they have. Experience and education, it’s here – it’s super important. This is a wish list from them, so you say, instead of saying, ‘proven’, you remove that and you say ability to manage, planning and conducting projects – you have done that as a PhD. Problem-solving – that’s what we’re good at to do as a PhD, so you don’t have to worry about that. Curiosity about developing and interpreting new insights – well, that’s interesting. Developing, interpreting new insights – that’s what we do as well as a PhD. Ability to articulate complex issues – that’s what you do in academia. Again, excellent conversational and business English, written and oral, demonstrated via storyboarding/slide development, report writing. There are so many skills that you can learn and write down on your paper. What does it say? Master’s or PhD, but I also know PhDs in humanities and social science that got this sort of job here, so it might not be a must to be in life science. When you now have learnt this, what you do is that you take it and copy this here into a Word document and save it because when they close the link, you can’t reach out to this one here again. So, as soon as you find something that you like, make a copy and paste, put it in a Word format and save it, and then write down the specific skills and key wordings. This is essential because now I will do another search from the words I’ve found here. I’ve found ‘analysing’, ‘supporting’, even though we had that in, but it was also ‘planning’ and ‘time management’. That could be interesting to see what happens if we put ‘planning’ and ‘time management’ in. What kind of job title comes up then? When you have found certain skills that come up again and again and again, most likely they are significant for these sorts of jobs. Of course, you should have that in your resumé, shouldn’t you? Then most likely you should have them on your LinkedIn profile as well, so you’ve really learnt a lot by having this look here. I find it really exciting. Now I will go down here and I will go back to this one here, and I will make a new share. We are here – I have to go back to this one here, so now we took these ones, so let’s just put in ‘planning’ and ‘time management’. Maybe we need to put ‘time management’ in a bracket. I do it like that. Not the bracket, but ‘time management’. I’m putting these ears here as a Boolean tracking. Oh, I’m spelling bad here! There we go. Otherwise, the computer will help me here. What happens if I put ‘planning’ and ‘time management’ as a PhD? Thirty-two jobs – oh, not bad. Let’s see – Pre-Sales Solution Consultant, Principal Consultant for AI and IoT (client and project management), Senior Data Scientist, Analyst Advisor, Associate Advisor, Senior Analyst, Data Scientist, Pre-Sales again – same job that’s coming up several times – that happens. Okay, Statistics Director – fairly different jobs, not really the same titles as last time, is it? That is sort of different, and let’s say, is there anything that you are interested in? Otherwise, you go up here and say, okay, ‘planning’, maybe ‘time management’ wasn’t the best ones. So you can decide that, okay, ‘planning’ and let’s say ‘analysing’ instead and see what comes up. I just do that because I like to do it! Let’s see what happens. Okay, 19 jobs, so fewer jobs if I put in ‘analysing’ in combination with ‘planning’, and then I see, okay, Energy and Sustainability Senior Researcher, Research Associate. Consultant comes up here again, the IQVIA, Research Associate, Doctoral Student, Deputy Director, etc., etc. This is how we can start doing things, but let’s now go back to the IQVIA job that we had here. Let’s say that you like that one. Now you have the company here. Now the next clever thing to do – and I’ll just stop sharing because now, if you say that you’ve found a company – say, okay, I’m curious. They seem to need consultancies at IQVIA, and let’s say that you need to learn more about the company or what kind of people are working there. Let’s say you don’t have a life science background or you’re more an engineering background or you’re social science, and you are curious about what kind of people are actually working. Now you’re going to do the next thing here, and this is again for exploration only. You’ve figured out at least one company here, so what I’m going to do here now is… Now I have a problem to share my screen. I need to actually make it a little bit there and then I go like that! I’m sorry for that one – just a bug in the system sometimes. I go to LinkedIn, and here I have LinkedIn. This is my profile, and I go to the search function. I go to IQVIA, and I scroll. Scrolling there, now this shows the power of why you need to build a network on LinkedIn before you start to apply for jobs. You should have roughly 500-plus connections. You need to start to add people in the region and in the field that you would like to go into. Then I press the People button here, and I can see it’s 94,000 people here in my network, and I can make a quick check only – okay, where are they working? Now this is globally here, so I decide, okay, that wasn’t really fair, so let’s say we go to London because we decide that I’m interested in the London area. I show the results, and I’m ending up with 2000 people in London, so that’s a fairly good volume. Then you can check where they are working at the moment because even though I wrote ‘IQVIA’, it doesn’t mean they work there at the moment. You will see here, okay, they are in ICON, IMS Health, AstraZeneca. Already here you’ve got four different companies that most likely are very interested in people that have been working at IQVIA, or IQVIA I think they say. I can now go down to a little bit less and let’s say I take 1^st and 2^nd degree people. Then I have 58 people and that’s a very good selection. You can basically check all 58. I check here, Urszula Kaldi – look here, that’s really interesting. She is a Talent Acquisition person. That means that this person you most likely can contact because she’s probably looking for people. You go down and you check here – Data Scientist at IQVIA, Consultant, PhD MRPharmS, Talent Acquisition Manager. You have Jay Foster, Talent Acquisition Manager, and you go on and you go on, so you actually learn to check people here. Here they are, and you could go down to Urszula and check. Now my computer’s a little bit slow. You read, okay, IQVIA Manager – now she’s in Poland at the moment. Okay, great area – maybe that… Let’s check what she did before. Senior Recruiter – she’s a recruiter at IQVIA. That could be a good connection to have, Recruitment Consultant. Recruitment, okay, so you check her background. Then you say, okay, I need to change that, so what I’m going to do now, I’m going to change the area. I go to London again, but I’m going to go to the next – they had ‘London, England, United…’ here, not ‘London Area’, so let’s say I take the ‘London, England’ area, let’s see what comes if I choose that instead if it makes any difference. Yes, a little bit. We have Ana Lisica, Consultant. We go down and we check the people again. Here we go, here we go, and we can go in and check another person here. What has she been doing? North Lambeth, England, United Kingdom. We check her background – Consultant, IQVIA, full-time. Before that, she worked at Innovation Forum. She was a Medical Consultant, Independent Contractor. Before that, she was at King’s College. She worked as a Life Sciences and Medicine Doctoral Teaching Assistant. So you learn about people’s backgrounds and what they do at IQVIA, what kind of people actually work in that specific company, but you can figure out here that they for sure at that company recruit PhDs. They’re very interested in that because there are many of them. That is another thing, by the way, I can do. I can put ‘PhD’ in here, so I add that to ‘IQVIA’ and then again, I notice that I have 13 people left. For example, if I go and check Yein Nam, she’s a PhD – I go, check her profile, and here we go – IQVIA Associate Principal. Before that, she was at Adelphi Real World. Go down, PhD Student at the University of Manchester, so she has a PhD, been a postgraduate researcher, and now working at IQVIA in London here. What did we learn by doing this? First of all, you can connect to these people. You can reach out to these people, particularly if they are recruiters or internal recruiters. It’s actually their job, and many of them also have contact data, and that’s the moment you can ask them questions like, ‘How is it to work as a consultant in your company? I notice that you are looking for people. I realise I don’t match fully all the competencies, but I have this, and I would like to work at IQVIA. So what could be your first step-in position or what could I add, what skills could I add for you to be interested in me?’ This is sort of stepping into the hidden job market. All jobs are not advertised, but this is also why, as I said, the paradigm shift is that you can negotiate your job title. Yes, you can negotiate your job title, so you simply call them and say you’re interested in them, and consultancy companies are usually very keen on bringing prospects in for interviews. So it could very well be they ask you some questions and you say, ‘Okay,’ and you come in for a further interview, and they say, ‘You maybe don’t match up to what we are looking for, but you’ll learn,’ and you’ll learn what you either can improve or you actually do get a possibility to negotiate the job title. With that said, this is the way you do for an Agile job search. You go in and search for skills. Then you cross with these skills and go in and read in the job ad yet more skills and search for more. You’re saving – you save the job ads. You learn and check on every job ad. You’ll write down the skills carefully, so you remember that and save it. Then you figure out some company names which you write down in an Excel file, so you have skills, job titles and companies. Then you go to LinkedIn. If you want to fish out even more, you can simply google. Google always works, so with that said, welcome to the new paradigm shift in job hunt. It’s your opportunity, so let the algorithms and the AI work for you. Use the technology so you can headhunt your own job. Thank you very much for listening. This is Tina Persson. Take care.

[END OF TRANSCRIPT]