My approach to job searching & changing careers that doesn’t rely on resumes (it’s also your career insurance)

The core strategy of The New Way to job search

At the core of this two-pronged strategy is talking to other people and tapping into their brain trust.

You can figure out both parts of your next step by applying the same strategy: Talking to other people.

Or, as I like to call it, “coffee chats.”

Through coffee chats, you leverage other people as human search engines and human LinkedIns to help you determine the WHAT and the HOW of figuring out your next step.

It seems simple but it’s elite-athlete-kind-of-simple—when someone is so prepared and practiced that they make it look easy and powerful, but really it takes a lot of time, effort, and training to make it work.

It’s the same with coffee chats…

To do it effectively and not embarrass yourself or waste your time, there’s a ton of work that needs to be done beforehand. I’d like to help you avoid getting stuck or making the mistakes I’ve seen other people make (more on that soon).

Already tried coffee chats?

Awesome! If they weren’t very effective or didn’t work for you (or maybe you’ve been on the receiving end of a bad one)—keep reading.

I’m going to teach you several key strategies that can drastically improve your coffee chat game.

We’ll get into the four building blocks of figuring out your next step later on in this blog post but first let’s talk about the elephant in the room.

Are coffee chats really worth it?

YES!

If you take anything away from this post, please let it be this.

Coffee chats are incredibly powerful and effective for nine main reasons:

1. Coffee chats are career insurance that helps you avoid job searching
2. Other people connect the dots for you
3. You get choose how to frame your experience by leading with skills, not titles (this is incredibly useful if you’ve had a non-linear career, you’re changing careers, or you’re a generalist)
4. Helps with decision making and analysis paralysis
5. Boosts your confidence
6. Saves you time
7. Saves you money
8. Expands your network
9. Stops information overload or overwhelm

Let’s dive in…

1. Career insurance that helps you avoid job searching

You never know when you may need a new job due to a layoff, your job becoming obsolete, or a change in lifestyle is needed (like having kids or taking care of aging parents).

With coffee chats, you can build your network and keep your options open. It’s as close as you can get for preparing yourself for something that you can never totally prepare for.

We’ve all heard the scary stats that say people will now have to change careers many times throughout their lives.

And sometimes, you may just want a new job because you’d like to feel more engaged or want to make more money (job-hopping is the best way to get an increase in salary—not just a small one but a big jump like $55k, which I’ve helped my clients have accomplished).

The great news is that if you learn this skill now, it will serve you for the rest of your life.

That’s why coffee chats are like career insurance.

And if you’re like me and hate feeling trapped in a job, the insights and connections you build up through coffee chats are like having an escape plan in your back pocket.

If you’re coffee chatting often (when I was in my last job, I was doing it 2-4 times a month), it is very possible to land a job before you even leave your current job.

That means you get to avoid the job search altogether.

2. With coffee chats, other people connect the dots for you

When you use coffee chats, people connect the dots for you about WHAT your next step is and and HOW you can get there (and ideally, they’ll help you land the job).

When you take action and talk to an actual human instead of continually Googling or just thinking about what you should do next, the contact can share their ideas about which roles or organizations might utilize your skills.

This is HUGE! This is where the person starts to figure out your next step for you.

Do you know every job that’s out there? No. And I don’t either. Often, job titles don’t even really give us insight into what the job actually IS.

Organizational culture is often a reason people stay with or leave an employer. Maybe you’ve been burned by this before? I know I definitely have.

But how do you know what an organization or company is actually like without working there?

By tapping into other people’s brain trust you get a different perspective on your skills and get insights into other fields, jobs, and organizational cultures.

Another way people can connect the dots for you is that they can share job search strategies that have worked for them.

They can also share job postings (people prefer to hire through referrals).

NOTE: This is not the same as just applying to an online posting. When a contact sends you a job posting, it usually means they have some influence and can either refer you as the best candidate (yay!) or at the very least, can get your resume to the top of the pile.

3. YOU get to choose how to frame your experience by leading with your skills, not titles

We. Are. Not. Our. Job. Titles.

Have any of your job titles totally represented ALLLL of what you’ve done in that job? Probably not.

Our lives are not just our jobs, either. We have lives outside of jobs (at least I hope you do).

That means that experience outside of a job is exactly that—experience.

Regardless of where your experience is from—school, volunteering, a personal project, etc.—those skills are still part of the value you will bring into your next job.

Resumes restrict our experience to a narrow 1-2 pages of chronological employment experience.

Gaps in employment stand out.

Employers won’t spend the time to connect the dots between a wide range of experience and skills.

When you figure out your next step by talking to humans, YOU get to lead with your skills and experience, not your titles (unless it supports your experience, in which case, that’s great).

YOU get to craft the story of your experience and connect the dots in the way you want to.

YOU are more than a resume and this strategy recognizes that.

4. Helps with decision making and analysis paralysis

Remember that the person you’re having a coffee chat with is much more than their current job—they usually have had several jobs (or careers!) prior to their current one.

You can learn a lot about what your next step could be and how to get there by learning about their career path and how they ended up in their current job.

Even if you’re not totally interested in their current job, you can gain insights about their previous roles and employers.

People can also give you valuable insights into how to get hired at their organization or the ones they’ve worked at previously.

Resumes can’t do this.

All you usually have to work with is a job posting that often doesn’t truly represent what the role will entail.

I’ve been on the hiring side and can assure you that job postings can sometimes be sloppily thrown together due to time constraints or lack of knowledge (it’s not always an HR person putting it together).

5. Boosts your confidence

It can get depressing when you’re sending out resumes and not getting much response.

It doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re unqualified, the employer probably just has someone who has already been referred as the best candidate (see the pattern here?).

Your resume may not have even had a chance.

When you actually talk to a human it can show you that, yes, finding a job is possible. And it’s extra amazing when you really hit it off with the person.

6. Saves you time

Coffee chat contacts can share what the day-to-day life of a particular job or career is like. Do not underestimate this.

`1111I’ve found that people often overlook what the nuts-and-bolts of an actual day are like in a job. I have even overlooked this myself…

I’m actually a trained elementary school teacher (one of my many previous career chameleon lives) but I didn’t pursue it after getting my education degree.

Although I love helping people develop their potential, halfway through my teaching degree I realized that the the day-to-day of teaching didn’t allow me to do enough of that.

When you know what a particular job involves, you can make an informed choice whether to pursue it or not.

This strategy also saves you time because you don’t have to spend hours upon hours of editing and sending out resumes.

7. Saves you money

It breaks my heart when people decide to go to school (or back to school as the case may be) because they think it will help them figure out their next step and land a job. I just hear the sound of money going down the drain.

Let me be clear: I don’t hate education.

I believe that education is a business that doesn’t always give us the results we expect.

Do you truly need to go school for a particular job?

Will a specific program or degree give you the skills you want?

Are you going to school because you’re hoping it will give you answers?

Or provide an escape?

That is a very expensive risk to take. I know this because I paid my own way through my two degrees (Bachelors degree in Psychology & English and Bachelors of Education).

So if you’re going to school, I want you to be sure you’re making an informed choice and going for the right reasons.

And all of the questions above can be answered by—you guessed it—tapping into other people’s brain trust.

8. Expands your network

You can get access to the network of the people you have coffee chats with. Good people tend to know good people.

If you think about the fact that each person you’re talking to has at least 3 great contacts…That means a lot of great new contacts for you.

You can expand your network in a massive way through coffee chats.

This is incredibly useful if you have a small network, weren’t born into a family that had connections (I definitely was not), or if you’ve just moved or are just starting out.

9. No more information overload or overwhelm

Coffee chats cut through the noise. When you are leveraging people in this way, you’re talking to a trusted source with lived experience.

This can really help filter out information that is not accurate or useful. When you read something online or in a book, it’s hard to tell if it’s from a trusted source with real experience.

Often, it is someone writing about a popular topic (Careers! Millennials are doomed! There are no jobs!) who doesn’t actually have the real experience.

If Google provides quantity, coffee chats provide quality.

The four building blocks of figuring out your next step

To make coffee chats work for you, you need to get your four building blocks ready:

1. Establish your priorities
2. Know how to frame your experience – identify transferable skills
3. Focus area(s)
4. Preparation and practice

And guess what? These four building blocks are a major part of what we work on in Guidance Counselling for Adults.

Add it to your calendar with one click.

1. Establish your priorities

If you don’t know what’s important to you in a role, organization, work culture, and other areas of employment, it’s very easy to get sucked into whatever role seems slightly interesting.

This is especially important for people who have “shiny object syndrome,” have lower confidence, or have been job searching or unhappy in their job for a while.

Your priorities help you figure out (and filter out) whose brain trusts you want to tap into.

2. Know how to frame your experience – identify transferable skills

As we’ve already touched on, you are not your job titles or your resume.

When you lead with your experience and the results you’ve achieved by leveraging your skills, it brings the focus to what you have done.

If you have impressive titles that will add to your credibility, reference them as necessary.

Identifying transferable skills requires knowing which skills you WANT to keep using that may be useful in other fields or industries.

That’s right—just because you are good at something or have experience in it doesn’t mean that you have to keep doing it.

This requires diving into all of your current and past experience, which can be tedious if you’ve been working for many years. It’s worth it, though.

If you’re staying in your current field, focus on deciding which skills and strengths you want to share.

Then it becomes a matter of creating a cohesive elevator pitch and key messages about your skills and customizing what you share about your experience based on who you’re talking to.

3. Focus area(s)

You don’t have to have an exact job title in mind to start having coffee chats but you do have to narrow it down.

If you’re interested in Human Resources, it doesn’t really make sense to talk to someone in woodworking, you know?

A focus area could be an interest (like cycling), an industry (like tech), an impact (like women’s rights), or a skill (like sales or project management).

A focus area could also be a specific title if you know it (like chemical engineer or computer programmer). These are all real examples from my clients, btw!

You may have multiple focus areas and that’s ok! At one point in my career I had FOUR: project management, facilitation, education, and technology.

4. Preparation & Practice

Although I’ve been referring to this strategy as “coffee chats,” they are so much more than that and you need to prepare accordingly.

From prepping your key messages, to finding the right people to talk with, to requesting a coffee chat, to tapping into your contacts’ brain trust, to following up and maintaining the relationship…

It doesn’t happen without preparation and practice.

Most people have at least one building block that they feel REALLY comfortable with and at least one building block that makes them nervous.

What about you – which building block feels good and which one feels nerve-wracking for you?

Guidance Counselling for Adults registration starts on Tuesday – save $100 for a limited time

If you want my help with any of this, take a look at what’s included in Guidance Counselling for Adults.

This is my 5 week program with options lots of personalized support from me ranging from co-working sessions to feedback on your strategies and elevator pitch to a 1:1 session with me. It’s like having access to a career coach for 5 weeks.

Guidance Counselling for Adults opens this Tuesday, October 15th.

And when you register Sunday, October 20th at 8pm EST, you’ll save $100 with the early bird rate.

Add it to your calendar with one click.

Have coffee chats worked for me?

Yes! They are the key strategy that have helped me become a successful career chameleon, working in a range of industries from non-profit to tech to consulting and landing high-level roles by age 28.

For reference, here is my background:

• Undergraduate degree in Psychology and English Literature
• Bachelors of Education degree (qualified to teach grades 4-10)
• I’ll acknowledge that I am a white woman which puts me in a place of privilege and can give me an advantage.

What I love about these strategies is that I have seen them help people who don’t have access to networks or contacts.

Being raised in a low-income working class family meant that I didn’t have access to contacts through my parents, so I had to learn these strategies as well.

It’s breaking down strategies that many folks who are in positions of power or privilege already know (and they’ve leveraged to get them to that place). It demystifies the hidden job market.

The Job: Director at Tech Company

How I Landed the Job:

• It started with a tweet
• I had been to a tech workshop for beginners and noticed that the woman who ran it also was running a tech workshop for people in education at a tech company (where I eventually got hired)
• I asked for the details and went to the workshop
• I approached the woman, shared my experience, asked her for coffee
• At coffee, I tapped into her brain trust and learned more about what she did
• She ended up offering me a volunteer position at the organization
• Six months later when she left her job, she recommended me as the best candidate

The Job: E-learning Consultant at a National Organization

How I Landed the Job:

• A contact (who I had built a relationship with through coffee chats) was being recruited for a role but she wanted to stay at her current job
• She recommended me for the role

The Job: Project Coordinator at a Non-profit

How I Landed the Job:

• I went to a workshop and met a woman there
• Asked for a coffee chat
• Two months later, she sent me a job posting for a role they were hiring for

The Job: Account Manager at a Private Consulting Firm

How I Landed the Job:

• Had a coffee chat with a former colleague
• She sent me a job posting for her organization, which was hiring
• Got recommended for the job

The Job: Fashion Magazine Stylist

How I Landed the Job:

• This was while I was in my 4th year of my undergraduate degree, when I was trying to figure out my next step after graduating
• Told another student at my school that I was interested in becoming a stylist for fashion magazines (I had even paid the application fee to a few fashion schools for the next year)
• She introduced me to her aunt who ran a stylist agency
• We had a coffee chat (before I knew that was even a thing! Ooooh, I was so desperate and scared in that final year of university…)
• I learned about the industry and realized I was not interested in the day-to-day work or the competition
• A few months later, she offered me an entry level job – I declined
• This was useful because it helped narrow my options
• I stopped my applications to fashion school, saving me a ton of time and wasted money

What do these examples have in common?

I had my four building blocks ready.

I was also sowing many seeds, meeting with as many people as I could without knowing which opportunities would bloom.

Did I know that a random tweet would turn into a job? Of course not! But I got into the habit of cultivating every opportunity I could and didn’t dismiss anything or anyone that could act as my human search engine or human LinkedIn.

Does this coffee chat strategy only work for me?

Nope. I’ve seen it work for many of my clients.

I’ve even had a client who wanted to switch from non-profit management to HR recruiting in the tech industry…She turned a 15 minute phone chat into a role that was especially created for her 6 months later!

That example also goes to show that coffee chats don’t have to be in person and can help you change industries.

WAIT! Do NOT start coffee chats yet.

After I’ve shared this deceivingly simple strategy, some folks will go out and try applying it right away.

Do not start coffee chats yet.

I still want to cover coffee chat mistakes to avoid so just wait a bit.

What you’ll learn in my next blog post

The 6 things that I’ve seen prevent people from coffee chatting confidently and successfully.

Guidance Counselling for Adults opens this Tuesday

There will be 3 ways to go through this 5 week career coaching program (with options for lots of personal support from me like a 30 minute one-on-one coaching session with me).

As usual, there will be an early bird price (save $100 when you register by Sunday, October 20th at 8pm EST) and a sliding scale.

Want to know more? Check out Guidance Counselling for Adults here.

The next time I’ll run GCA will be in 2020.

Take care,

Kathryn

PS: If you want my help with any of the strategies outlined in this blog post, Guidance Counselling for Adults is probably for you. Registration opens on THIS Tuesday, October 15th with 3 levels of varying support from me ranging from co-working sessions to a 1:1 session with me. Save $100 by registering in the first few days. Don’t miss the early bird price – add the date to your calendar with one click.

PPS: Blog post summary: Coffee chats can help you job search, explore careers, and find the job that’s right for you but you have to have your four building blocks in place. 1) Establish your priorities. 2) Know how to frame your experience & identify your transferable skills 3) Focus area(s) 4) Prepare & practice.

PPPS: If you learned something from this blog post, I’d be honoured if you shared this blog post with friends or shared it on social media. Thank you!