Hey folks, and welcome to the Grad School Sucks podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Matt Carlson, and this is the show for grad students and academics who want to start non academic careers. Today, I want to talk about seven secrets, seven resume and job hunting secrets that I have PhDs,
Who are further along in their career than I am. It's come from my own personal research that I've done as well as informational interviews that I've done with recruiters, which have been incredibly informative. The main clip for today's podcast comes from a recent webinar that I did on how to create your first industry resume.
And if you attended that webinar live, then hey, hello, thank you for showing up. If you registered but didn't attend live, make sure you check your email for the replay link. I'll keep that link active for about five days. And if you aren't on my email list, you didn't know about the webinar, but you want to attend webinars in the future, then I recommend you sign up for my email list.
I'll leave a link in the description of this episode. I typically conduct at least... One webinar every one or two months, but anyway on to today's show Here are the seven secrets about resumes and job hunting that I have learned over the past year or two See you on the other side Seven secrets to resumes and job hunting.
These are things that I learned over the past year Some of it was from other PhDs have gone industry. So is it? Of it was through my own research, and some of it was directly from recruiters, who are, of course, off the record, not interviewing me for a job. But the first one, which I think is really important, and goes right along with what we've been talking about, recruiters have a short attention span.
And that's not because they're bad people. It's not because they don't care. about you and everything you've done. It's because they have a job to do, and they have to burn through typically over 100 resumes in order to whittle down to a pile, and then start calling them, and then move them on to the hiring manager.
And so they're going to give you 10 seconds or less. 10 seconds or less to put you into the yes or the no pile. That's all you get. And that's why you have to have those P a R those par statements, and they've got to be really well defined and quantified if at all possible. Again, typically recruiters will only look at the top half of your page, which even more so, uh, talks to the importance about what you put at the very top.
Number two, most cover letters will never get read. And I've heard nine out of 10 will never get read. I'm, I bet it's probably. More than that, I know many organizations and companies are moving away from having cover letters. The truth is that some of them still require them, and many of them have it as optional.
And if you are going to apply to jobs that have a cover letter, it's recommended you spend five minutes or less on that cover letter. Because there's such a low chance that a recruiter is actually going to open it and look at it. You can use AI to build these quickly, or you can just not apply to jobs that have cover letters.
That's actually what I did for a little bit. All right, next one, linking to LinkedIn. So one thing that we didn't talk about because we can't cover everything in an hour is in your contact information at the top of your resume, you've got your name, you've got your city state, you've got your phone number.
You need to also put your LinkedIn profile, a link to your LinkedIn profile, and think about it. Think about how you signed up for this, right? You probably saw a piece of my content, whether it was Instagram or LinkedIn or somewhere else, and you... Learned who I was that's there's a marketing concept called no like and trust and the recruiters basically have to do the same thing with you and the resume is where they get to know you and LinkedIn is where they can like you and then of course trust is when they give you a call and decide to move you on to the next phase and the more time that a recruiter spends on your LinkedIn page is Is directly correlated with the likelihood of you getting a phone call from them.
Because again, think about it. Instead of just a flash in the pan 10 second resume review, maybe you get 30 to 60 seconds of them skimming through your LinkedIn page. And if you have a good LinkedIn page, boom. That could be the trigger that gets you into the call later pile instead of the delete now pile.
Put your link, put a clickable link to your LinkedIn at the top of your resume in your contact information section. All right, the next one we're going to talk about is ATS or application tracking systems or application tracking software. They are widely used for larger companies and nearly a hundred percent of companies on the top Forbes list use ATS systems.
And many people talk about them like boogeymen, but the reality is they're like any other kind of engine out there that compiles results. It's SEO driven, it's relevance driven, and it doesn't delete any information. It doesn't reject people from jobs. It simply organizes information. And it doesn't make any decisions.
However, it will rank you if they have that option turned on, if they're using an ATS that has that feature, it will rank you by how well your resume matches the job description. And the way to beat it is the same way to beat a recruiter. It's to have a good resume that matches what they want. And there's really not a, there's not, people talk about that you can beat it with these three technical tips, and it really doesn't work like that.
You really just have to have a good resume that recruiters want to see. The one thing I will say is that if you match key phrases and keywords from the job posting onto your resume, that will rank you higher. Of course. It also rank you higher in recruiters minds because they'll literally see the words and phrases that they wrote in the job posting to elicit your resume.
So it's really just mirroring what recruiters want. It's not some robot that you need to figure out how to defeat. Unless you have like icons and, or you submit your resume as a JPEG or like some weird formatting issue, then the ATS will beat you then, but hopefully we're not running into that. All right, let's wrap this up and move on to Q& A.
The best time to apply for a job is within 72 hours. Within 72 hours, particularly if it's remote, and definitely if it's an easy apply job. And that's simply because a lot of times, they'll leave the jobs open to keep accepting resumes, but they're not actually looking at them. If they already had a couple hundred, and those couple hundred are relevant to the role, then They may leave it open, but they're not going to look again, but within 72 hours is your best chance.
All right. On that note, you're going to be looking at LinkedIn and you're going to see these over 200 applicants. And those are actually a little bit false. It's actually just not true a lot of the time. And if you think about it, LinkedIn makes money from businesses. Businesses that buy their recruiter packages, their ability to list easy applied jobs on LinkedIn.
That's how LinkedIn makes most of their money, not from the premium. LinkedIn that you and I would buy, but from businesses. And they want to show businesses that they're delivering results for people. And so whenever you see something that says like, over 200 applications, the truth is that it's far less than that, are actually real people.
A lot of people won't finish the application. If it's an apply one, that you click and it pops you off to your website in a new tab, it's gonna assume you applied to that job. And most people who click that apply button. are going to look at the page, see all the forms they have to fill out and then just exit.
And they're not going to apply, but LinkedIn is still going to count it as an application. There's also just people who are not qualified or who are from countries where the job isn't posted and they're not accepting that, or there are bots and typically a fraction of that number, probably 50. actual applicants applied to this data analyst job, not 200.
So don't be too dismayed when you see these huge numbers. All right. It's almost Q and a time. Where's my secret? Number seven, not all emails are made equal. You will be judged by the email you have. If you have one of these emails, hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, you will be perceived as being behind the times. And it's Not fair.
It's kind of weird, but that's how it is. And this is particularly true if you're in a more tech oriented space or a tech oriented role. And of course, if you have some, like, goofy name with, you know, like, Dora the Explorer 4571 or something like that. Obviously that doesn't look professional. What is accepted generally is Gmail Outlook and then work and school emails.
Those look professional. All right, folks, those are my seven resume and job hunting secrets. I hope at least one or two of those really stuck out to you as new information that you can absorb. For your current or future job search in the industry space. And if you are interested in signing up for new webinars, hearing more tips on how to go industry, then I recommend signing up for my email list.
Again, I'll have that link in the description of this episode and you can sign up there. Thank you for listening. And I will see you all next week.