How to Align Your Resume with Job Descriptions

Behind the Scenes with ZipRecruiter Transcript

Stacey Delo
Great. Hi everyone. Happy Tuesday. Give everyone a second to login. It’s California reopened day. Both Julia and I are in California. It’s been a long, a long year and a half. So today is a big day out here. All right, I’m gonna get going. I’m Stacey Delo. I’m the CEO of pray, a career resource for moms going back to work or pivoting. We’re really glad to have you here today. I’m personally very excited about this conversation. I, I feel like I went looking for a great economist to talk to and I kept seeing Julia Pollock’s name pop up and all of these articles that I was reading. And so I found her. And she’s here today. And not only is she an a labor economist, with zip recruiter, one of the largest employment sites out there career sites, she is also a mother and passionate about our topic of mothers in the workforce. So we’re gonna have a really great candid conversation with Julia today about what the job economy looks like, right now, as we’re, you know, reopening from the pandemic and looking to schools reopening 100%, hopefully in the fall, and what that means for the job market now into the rest of the year. So as job seekers, this is just a really amazing opportunity to listen to what Julia has to say today. And then ask some questions, Jordan, on our team, we’ll be managing the chat, and the q&a, if you want to tell us in the chat, where you’re joining us from where you are in your career journey, that’s really helpful to us so that we can make sure that the questions that we’re asking are important to you. And then we’ll use the q&a box for specific questions. Julia and I are gonna kind of set up the conversation. We both have some slides to share. And then we are going to open it up to you to address some of your questions. So please use the q&a box for that. Other than that, we don’t see or hear you throughout this session. Okay, a few updates from me and I pray. This is today, June 15. Tomorrow, I’m participating in an Instagram live conversation with Mona Andrews, who’s the CEO of stay in the game, I just had the prep call with her yesterday. She’s outstanding, and places people in contract opportunities. And so I’m, I’m excited to learn a little bit more about what she does that we can share that with you all, but it’s going to be a great conversation. And you can just join us on the apprai Instagram to watch that interview. And then on June 29. So two weeks from now, we’re going to have a session with Megan and Tina on our team about polishing your LinkedIn profile, which is always a really popular thing to do. Okay, next up, just taking a look at the job board. You know, our job is really small but mighty, nowhere near the size of zip recruiters. You should be looking at jobs on zip recruiter as well. But as you know, our job board is really meant for people who have career gaps. You don’t have to have a career gap. But if you do, it’s going directly to hiring managers

that are welcoming of resume gaps. So please apply to these positions. We have a handful of returnships right now, which are really exciting opportunities. We have many financial opportunities. You can see some of them listed here. We have a great exam executive assistant opportunity with a healthcare consulting firm. And what I love about what they’re doing is not only are they looking for a thought partner in this executive assistant position, but they also host these informational sessions so that before you apply, you can learn about the company and they’re really looking for somebody who wants to grow into their growing company. So take a look at that. And RDC are nonprofit Buffett is a great one metal is the cryptocurrency company, they have a handful of positions on our site, please take a look at those and also streamlet. We have a hedge fund that is doing a confidential search for a, I believe it’s a marketing director. And we have a number of marketing positions right now. dhemaji, which I’m not sure is listed here is another one. So please take a look at those. Okay. And then let us know when you apply so that we can be in touch with our hiring managers. So for our my short bit of inspiration today, this was in the broadsheet yesterday, if you get the broad sheet, it’s a great newsletter, about happenings of women in work, and this was Brooke Baldwin, the recently former CNN anchor and author of the new book huddle, how women use their collective power to empower each other. And this article that she wrote in Fortune, really caught her eye because she’s talking about how she interviewed women who are hiring beyond the resume. So they’re looking at, you know, the whole person, as opposed to just the information that we can put on a resume. And you know, that really resonates with our team, because we spend a lot of time working with people around the worries that resumes offer things like should I put the year that I graduated on my resume? How do I position my career gap are my qualifications really matching what the employer is looking for, and then they go into these, you know, systems that you hope they get through. And what she’s saying is that it’s really time for the resume to modernize. And that is, that is a challenge, right? That is a big challenge, because there is an entire ecosystem that’s built around the resume and various online profiles that you may have. So I’m going to be curious, I’ll bring in Julia here in a minute. But I’m going to be asking her a little bit about her thoughts on the resume as well, and maybe ways that we can modernize it going forward. But we are really into, you know, the idea that you can project more about yourself if you can actually talk to somebody. And so what what Brooks piece, so I encourage you to read it is really going into is about how there’s a there’s a group of women in big positions right now who are thinking about this and doing that, and they’re hiring. So we’d love to see more of that. And speaking of the resume, I just want to blog, our resume, coaching packages, and you get to work with someone one on one on our team so that we can make sure that you’re projecting what you need to project to get hired. So we have a whole group of kids on our site that you can check out on on the website, I’m sure Jordan, I’ll put some links to that in here. And we usually provide a discount after these sessions. So take advantage of those. Okay, so who’s hiring now, Julia, I’m so excited to introduce you here. So Julia is a labor economist with zip recruiter, as I said, She’s quoted everywhere, you’ve probably read something, she said something smart, she said and not even known it. But she, what I love about what she does is she she uses the information and the data in the marketplace to measure the health of the labor market. And this is a really critical time to be able to understand what’s happening in the labor market so that you as a job seeker can sort of put your best foot forward. I also love that she’s a drilling reservist in the US Navy, and a mother of two. So welcome, Julia, thank you so much for being here today.

Julia Pollak, Economist, ZipRecruiter
Thank you so much for for having me.

Stacey Delo
Absolutely. So I’m really excited to get going with our conversation. I kind of wanted to start it off with a few questions. And then I know you have some slides to share. So we were first of all, why don’t you Why don’t you give just a brief background. Tell us a little bit, give in your words. Tell us a little bit about yourself, and then I’ll kind of dive into these questions. Sure.

Julia Pollak, Economist, ZipRecruiter
So I work at zip recruiter have been there for three years, almost. And they’re labor economist. So I study the real time high frequency data that we have in our marketplace, about what’s happening with employer demand for labor, how many employers are posting jobs in which industries in which cities in which states and A job seeker activity as well. So who’s applying? Are they good matches for the job where their skills mismatches? Where are their, you know, hundreds of applicants, applicants per job where they’re no applicants per job. The labor market is so incredibly complicated and rich and diverse, especially in a country like this, it’s so enormous, where the industry mix is so different across the country. So it’s a constant source of very, very interesting data that sort of supplements, the national data that we that we get all this sort of aggregate data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Census Bureau and everyone else. I was drawn to this field because I grew up in South Africa, which had very, very high unemployment. And it was just very clear how damaging it is for society when you have so many working age people without opportunities and without great jobs, you know, 30 percenters or something? Very, very, very high numbers. And so, you know, job really seemed to me like the path to training to growth to wealth. And that’s true here, too. So that’s always been an issue that sort of motivated me to kind of secure this career path, as I think many of us do. It definitely wasn’t direct. I studied economics as an undergrad, I then went and worked on on Capitol Hill doing national security policy research, actually. And I was surrounded by military leaders who by fire upon very, very inspiring. So I joined the Navy as a reservist after that. And, you know, spent a couple of months away for training. And I still do that. And I spent one weekend a month down in San Diego fixing helicopters, and two weeks a year over the summer. I, I taught economics at Pepperdine University, which I loved, I love being a mentor to students as well. And my graduate work at the RAND Corporation, which has a public policy graduate school, but also requires you to work on projects on policy projects while you study. So I did a really wide range of, of economic studies for private sector and government clients. And that was very, very exciting. Then had two kids while I was there, which was a challenge, but also great fun. And I’m actually expecting number three, so I’m, I’m, oh, my god. Seven and a half months pregnant, and very exciting that my third child will be born post pandemic. And I think that’s something we should we should talk about, because I actually think the working world will be a friendlier place for a new mom now than it was before the pandemic.

Stacey Delo
I agree. Isn’t that wonderful news? Well, I just I’m so impressed by I love that you just went out and joined, signed up as a reservist. I mean, that’s just it, that is really commendable. And so cool. And but I also share your passion about understanding what the value of a job means to people. This is important. It’s important work that you do, because you’re helping people get paid. And it’s critical. You know, for society, that we have jobs, good jobs that are meaningful to people and their families. And so thank you for the work that you’re doing in that direction. And I’m

Julia Pollak, Economist, ZipRecruiter
really excited to be at a company whose mission is to connect people to the next opportunity, and to find ways to help both job seekers and employers to get ahead in the labor market, and then find exactly the right matches for them.

Stacey Delo
Yep, yep, we speak that language here, too. Thank you. Thank you. Um, so let’s dive in here. So our team was meeting yesterday. And this was a chart in the New York Times maybe about a week ago or so. And the ER team was talking yesterday and it just kind of reminded me of this chart that I had seen like, we’re in a bit of a, like a almost a perfect storm right now. Right? Where there are a lot of job openings that companies are having a hard time filling. We still have a we have a really it’s a I think it’s a record high quit rate at the moment. So people still, you know, a lot of churn, essentially you have people that are looking to move back into the workforce. You have people who are reassessing what they want to do and knowing that the you know, the demand for labor is such that they He can go and get another job. So making changes. And you know, the good news for us, I just want to show this quote, because we used it in our, our newsletter last week. But you know that companies are willing to pay a little more to train workers, which I think is extremely valuable, and to take chances on people without traditional qualifications. I mean, it Do you does that resonate with you that there’s kind of this this, I mean, the storm, meaning that there’s actual, big opportunity for job seekers coming into the second half here. Yeah, I

Julia Pollak, Economist, ZipRecruiter
think this is possibly the best time ever to be a job seeker. So, you know, the, I have a couple of slides on this. But the pandemic was the swiftest, deepest, broadest recession that we’ve had in sort of modern history. And employers really instituted hiring freezes all over the place laid off millions of workers. Now, though, job posting activity, employer demand for workers is recovering far more quickly than those employers who expected it to add far more quickly than job seeker activity and labor force participation. And so you have a situation where spending is way higher than it was before the pandemic. It’s like a 15%. There’s massive demand for goods and services, partly because of the robust fiscal support that we gave the economy during this crisis. But also, because we were in a pretty good place to begin with after a 10 year expansion before the pandemic hit. And so, you know, spending, consumer activity, investment, confidence, those are all record highs. And yet, employers are operating after these massive layoffs with many, many, many vacant roles, many openings. And the pandemic was such a huge shock to labor force participation, more than 3 million people have left the labor force and are not looking for work and are not currently working or even looking. So it’s a big challenge for employers, and they are definitely doing all kinds of things to address it, we’re seeing wages go up, hours go up. The range of benefits expand pretty dramatically, companies are even giving hourly employees and contractors, the kinds of benefits that were previously reserved for full time employees, we’re definitely seeing employers cast a wider net and overlook things that were red flags to them in the past. And so this is a really great time to be searching for work and networking. Meeting and meeting people is so hugely important, a lot of a lot of the people that I meet who have the best jobs met, found them through friends and through their networks, about 80% of people find jobs through their network. So it’s really important to know how to use job search sites and how to get ahead on them. It’s also important to, to network properly and network to build relationships, not you know, not just to be transactional. But to meet people in your field who can really help you find what you what you love. And that working with horses is a two way street. Right? So, you know, look for the influencers, the thought leaders in the areas that you care about, share their posts, comment on their posts, you know, give them something to and start a conversation that way where you’re engaging with them. You’re sharing, liking, retweeting, posting, commenting intelligently. And basically, you know, meeting them virtually even before you even know them. So you can do that online with anyone from across the country. And then of course, you know, doing it in person, increasingly, it’s gonna be pretty important as well.

Stacey Delo
Yeah, we talked about that a lot that this is this is it, especially the summer can be a great time actually to work on your network. Because people tend to have a little little more time. And you want to make sure that you keep your network warm so that when you reach out, it’s not as though you haven’t talked to somebody in 10 years. And there are some lightweight ways that you can do that. I’m gonna stop my share. That was the end of the slides that I had. You’re welcome to share yours at any point that you want to I, when we first spoke, one of the things that I noticed was Julia had her phone by her and an alarm went off and she was like, just a minute. I just need to make sure that somebody’s picking up my daughter and And, you know, she had a shot, you know, one child and school in the morning, one child in school in the afternoon. And she was just making sure that, you know, her her support system there was was someone was picking up her daughter. And so, you know, I know that you have felt what we’ve been through here, you know, because you’ve lived it too as a working mom. But I’m wondering, in the role that you have, you know, watching what we saw January of 2020, where women made up the majority of the workforce for the first time, and maybe over a decade or so. And then, you know, just this just swift decline. And I’m wondering how, you know, how you related to that, how you felt about it, and what you see happening? You mentioned a little bit what you see maybe happening for women already, but I just, I just I’m curious how that was for you, as you know, I know, you probably felt it in one way as a mother, but also as an economist.

Julia Pollak, Economist, ZipRecruiter
So it was really exciting to start this job in 2018. And the employee population ratio for women, prime age, women just kept going up, economists kept thinking that it would sort of stop at some point to a plateau, there was no way it could go further. And then it did, it went further and further and further. And it became clear that there are many, many, many women in this country who would love to work if the conditions were right. And finally, in 2018, and 2019, the conditions became right for many of those women. And that’s because we were in a tight labor market. And employers were finally doing the kinds of things like offering more scheduled flexibility, that are so key to allowing women to participate fully, and have the sort of the dream, which is you know, having it all to have a family and a career. labor economist, Claudia Goldin has written this book about women in the workforce over over the last century. And she shows how all these different generations had these different goals and aspirations. You know, once upon a time, you either were sort of a spinster with no kids who worked, or you spinster, or you stayed home with kids, and there wasn’t really a way to combine those. And then, you know, future generations had families first, and then kids or, but nowadays, the majority of women, the vast majority, women have at least one child, and have a career. And, but of course, women also take on the lion’s share of the responsibilities in the household. And so it is difficult for them to get ahead in many of these careers that require you to be at the law firm until 9pm Every night and have your dinner there and do your laundry, their dry cleaning. You know, we’re a country where, you know, people’s out of office messages, say things like, you know, out for kidney surgery, but you can get me on my phone anytime, you know, back back in three hours. It’s very, very work centric, work driven culture, we have some of the most stressed workers on the planet, some of this is all unnecessary, as we’re all finding now, during the pandemic. Many jobs can be done anytime, anywhere, you know, with your kids sitting next to you. And it’s just not necessary for us to all be on this constant rat race. But that is how things were, for a tight labor market forced employers to rethink what they were doing, and to cast a broader net, to expand their recruiting, to offer returnships to offer more training on the job training. You know, they weren’t necessarily going to find workers who had the skills they wanted. And you know, the economy is changing so quickly. Now, even when you find people who have the degrees that you want, they may not actually have the practical skills that you really need. And so employers are increasingly looking for people with the right characteristics with the ability to work. So I there’s a loud guard struggling by so. But, you know, employers and are looking for people who are self motivated, who can, you know, supervise themselves, get things done, who are trustworthy or personable, who have great soft skills, who are able to communicate with clients and customers to listen to them to understand their problems to formulate recommendations, and those kinds of skills are so crucial, and they’re often more important than, you know, the courses you took in college or, or or anything else, because the software programs you use at work are going to change all the time. And the problems are going to change all the time. And you’re going to need to be nimble and adaptive and humble and, and curious. And so employers are increasingly open to that. And 2018 2019 What an amazing time to see labor force participation among women just keep going up with it almost seemed like there was no limit. And suddenly COVID hit, and labor force participation of women fell right back to 1987 levels. The year I was born, it was really like this massive, massive move backwards. You know, largely that was because of school closures. And even for people who whose schools didn’t close for daycare centers, for example, that reopened very quickly. Many parents were worried about the health risks, we didn’t know how dangerous COVID would be, we didn’t know how likely your children were to get transmitted or the long term effects would be so many people decided the best thing for their families was to keep their kids home.

You know, I know, here in Los Angeles schools, I think Los Angeles Unified School District was one of the last reopen, it finally reopened in April on a hybrid schedule. So my kids were at school for three hours a day, that’s it doesn’t, you know, doesn’t really help you to have kids in school or three hours a day. If you want to have a proper career. I think you’re muted.

Stacey Delo
No, absolutely, absolutely. It’s, it’s just, it’s just wild. So let’s fingers crossed into the fall that the schools can reopen. 100%. Okay, so I don’t want I want you to go ahead and show us your slides. I have more questions. You know, I think I think folks on this call are particularly interested in understanding know where the jobs are going to be into the end of the year here. And then you know, how to think about somebody with a career gap. You talked a lot about we call them transferable skills, that characteristics and whatnot, and how you sort of pull those out in a meaningful way so that employers understand that that’s what you bring to the table for them. So let’s walk through your slides. And I’ll just pop in with questions. And if there are any questions in the chat, I’ll take a look at those two. And maybe we can, we’ll just we’ll go from there. Great.

Julia Pollak, Economist, ZipRecruiter
Okay. So I mean, just to show you this was really unprecedented. The red line is the Coronavirus pandemic, jobs completely fell off a cliff, employment fell by 15%. In past recessions, even the great recession, which was really huge employment only fell by 6% of the course of recession. But as deep as it is, this recovery is also sort of one of the fastest ever. And if you take a look at that red dotted line, you know, you can see we’re already sort of, you know, three and a half years ahead of the Great Recession recovery. So I’m very hopeful that this line will now continue to go up now that people are vaccinated. And and you know, California is reopening today. So I’m expecting that this will be quite a robust recovery going forward. Even though it’s been so incredibly disruptive. The interesting thing about this particular recession is that it didn’t just hit employer demand for workers. So the the green bars are job postings. And you can see that they went from about 11 million active job postings on ziprecruiter in February to you know, fewer than 6 million in May in the massive, massive decline. It fell more than 40% during the pandemic. And that represented, you know, the huge sort of drying up of opportunities for for people looking for work. That’s fairly, the magnitude of that shock is unusual, but the sort of retreat of employers from the labor market and the decline of opportunities is pretty typical in a recession. What’s not so typical is the retreat of workers. And what we saw in this recession was also a massive decline in labor force participation. So when people were terrified to go to work, they were afraid to get sick. schools closed, it became very difficult to go to work with public transit stopped or extremely inconvenient. Many people couldn’t even physically get to work. And, and then entire industries were just completely dormant. You know, if you’re in the arts and entertainment industry, if you play concerts to packed venues. Now that was just over if you were in catering. All the bar mitzvahs and weddings and everything were were canceled and postponed. So it was extremely disruptive. What we’re seeing now though, is that employers are coming back much more quickly than job seekers. So, despite rising vaccination rates, despite some degree of school reopening, despite all of those sort of barriers to returning, kind of receding a little bit over the last few months, job seeker activity, labor force participation have not really recovered. And that’s why we have this amazingly hot, tight labor market, where employers are desperate for candidates. Now, you all know the reasons that people are, are not rushing back, people are still concerned about COVID, people still have pandemic related child care issues. There are also people I think, who have now experienced something akin to divorce, you know, a, a layoff is a really traumatic thing for many people. And it’s going to take people time to trust employment, again, to trust employers, again, to venture back out into the labor force. The other problem is that many people lost their jobs in March, April. And typically, when you get laid off, you start looking for a new job immediately. So people were looking for jobs in June, July, August, in the winter, when it was really awful to do so. And it was very discouraging. And people were sending off, you know, hundreds of applications and getting no responses because the labor market was still in this, you know, Dark Winter, this this horrible pandemic situation. And I constantly hear this, you know, we, a friend of mine just applied for a job at zip recruiter, and didn’t hear anything back, and was extremely upset and said, I’m sure it’s because my resume isn’t right. And I’m sure it’s because I didn’t go to the right school. And I’m sure it’s this, and I’m sure it’s that. And I looked at what had happened with a hiring manager, and they’d received like, 100 applications in the first five days, he applied on day eight or something, so no one even saw his resume. But people somehow, you know, when you go and try to buy a house, and you get outbid on every house, you don’t really take it personally, you just think, Oh, this is a really tight, tough market. And I need to keep doing this. Or, you know, I need to give a load of extra money and start calling up aunts and uncles.

With with jobs, people take it really, really personally and think it’s a reflection on them. They don’t realize what a numbers game it is. So sitting behind the scenes, it’s a recruiter, you we can totally see how this works. Many of you will post a job, it’s there for you know, the posting stays open for a whole month until the hire is actually closed. But the hiring manager is downloading the first 10 resumes, and, you know, interviewing the first five people, and if they find someone good in those first five, that’s it done. So,

Stacey Delo
what we’re hearing to what we’re seeing is that not only are they inundated with resumes right now, but the almost the coordination of interviews, that’s that, I can’t tell you how many businesses have reached out to us to ask for recruiting coordinators, people who bring everybody to the table for the interview match everybody’s calendars. Sorry, my dog is gonna walk in the back of the seat here right now. Um, don’t do that in an interview for a job interview?

Julia Pollak, Economist, ZipRecruiter
No, I think it’s perfect. It’s great. It’s so easy. It’s a chance to showcase to the employer how you behave under stress and with unpredictable things, and it builds rapport, it’s a chance to connect. So I’m all for dogs and kids are doing it.

Stacey Delo
Um, yeah, we are doing here. Um, we but anyway, just that it’s, that’s another, you know, you have to have a big muscle, you know, a strong muscle as a as a job seeker, because you’re right, they everyone takes it so personally, and you have to just move on. But I think also recognizing that as companies are hiring so quickly, they’re also stretched by who they have to help bring all the candidates through. I mean, you know, if you have to coordinate for a panel of interviews, like a lot of scheduling.

Julia Pollak, Economist, ZipRecruiter
Well, so one of the main reasons for that also is that the first people companies laid off during the COVID recession were people in HR and talent acquisition. So when you lay off, you know, 30% of your staff and you Institute hiring freeze, you get rid of your whole HR department, you’re not going to need HR, right, you’re not going to need talent acquisition teams, because you’re not hiring you think forever. You’re worried about going bankrupt at this point. You’re worried about going insolvent. And that’s what many, many companies did that layoffs among human resources, professionals and talent acquisition professionals were enormous. And so now when companies are seeing demand for their goods and services skyrocket, and they really need to expand capacity on Bring staff back. One problem is that they don’t have talent acquisition teams. So they first need to hire the HR staff before they can hire everyone else. And and that’s exactly what we’re seeing happening. It’s one of the reasons I think the job growth in the last few months has been, while strong, historically a little slower than many people had hoped it would be over the summer. They’re just, you know, some cool backlogs and things like that need to get worked out. But I think the psychological issue is a big one. And many people got really sort of shaken by the pandemic. They’ve been out of work now for more than a year in many cases, and, and so people’s confidence shattered. Now, all of these things are rapidly receding. Concerns about workplace health and safety will become less important as more working age people get vaccinated, of course, we started vaccinations with, you know, the elderly, so you had us reaching 80% of the plus 75 population vaccinated when fewer than half of the working age population was vaccinated. So it’s, you know, it’s taking a while for the actual workforce to get vaccinated. Many schools never really reopened, or they reopened on a hybrid schedule, there was not much movement in April, May. In terms of more Reopenings, there’s just so close to the end of the school year, I think that many schools thought was, you know, what was the point. But hopefully in the fall, that will no longer be a big barrier. And then the psychological barriers, I think, will also be overcome as the job postings, job openings continue to surge. And people hear from their friends, you know, hey, I got this great job with these great benefits with higher pay them before I take you know, it takes time for people to hear that story. many job seekers are not applying to multiple jobs a day. So they’re not able to sort of track how the labor market is improving. And they’re not getting a frequent enough read. And as a result, that they’re not aware of how quickly the tables have turned in their favor. But that will all change. Another thing is making like really tough for a lot of employers is this huge shift towards remote work. So the pandemic permanently increased the number of people who want remote work. And our surveys, we run a monthly survey, and more than half of job seekers say they would prefer a remote job now. It’s one of the reasons many are taking a long time to get back to work because they’re holding out for remote opportunities. And they don’t just want remote work. Now during the pandemic, many people almost half want remote work even after the pandemic is over. And this is a huge shift. And employers are responding. So before the pandemic, only around 2% of job postings explicitly stated that the opportunity was a remote only, you know, virtual work from anywhere job dramatically went up during the pandemic. And it’s still around, you know, nine 10%. So it makes sense for people to want to hold out for those opportunities, it also makes sense that it might take time to find one because it is still a small minority of all the jobs available. Lots of jobs do actually require you to come to the hospital or the store, or the the school or whatever it is. But all those factors are combining to make this a really fantastic time to be a job seeker where employers are in some cases, paying people just to show up for an interview and offering signing bonuses and offering higher wages and offering better hours more hour more scheduled flexibility, and all the kinds of conditions that make it more possible for women to really succeed and balance work and family.

I would say well, my biggest piece of advice to job seekers now is start searching now. You know, don’t don’t delay, don’t hold off. Don’t wait until your resume is perfect. I’ll give you a cautionary tale. I found my job at zip recruiter on zip recruiter. And I applied by accident because it was a one tick apply job. And so when I clicked on it and looked on it, it looked at it I’d actually applied before realizing that I had but I thought let me not apply to this. Now let me update my resume. I really liked this job. It sounds perfect. So I want to be the perfect candidate. I want to you know, put together the perfect package portfolio, et cetera. And had I done that had I waited a week, I probably would have lost the opportunity. It’s because I applied by accident that I got a call the very next day and I’m here today in sort of this ideal job that started off as a part time contractor position at an office five blocks from my home like walking distance. Where, you know, I was able to balance having a young child at the time and, and do the work that I love. But many people back

Stacey Delo
and love, I love and it’s such an important message that she’s giving that you’re right we are a lot of us are perfectionist, and we keep thinking there’s more tweaking, there’s more tweaking to get this ready, and you really just have to move on things.

Julia Pollak, Economist, ZipRecruiter
Timing is so crucial. And this moment right now is a really key window in the labor market. Already four states rolled back these expanded enhanced unemployment benefits on the 12. More states will do so on the 19th. You know, 25 will do so by around the end of July. And then of course, we have everyone’s expanded benefits expiring on September 6. So over the next few months, we can expect thanks to rising vaccinations, more Reopenings schools getting back all those things. People you know, I think a lot of people right now are placing a very high value on leisure time had a terrible 2020 and 2021. They’ve been frazzled monitoring zoom school, and working from home, around the clock, there’s been no outlet, there’s been no way to, you know, do the indoor play spaces and the fun things that they’re used to doing. So people are not in a rush to get back to jobs, partly because they also want to enjoy the summer and have a break. You know, by September, October, I think you can expect the labor market to become a lot more difficult and competitive for job seekers. And so now is really a sweet spot. Don’t delay, don’t be perfectionist. Yeah.

Stacey Delo
I always feel like summer is like that little secret sauce for job seekers, it generally is a great time to apply just because you’re right people are, they’re taking breaks or they’re they’re focused on other things. And so competitive wise is always a great opportunity. And I 100% agree that this year in particular, especially with so many jobs available,

Julia Pollak, Economist, ZipRecruiter
and then so many other people in the labor market have been out of work, not because of childcare reasons. But they were laid off, their industry was dormant, they’ve been out of work for a year or more. And so parents who are out of work for a year or more are just not that unusual, right now. If you tell an employer, Hey, I didn’t work the last year and a half, I was raising two kids during a global pandemic. That’s just not going to be as stigmatizing as it might have been in previous years. And so that’s another thing going in your favor. You know, everyone understands what happened, it was a massive mess. And you know, it says nothing about you, if you were out of black markets last year now. So that’s probably sensible to set it up.

Stacey Delo
That and I just want to be cognizant of our time, we have about 1012 more minutes. But one of the questions that I had for you is when it comes to career gaps, you know, we deal a lot with how to position it on on a resume or a profile. And I wanted to get your thoughts, especially now you know that that gaps are going to be less stigmatized. But should people would you suggest that people still put a one liner on a resume to account for what they’ve been doing? And how do you feel about and this is sort of two questions, but I’m going to sneak the last one and that you know, how do you feel about putting motherhood on your resume?

Julia Pollak, Economist, ZipRecruiter
Oh, I think you should definitely be upfront and open about career gaps and not flinch. Maybe use a little bit of humor. So you know, what your name, but your email address your LinkedIn profile, your LinkedIn profile link is really important these days, I think just in the last five years, it’s become a much, much, much more important part of your resume on the resume. Yeah, yes, and link it you know, so they can just click on that link and go right there, which was almost everybody I interviewed for a role recently, the first thing I did was look at their LinkedIn profile, if they had one, and if they didn’t, I just was not as interested in the candidate. And I think that’s increasingly the case. You don’t need to give us a whole huge paragraph block of text explaining who you are and what your goals are and aspirations. It’s good to have one sentence at the top that says, you know, human resources professional with five years of experience in, you know, whatever, managing payroll for, you know, dozens of employees or something like that, just something that clearly crisply states who you are and makes it clear know what kind of role you’re looking for, I wouldn’t say you know, human resources professional looking for roles in law, I would just say what you do. This is, this is the experience I have, this is what I do. And then, you know, obviously, list your past roles and your skills skills are really, really important. And you can these days make up for gaps in your career and your experience by getting online certificates. And many of those are so valuable now, they’re such a great signal of your competence, your interest in the field, that often they can overcome all the other barriers, you know, if you didn’t go to such a prestigious school, but you have the occupational license or the certificate, you know, the the economic studies show, you often completely remove the gap and callback rates. So definitely consider investing, you know, many of these courses are like 12 hours long, or three weeks or something. And they’re extremely convenient, extremely affordable, and very high quality, and they are great signals to employers. So I’ve considered making the skill section, you know, high up on your resume and so strong, that the rest kind of doesn’t even matter. Hmm. And then when you do list your past roles, if you have a big gap, you know, maybe use exactly the same format that you use for describing your past roles. Now, the title of the role, let’s be bullet points, sort of stating things that you did in those roles, and use it about about parenting, you know, raised three kids, you know, one, lead one to be an honor, graduate, whatever, shuttled three children to, you know, soccer games and whatever on time each day, and just, you know, have some fun, show your personality. Don’t, don’t shy away from it. And don’t, don’t shrink from it.

Stacey Delo
I love that. I love that. So I don’t want to cut you off. If you have more slides,

Julia Pollak, Economist, ZipRecruiter
we can race through them. I was just just telling people how to get the most out of zip recruiter. And

Stacey Delo
yeah, and if you have resume templates, I know people are good. There’s a lot of questions in the chat about resumes. So I have I’ll I’ll get to those in a second,

Julia Pollak, Economist, ZipRecruiter
you can really go wrong very easily. So in the past, once one time, if you wanted to stand out to an employer, you wanted to have a resume that stood out visually and used fancy design. And a lot of people today, if they go on Etsy, and they look for a resume template, this is the kind of thing you’ll find. They’re beautiful, they look wonderful. They have lots of columns and tables. And I’m going to tell you, this is not the way to go anymore. The job market has changed. Because job search has now largely gone online. And more than 75% of resumes are read by a computer. First. They’re not read by humans. This is not the era where employers are printing out resumes, putting them on the table. And the best design kind of jumps out at you. Resumes are read by applicant tracking systems. They’re read by the robots out, you know, artificial intelligence algorithms on sites like zip recruiter and your goals. To get past the bots, you really need to figure out how to get past the robots. To do that you need to know how they work. How do they read your resume? Well, they scan job postings, figure out what the real job title is. They figure out what related jobs are that are sort of similar. They figure out what the important skills are that that job requires, whether whether they’re listed or not. So some of them can be extracted from the job posting, some are predicted based on other similar jobs will predict the minimum education level and the predicted salary, and figure out basically what the job requires. And then we’ll read your resume. And we really don’t care about all the fluff and the glittery, whatever, we’re just extracting those key words, write researched, wrote, etcetera. And that’s what we’re pulling out. This is actually not such a great resume, I prefer them to have bullet points rather than sentences, rather than prose, under each career under each past experience example, so that you’re really just focusing on what you did very, very clearly and briefly and succinctly. And then we match the job posting with your resume. And based on how much agreement there is between the terms in your resume and the terms in the job posting, we figure out if you’re a good match or not. So read lots of job postings that appeal to you and make sure your resume is a good match. Obviously, it has to be honest, you know, don’t Don’t make things up. That could be disastrous. If there are skills that every single job that you’d like requires figuring out ways to invest in those skills that you have those words on your resume and you rank highly and your resume is number one in that list. There are other practical tips. So don’t use those fancy Etsy resume templates. Use the plainest most boring resume template you can find that reads from top to bottom and left to right, no tables, no columns. So look for an ATS compatible template, we have a bunch of them on ziprecruiter you can go to our CEOs book which is called Get Hired now WWE comm get hired now book. And we’ve got a bunch of templates there for you. It’s also important to use generic job titles that everyone understands. So many companies these days have job titles like peeping people, Ninja, and but it’s important, you know if that really means Human Resources Manager, and that’s what everyone would understand. Say that your human resources manager. That’s not lying. That’s clarifying. Right, like a caveman, we really clear and succinct we don’t need long blocks of text, no one reads them. Wherever possible use numbers. So not just, you know, skilled in managing payroll, but manage payroll for 50 employees, you know, using whatever software, you know, whatever conducted counting for 70 clients using QuickBooks software, very important to list the software programs and to quantify your impact in some way wherever possible. Especially if you have a number like a million that you can use write created a site that had more than a million site visits or a business with more than a million orders, or more than a million dollars a managed a budget of more than a million dollars or something. That’s a word that really jumps out.

Be specific. So revenue is important. But being specific is also important. So don’t just list Microsoft Office as a skill. Everyone is, you know, that’s like saying oxygen is a skill. And we all use Microsoft Office. What does that really mean? Do you know what a pivot table is? Do you know you know how to do complex functions? Can you make beautiful spreadsheets and beautiful presentations, to tell us how competent you are and using those different tools. And then please check spelling and grammar. And I don’t just mean for accuracy, but also for logic and consistency. So you know, if you put three bullet points under every single past, jobs that you’ve had, make sure they all start with a verb, that’s an active verb, and if any job that you’re currently doing, say, you know, right, whatever, and create on direct and you know, all those kinds of things. And for jobs that you held in the past, say wrote directed lead, don’t have right in the first line. And then directing in the second line, have some logical consistency across your resume between each of the pieces. And then lastly, give your resume the robot test. So upload it to a site like zip recruiter, and have zip recruiter populate your job seeker profile from your resume. And if we can’t read your resume, and accurately populate that profile, then your resume is too fancy, and a computer can’t read it. And if you apply to other companies and their applicant tracking systems, try to read it. It’s turning into garbled gibberish and it’s just getting tossed up. Yeah, so if your resume the robot test on zip recruiter. And, of course, I think I think the main problem for mothers who’ve been out of the workforce is they really worry that they’ve lost skills and are not competitive and won’t be the strongest candidate. I think we can be our worst enemies often in hiring. I’ll just tell you from recently, going through hiring process, candidates or do a lot of things wrong, I’ve made the most of the resumes I looked at were abominable, they were terrible. You You are probably a much stronger candidate than you think. And you can you can rise to the top much more easily than you think. So don’t stand in your own way. Don’t have impostor syndrome. running a household is incredibly complex and requires a lot of skills. Directing and inspiring children is the kind of leadership that many people don’t have in the working world. So be confident in your skills and include them. And then also overcome the weaknesses on your resume by networking and meeting people and gaining their trust, and getting jobs that

Stacey Delo
way. I just I love that message of your, you know, seeing resumes that aren’t, you know, very good. And what what that is a message of is that other people are just clicking Apply. And so if you have put some thought and time into yours, it’s going to stand out. So

Julia Pollak, Economist, ZipRecruiter
be no research about the company to walk up at an interview. And you can say, I’m really excited to be here, because this role will allow me to combine my passion for this with my background and that, and, you know, allow me to be, you know, this position in a company that is doing these amazing things and overcoming this enormous problem and making a positive difference in the world. If you show that you know, something about the company, and its mission, and you know, some gaps in what they’re doing and things that they could do better. Yeah, perfect. And you can often gain that knowledge just as a consumer right of their product, just by by spending some time online and looking through their features. You can you can learn a lot about a company and what it could be doing better. Right. So, any questions? Oh, and then of course, you know, the internet is amazing. There are so many great resources. Tik Tok increasingly has just fantastic advice for job seekers. We’ve We’ve partnered with a lot of influences on tick tock to create videos for for people in a market. You know, I can send this to you, so you can look at it later. But they’re, you know, they’re fun one minute videos like this one, I think it’s fantastic actions you need on your resume. One headline that highlights your title and industry two and about me two sentences on your expertise and years of experience. Three, your work experience, highlighting your achievements and each job with metrics for certifications and skills. This highlights your relevant coursework, software and languages five, contact your email, your phone number and your LinkedIn link. Okay, now that you have a fantastic resume, you’re gonna want to show it off and send out some job applications. And I know we all hate that feeling of applying for a job and then feeling completely ghosted, zip recruiter status update feature sends you an email or a notification on the app when your application has been viewed or given a thumbs up. So no more. So lots of stuff like that these days, really great. It’s really great stuff all over. It’s high quality, and welcome to zip recruiter can really, you know, help you stand out. And in here, three others. Our blog has constantly got articles with tips, our CEOs book, I think, is a great resource. And then within the job seeker profile, we also show you courses to make your resume stronger, and make you a more competitive candidate. Those are some of the sort of top employer rated courses that are available online.

Stacey Delo
Great, that’s we love resources. That’s fantastic. Um, I just, I just took so many notes, I think that was just fantastic. I mean, I loved your presentation, and I wrote down a lot of a lot of things, I I think it’s really helpful to see that visual for people of what the computers are, what they’re scanning on the on the job description, and they’re scanning on your resume, and the two have to speak to each other in order for you to get through the system. So

Julia Pollak, Economist, ZipRecruiter
computers like exact matches, you know, don’t get too fancy with synonyms and things the exact same words are totally fine.

Stacey Delo
Yeah, and plain language is a language that that people can understand and that computers can understand. Um, okay, so let me there are a couple of questions in here.

Julia Pollak, Economist, ZipRecruiter
Get my chat back. And I should I stopped sharing

Stacey Delo
specific that you saw highlighted that we should jump in on because we’re already almost five after I don’t want to eat up Julia’s time too much. Because we can always follow up.

Julia Pollak, Economist, ZipRecruiter
So I think, you know, someone has an interesting question. How do you know that tiktoks are on point and from experts. So you know, how do you know that there’s so much information available online, but a lot of it is false, right? Like I showed you the SA Etsy resume templates. They’re available online. They’re beautiful, but they’re unreadable. So I think you need to find a couple of trusted resources. sites similar to the the big job search sites, the in deeds, the zip recruiters, the glass doors, they really have good information, the muse, the balance careers, they have fantastic articles and examples and templates and scripts even, you know, scripts for answering interview questions, articles on the top 100 most frequent interview questions with suggested answers to each one. Those those kinds of sources I think, are pretty trustworthy. And then on tick tock, increasingly now the best influencers who do create good things are partnering with zip recruiter and indeed etc. And so you can look for those partners you’ll see you know, out or sponsored or something like that, or, you know, indeed, partner or Zapruder partner or something in their bio, and that will help you find people who are kind of vetted a little bit.

Stacey Delo
Yeah, and one, one question in here about the LinkedIn profile on the resume mentioning that recruiters find it distracting, because they’ll actually it leads them to other candidates, I think the other you know, the risk of leaving it off, is is worse, because they’ll never actually look at you. If you’re willing den profile isn’t hyperlinked in your resume. So I would say that the look, it’s a much lower risk of letting them sort of, you know, feed into other people, I would definitely have your LinkedIn profile on your resume.

Julia Pollak, Economist, ZipRecruiter
I think it’s increasingly becoming table stakes. And you know, obviously, we don’t put photographs on resumes anymore. That’s a no no. But about on LinkedIn, having a good professional headshot means a lot, having a big smile, good lighting, you know, having a dark, so there were some candidates who were fantastic. And I went to their LinkedIn profile and they have this dark sinister looking pic that was you know, had someone’s hand cut off. You know, make little investment, get a proper professional headshot, it can really go a long distance and make someone like you there’s so much bias in hiring people really do react to smiles, body, you know, confident body posture. You know, good hair and makeup. I mean, these these silly little things can go a very long way.

Stacey Delo
Yeah, there’s a question about companies in schools for certificates, like that are highly recognized. I’m sure ziprecruiter has a blog on that somewhere,

Julia Pollak, Economist, ZipRecruiter
yes, but also our course catalog inside your profile. We’ve partnered with sort of the best in class online training providers. So the Coursera is in the edX is in the UdeM ease of the world. And you know, they’re on those courses, you’ll see, often, you know, we’re rating out of five stars for the courses. All of those companies desperately want to sort of dislodge the kind of big community colleges and colleges, they want to they want to crack the candidates. And so they develop their courses in close partnership with employers, and they have an interest in getting you placed after you finish those courses. So, you know, they work with us to figure out what employers want. Those, I think there was something like 10 companies we’re working with on in our platform, obviously, LinkedIn works with LinkedIn learning. Facebook now has created I think, eight certificate programs, Google careers, Google’s created nine certificate programs or something like that. So all of those are very respected. And you can’t really go wrong with those courses.

Stacey Delo
Yeah. Oh, great. Okay, and then I mean, give it to Jordan in one second. But the last question I want to address on the gap. So when people add it to their resume, if it’s not about motherhood, if it’s about other things, you know, I’ve seen things like personal sabbatical. I mean, do you have recommendations on what you would suggest? Yes, sure.

Julia Pollak, Economist, ZipRecruiter
So I see one question about health and illness. So say you took a year off to look after an ailing parent. I think that’s often a good thing to put on your resume. I think many people will, will connect with you over that experience. That is such a widespread experience. Now, if you’re out for your own health, you know, put 2020 to 2021 beat cancer. I think many people will will see that and know that you developed a kind of perspective and resilience and just kind of explore and some depth and wisdom through that experience that you cannot get any other way. So, and and who knows the person who’s interviewing, you may have exactly the same kind of experience in here. You never know, you know who you can meet, I think, like, I’ll just be real. My husband is an Orthodox Jew, and never used to wear a key pa because he didn’t want people to see him as a person, not as a Jew. And the minute he started wearing a yarmulke, though, the connections that made on streets in foreign cities all over the place, were just so amazing. So don’t shy away from what’s unique about your view than your innate, you know, unique about your situation. You know, be Be open. Be honest.

Stacey Delo
Yeah. And positive, be honest, positive and confident.

Julia Pollak, Economist, ZipRecruiter
Exactly. Obviously, with health. You know, obviously, if you were looking after someone, don’t give the gory details, necessarily, you know, the HIPAA, medical privacy, those things are important. Don’t overshare keep it brief. You don’t need to give us all the details. But, you know, eat cancer or something like that. That’s a lead. I think that’s a great way to put that on there.

Stacey Delo
Thank you so much. This was just a fantastic hour. Jordan, did you have anything you wanted to add? Or? Yeah, I

Unknown Speaker
just wanted to, I just wanted to plug our resume and LinkedIn coaching session that we have, we have two incredible women, that it will take no time at all for them to give you what you need to make you really stand out. We’re offering a 20% discount today. But one of the things that I think is so interesting, as I’m, as I’m watching this happen, you know, I’m watching Julianne Stacey get this presentation, I’m watching all of the comments. And even in this environment, women are like, but it’s still not good enough. But it’s still not good enough. But if I took a course, it’s not from the best place. And so it’s not going to get recognized. And that is not the point. The point is to get the information you need, put it out in the world. And just click, click Apply, click Apply, click Apply, and you’re gonna get a job eventually, it’s really a statistical game. And I think we like I loved what Julia said with like, just like get out of your own way. And the only way you can do that is with the tools that you know, you need. But you don’t need to have all those tools right now, like, you can have a great LinkedIn profile and apply for jobs on LinkedIn. By applying through LinkedIn, you can have a great resume and just upload that to indeed, or zip recruiter and start applying for jobs, you don’t have to have everything figured out to get a job. Because guaranteed you have 80% More soft skills than anyone who’s applying for that job. And that has weight that actually has weight. So with that, sign up for a resume review or LinkedIn review, here’s the link, I’m going to put the code zip 20. And that will be good for the next few days. Yeah, and Megan and Tina, I mean, literally, within two weeks, you could be ready to apply for jobs with the information that you already have in your life and your experience. So

Stacey Delo
we have a lot of there’s a lot more questions in the chat that we have a lot of great webinar sessions on our site about so if you have more questions, I encourage you to go to our recorded sessions, because we talked about cover letters and kind of their irrelevance largely. But everything, all these topics, we have lots of information on our site. Juliette? Thank you again. I’ve just enjoyed meeting you so much. And we are just delighted that you would take the time to be with us today. I know it was such a helpful session for everybody. And congratulations on Baby number three, we’ll be thinking about you.

Julia Pollak, Economist, ZipRecruiter
Thank you. It’s so funny. It’s like been a stealth pregnancy. I mean, not not on purpose. You I told everyone but but no one to see it. And, and I look forward to being able to stay at home for as long as I want with a child without anyone batting an eyelid because my company has now moved to a fully sort of hybrid and remote posture. And we’re never going to be back in the office five days a week ever again, we’re designating like two days a week as sort of suggested office days so that you can collaborate and get lunch together and build rapport and whatnot. But

Stacey Delo
I love any more of that. Or more of that, please. I love that. Love it when you all have had an exciting start to the summer. So congratulations on everything that’s happened for ziprecruiter it’s been a big year for you all to

Julia Pollak, Economist, ZipRecruiter
Yes. Now. It’s very exciting to new chapter we we just went public on the New York Stock Exchange and and it’s you know, very exciting. Very exciting.

Stacey Delo
All right, everyone. It was good to see you. We’ll be back. Watch the newsletter for our next registrations for you Our next webinars and we’ll see you that thanks bye bye

Transcribed by https://otter.ai