The fundamentals of job searching have changed over the years. In addition, all of the new technology and resources available can make things even more confusing. Are you aware of the most effective job search strategies?
In this episode, you will learn more about the essentials of job search to land your next position. Our host and CEO Porschia, alongside our guest, Mark Anthony Dyson, will also share their insight on how to plan and optimize your job search.
They will discuss how to think about job search as a lifestyle, so you can seamlessly incorporate it into your day. The conversation also includes more detail on some of the best websites and tools available to assist in your search.
Mark Anthony Dyson is Founder of The Voice of Job Seekers podcast and blog. He is a freelance career advice writer, thinker, podcaster, and job seeker advocate, who hacks and reimagines today’s job search. He’s written articles in over 20 online publications, and his career advice has been featured in publications, such as Forbes, Business Insider, Fast Company, and LinkedIn News.
What you’ll learn:
- Why it’s important to think about job search as a lifestyle
- Effective job search strategies at different career levels
- The biggest challenges executives and professionals have with their job searches
- Tips on some of the best job search websites and resources
- Insight on how to focus on remote job opportunities
- How to avoid the large amount of job scams out there
As a thank you for listening to this episode of the Career 101 Podcast, we are sharing our FREE master class Career 911: Solving the Top 5 Challenges Executives and Professionals Have! It is a training based on solving the common problems our clients have experienced to reach their goals. You can get access to the master class here!
Resources:
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Episode Transcript
Porschia: [00:00:00] Today we are talking about job search 101 job search strategies with Mark Anthony Dyson. Mark Anthony Dyson is founder of the Voice of Job Seekers podcast and blog. He is a freelance career advice writer. Thinker, podcaster, and job seeker advocate who hacks and reimagines today’s job search. Mark writes investigative job search and career articles with a practitioner’s heart.[00:01:00]
He’s written articles in over 20 online publications and his career advice has been featured in publications such as Forbes, Business Insider, Fast Company, and LinkedIn News. Hi Mark. How are you today?
Mark: Great. How are you, Portia?
Porschia: I am doing amazing, and I’m really excited to have you with us to discuss job search strategies.
But first, we want to know a little more about you. So tell me about seven year old Mark.
Mark: Seven year old Mark was pretty quiet. I was very quiet. Not a normal upbringing, especially in those first years, but 7-year-old Mark was pretty quiet. Was so quiet that I was put in the front of the lower developmental classes in first grade because I just didn’t say [00:02:00] a whole lot.
And I couldn’t speak. Now, I could think, at least I thought I could think at that particular time, but according to the assessments and things, they thought maybe I should start off really slow. Then things sped up when I got to second grade. I went from the lower development class to the advanced second grade class.
I know that might be strange, but it was strange. And then from that point on. Up until sixth grade, I was in the more advanced classes of of second, third, fourth, and fifth grade. So I think I normalized by the time I got to the sixth grade.
Porschia: That’s great. That’s great, Mark. And it also says a lot about you that even in that first to second grade, timeframe, you didn’t just necessarily accept, what people were saying about you, right?
You really focused on your studies and what you were [00:03:00] doing and didn’t let a label or anything like that kind of define who you were going to be as a student and a person.
Mark: I don’t think I had the inclination yet that it was somewhat competitive at that particular time. I was in my own little world
Porschia: and
Mark: I had friends and I didn’t watch TV during the week because that’s what my parents had told me, that there was going to be no TV during the week.
So I didn’t watch TV during the week. Whenever I finished my homework, I would read a book and do a book report for my mother. Yeah, it was that kind of thing, so I don’t think I thought about it competitively until later on, until, yeah, I guess other people are doing better. I didn’t think of myself better or worse until later on, until people started talking about it.
Really, in those first two, three years, it was whatever happened.
Porschia: Yeah your mom might have laid the foundation [00:04:00] for you to be a writer, Mark, with those book
Mark: reports early on. She was a writer. And she wasn’t like a novel writer or anything like that. She worked as a copywriter for a large part in advertising.
So she worked for life magazine housekeeping. Something, whatever that magazine was, a pretty big magazine, and a couple of others where she did writing, although it, she only wrote when she was given something, she had a lot of time on her hands. But she loved to read for sure, and there were books all over the place.
And I didn’t pick one up until I was instructed to not like I naturally gravitated towards books, I was made to do it, but eventually. Somewhere along the way I learned to love books and love reading and love to learn to write.
Porschia: So what did you want to be when you grew up?
Mark: A lot of things, but I think there was, I think [00:05:00] one thing that happened from high school to college is that I took a lot of drafting classes.
Back when there was drafting in schools, and drafting was the precursor to architecture. But, when I got to high school, I had to take science as part of the curriculum to get to architecture, and I was terrible at science. I was horrible. I made an F in chemistry in high school, an F in chemistry in college.
So I knew that was the, that was that for that part of it. And I switched my stuff around to, got liberal arts in community college and got in communication in college, so. There you have it.
Porschia: Yeah. Tell us about some highlights or pivotal moments in your career before you started your business.
Mark: Wow. I was a [00:06:00] journeyman of sorts in a lot of ways. Probably for about 13 years, I was in the call center world and coming up in the management part of it starting out contract and then getting promotions. And then when it came time down to it, that Interest was killed by a lot of different factors that had nothing to do with call center management, but, you adjust.
And by that time I had a family and was had two boys that I was raising along with being married. So I did what was going to work for the family. So I would say that journey. After call center management was almost as pivotal because I fell into what I’m doing now. And that was, I really stumbled into it because it was actually an accident and you get noticed [00:07:00] for one thing, one thing leads to another, and here I am.
Porschia: Yeah. So what would you say was your biggest career challenge before starting your business?
Mark: It was finally something that I was really going to be happy with. And of course, I had some challenges actually along the way, I would say right before business, I was a substitute teacher and I was interested in becoming a teacher, maybe being a teacher until the sun went down, so to speak, in my later years.
But it came to a point to where I didn’t like teaching. I didn’t like the politics. I loved kids, but I hated the politic politics of teaching. So I got out of that, but at the same time, I was ending the teaching thing. Came an opportunity to to work with a third party consulting firm [00:08:00] that worked with the government.
The founder of the organization I was a part of was a special assistant to Bill Clinton. So he created this consulting firm to help a lot of the federal workers come out of, either go into retirement or go find other jobs. A lot of those back in 2005, George Bush had this initiative It was called the Brock the Brock Initiative, where it was a basement realignment thing that was going on, so a lot of the bases were closed closed for at least the way they were used to you, being used.
Two of them you might know, like Fort Knox, that’s a real famous one, and then Fort McPherson, which is in Atlanta. Two of the many that were closing, so I got a chance to travel, I got a chance to [00:09:00] learn and somewhat master writing federal resumes. And also went to train federal workers, which included army personnel, be able to switch careers.
And that went really well that I did that for a year and a half. And that kind of set my soul on fire, so to speak for the business that I do today. So I did have a resume writing business in which I was able to get a couple of contracts right away. And to work with other businesses that needed resume writers.
And so I got a chance to do that and to do substitute teaching and, then also be able to travel and train. So that was a lot of fun. But when the contract ended on both ends, it was me in the business. And that kind of, I eventually dissolved the resume writing business.
And what kind of [00:10:00] merged was the voice of JobSeekers. So that’s how I got here. And here I am.
Porschia: Yeah, you have a lot of great experience, Mark. Why did you decide to focus on job search as part of your area of expertise?
Mark: I decided that if I was going to go all the way in that I was going to, to make some kind of ride from it, but I didn’t know what it was going to look like at all, especially when some of my friends who thought that I was great at resume writing said, you’re going to, you’re going to, dissolve the cash cow.
I’m going like, yeah, it doesn’t fit my MO anymore. I became disinterested. And even today to talk about it, I wish resumes will crumple up and fall away.
Porschia: Yes, resumes can be the feel like the bane of certain people’s existence. I’ve had clients tell me that [00:11:00] before. And to your point, I’ve known resume writers who burnt out of it.
So I definitely know what you’re saying.
Mark: No longer interesting to me, but what I loved about job search was the shifting nature that has been happening in the last 14 years. You think about it, I start the business at the edge of the first recession there that happened in 2007 2008 when I had the resume business.
And then business was really easy to flow through because there was, there’s a lot of stating this, but there was also a lot of conundrum and confusion about what employers wanted and how people get jobs. Now, there’s really no magic formula how people get jobs from then to now, but there were employers who actually, a lot of things start to come out because of social people began to talking.
Talking to each other, began talking to each other. And they began to find out that a lot of the [00:12:00] similar experiences they had was that they were applying to hundreds of jobs and they weren’t getting anywhere. When really, first of all, it’s not a great idea to apply to hundreds of jobs and you can’t even keep up with the applications.
And they have basically the same thing. But a lot of times, too, people don’t have a steady job. Industries that they’re involved in to where they’re really deep into this. I talk about, and we’ll get to that in a moment about how people should pick a lane at worst two lanes and concentrate on those lanes and building them.
That means scaling up. And being a part of the network that’s a part of the bigger networks, and also starting to realign your purpose and target your advancement in those one or two things. I think that was fascinating to me how things began to shift, and how things, [00:13:00] employers will begin to tell us how really they were thinking because of social.
And we begin to find all these layers, and I found that fascinating, so I decided to follow that trail. And somewhere in that I re found my writing skills. And start to hone that, and start to In fact, that, that’s always a work in progress, right? As you never really arrive as a writer, but you do evolve in your expertise.
So I began to write articles probably at that time in 2011, when I started the Voice of Job Seekers, I was writing two or three times, two or three articles a week on my blog. And, and that’s where I made that shift.
Porschia: Wow. You say that job search is a lifestyle. Tell us more about that.
Mark: Sure. When we started to get mobile phones, [00:14:00] that’s when a lot of things began to shift, and those mobile phones became as powerful as the computers and laptops we have today. Even if you buy the new iPhone today, you can get a 512 gigabyte memory in your phone. When I started with computers years ago, You couldn’t even get 512 megabytes on the computer.
Things have really shifted now. Within the times that we use our phones, we’re always with our phones. They become a part of us. Maybe except for night, but that might be arguable depending on how people use them. But, we use them for everything now. They keep our schedules. They keep our info, private information, phone calls.
We can reach Bangkok if we wanted to from our phones via video for absolutely nothing. But we can also learn on our phones. We can do college courses on [00:15:00] our phone. I write articles on my phones. I respond to requests on my phone. Basically, you can do everything on your phone. So when I said that, when I first Said that back in, I think it was 2020 at that time, the pandemic was emerging, but in 2016, I wrote an article for the muse talking about how mobile phones is a game changer.
And really with those things merging at that time and everything going to mobile. It’s a lifestyle now. You could take a class in pieces now with asynchronous learning, not just waiting at a computer. You could do it on your phone, and you can even not sit and type. You can talk into your phone on a note, depending what you have, or every note, or whatever you have, and it will Transcribe whatever you say, all you need to do is go edit it, and you [00:16:00] can post it for your homework, you can put it on your blog, you can respond if somebody asks you a question, all those things, and you can do it while you’re moving.
So that’s why I say job search is a lifestyle now. It’s part of your life and for you to keep compete in marketplace, you’re going to need to keep up instead of waiting till you’re unemployed. If you wait till you’re unemployed and you get unemployed, then you’re Behind the eight ball. In fact, you might even be light years behind everybody else who is continually upscaling their career and upscaling their efforts and using their phones to do it because they’re doing it in between classes, they’re doing it while they’re standing in line at the grocery stores, while they’re sitting at the barbershop or the hairdresser, wherever they are, that’s how they’re doing it, even if it’s in pieces.
Really, [00:17:00] we need to think about our careers in that kind of way.
Porschia: I love that. Many executives and professionals work with us to create a customized job search strategy that is aligned with their personality and their career goals. From your perspective, what are some aspects of an effective job search strategy?
Mark: Executives are a different kind of breed. They don’t job search like the normal people do. Job search. Job search for executives is being tied into the network, and that network may go into their organizations that they’re part of, different meetings, different types of coaching that they may be a part of, all that kind of ties into the network.
So really, they’re not job hunting like everybody else. The network is the job part. And that [00:18:00] becomes a part of their thing that they do. They have even a budget for them to go network. That pays them to go from city to different conferences. And maybe you get paid for speaking at those conferences as well.
So they have a different type of thing going on, and I don’t want to make light of what they do and how they do it, but it’s a lot different, so a lot of them have, a lot of them are really heads down until it’s time, but they’re really not heads down because they already create this network and the connections they need to merge into their next lane or go on to their next advancement.
wherever they may fit in. And I’m not speaking for all of them, but the ones that are successful are doing that constantly. And I understand too, that life also gets in the way. So that makes it a little hard for some of them who are really involved in raising their children, their marriages and other parts of their lives where they’re involved.
But to get out in front of those [00:19:00] kind of things where they are, Involved with talking to people and maybe even creating other opportunities elsewhere while they’re doing the job is really the great advantage. And again, Not romanticizing it, but they too had their own problems because a lot of them, they don’t, they come up from the cloud like everybody else.
Some of them do, and they come up and having decide how do I look for a job? They may have a little bit more access to, for people to tell them what to do next by reaching out to their network. It can become very interesting for those who do it for, as executives, as opposed to everybody else who has to go and apply online, which executives, for the most part, they really don’t have to apply online like everyone else, and they don’t have to submit a whole bunch of resumes, and they don’t have to wait on an application.
It’s very On other people to make decisions about [00:20:00] what stage you’re going to be in next and not in the same way. I think we should make a distinction between the two because I think you have some listeners who aspire to be executives, but they’re waiting. Of course, a lot of times it’s waiting their turn after they put in all the work.
Porschia: Yeah, I think that that distinction is [00:21:00] definitely very important. One thing I see with a lot of our clients who are executives. Yes, they’re absolutely working their network. Like you mentioned I think a lot of our clients who are executives, they also get it. Absolutely. They might even get more job offers while they’re employed than people who are not.
And then they also tend to work with executive search consultants and executive recruiting firms where sometimes those firms are a bit more dedicated to working with an executive one on one. Due to their compensation structure and all of that. And yes, to your point, I think it is different for professionals.
If we think about professionals, what do you think are some, aspects of effective job search strategy for them outside of what you mentioned in terms of applying online?
Mark: Sure. As I mentioned, job search being a lifestyle, that’s one component where you should be continually engaging some form, [00:22:00] may not be to engage every form of job search, but at least advancing your knowledge and upskilling your skills, that’s as a part of it.
Also networking being a part of your industry organizations, that’s a big part of it. And a lot of times, a lot of people underestimate that part of it because I’ve been a part and I’m a part of a couple of industry organizations. You find opportunities there that you normally wouldn’t have and be able to have conversations that you normally wouldn’t be able to have without them.
And a lot of times, those job information exchanges happens inside those committees that When professionals get together, they’re having this committee and say, I’m getting ready to leave this job and it’s going to be, that’s the first time anybody heard of it, even before it’s even posted.
And so that’s a underestimated underutilized part of how professionals can really merge into. The second thing I think is [00:23:00] mentioned, I think it’s really important tenant that I push and push throughout the last 15 years probably is that That professionals should form and think about their job search and use the mindset of being a consultant.
And you’ve probably been a consultant before, for sure. I’m just curious. And the work that goes in before you present to a client, right? So you’ve searched the client, you have looked at, you look at what they do now, you look at what they don’t do, but basically you’re there solving a specific problem or problems.
And then you start to talk with the with the client about those particular problems, and you might find out other problems. Then you start to collaborate and make a plan with the client to solve those problems. Then you come up with a timeline. Now I’m making a short little package. All that to say, [00:24:00] if job seekers and professionals who are seeking jobs should think about their search in a much more intentional and intensive way.
Then, I think you don’t have to apply to 20, 30 jobs a week. You may just need to apply to 20 or 30 a month, maybe even less than that. If you’re really starting to think about how to plug into your network, finding out what the industry problems are, what the skills are bringing, what they’re not bringing, where the shortage of skills are, and then putting yourself into that.
And to those situations where you’re skilled, you’re skilling upward so you can solve those problems that are in the industry or within the company, within that company. And that makes it a lot easier from a presentation point of view.
Porschia: Great information, Mark. What do you think are some of the [00:25:00] best job search websites and resources out there?
A
Mark: lot of conversations around, and we’ll get to part of it because job portals are very interesting right now. And when they’re, just because there’s an announcement of the unemployment rate is low, doesn’t mean that there isn’t a lot of action. Because there’s always going to be a lot of action around job portals, but it’s going to, it’s going to be in shifts.
So I think that people. Are better. And using the most secure job portals and have the best reputations possible. And I think these days with job scams and things like that, I think that you gotta be smart. So you look at a site like Talk about remote work. A lot of people are interested in that.
Usually I recommend [00:26:00] flex jobs flex jobs really do does bit that their jobs and the jobs that they put on to make sure that they’re real, that they’re really remote and that they really have a viability where somebody can actually go get a job from them, as opposed to, let’s say Some of the other ones where they’re interested in posting, but they really don’t know who’s really behind the scenes and doesn’t have that kind of relationship with them.
And I think that’s where people feel safe. So I think FlexJobs and those kinds of sites, remote. co is another one for people who are interested in the remote work I think the, if you could do the larger job portals these days, like the Indeed and and all those that use the aggregation, which Indeed is probably one of the biggest, you should take a little bit more time to vet those employers to make sure that they are who they say they [00:27:00] are.
And I think. In conjunction with that, you can use LinkedIn as a way to, to help you vet those employers. And plus, you can match job descriptions of what’s on LinkedIn and what maybe a recruiter from the company may post and what maybe a hiring manager may post. The guys with the purple. They may post something a little bit different and they make it public because they may have inquiries and they can tell you how you acquire more information because the job description itself that’s posted, it’s just a general one.
It’s not always the bottom line. You want to get as much information as you possibly can. So don’t just rely on one and don’t post it. Just try to blindly send applications to a whole bunch, be intentional, know who you’re talking, at least try to understand who you’re talking to, what they desire before you go and [00:28:00] try to apply.
But yeah, I don’t think job porters are going away because of the technology they’d like to use, and they’d like to use to vet job seekers, and they in turn as well, they want to make sure that person is reached.
Porschia: Yeah. I think you started touching on this, but I want to ask if you have any other insights do you recommend that executives and professionals looking for remote opportunities do anything different as part of their job search strategy?
Mark: I think you need to vet it very closely. I did mention flex jobs. I think job portals. They’re going to have a challenge, a bigger challenge with scammers is, as I talked about, I think safety should be a top tier concern for everyone that needs to. Go find a job and that’s going to need the portals now Executives don’t necessarily have to use portals [00:29:00] like everybody else because executive jobs aren’t necessarily Advertised like that.
It’s rare and if they do it’s it’s a different circumstance, but generally a lot more Like you say, retained executive search, being reached out to by executives. If you’re an executive and you’re active on LinkedIn, you’re going to have, and if you’re actually really active, you’re going to have a following because people want to know what makes an executive tick, how to get, you To that point, and it’s usually a chain reaction where they’ll, one person will follow then somebody who’s a second person would get a hold of their content and begin to follow, especially to talk about how to become an executive, how to do certain parts of the jobs, which I think is a whole lot better than any job portal.
That you can possibly do, but I think executives definitely can use their influence and [00:30:00] use their hard work and could retract to inform others and therefore get rewarded with being having influence over, those who aspire to be like them. And I think that within itself is a job search strategy.
Porschia: Yeah, I agree. I agree. Absorbing that information and following people who you would like to either model that career path or be in a similar position is definitely a job search strategy.
Mark: I could jump in real quick. And I mentioned industry organizations, executives are a part of industry organizations too.
And I’ll quite frankly, a lot of don’t find out their next opportunities from talking to their peers. And, some of those organizations post jobs on on LinkedIn pages and elsewhere, or some of them have, a few of them have Facebook pages, I think, still, where they may post an opportunity.
But when you hear somebody leaving [00:31:00] and it becomes a public knowledge, that job becomes popular and it’s going to be targeted. I think. I think it’s good that, those who want to use executive talent searches that they should go ahead and use those because you get a lot of inside information that’s not going to be available to the public.
Yeah, like I said, they’re not creating equal in our in our workplace and the way we work these days.
Porschia: I want to follow up on something you touched on earlier. I’ve been hearing more clients talk about people approaching them with job scams. What are some tips you can share about job search safety?
Mark: Yeah. One of my favorite subjects these days, because I’m really concerned, you think about what’s going on now. There was a company in Asia, It was a job board or a job portal where scammers [00:32:00] actually were able to get to applications of job applicants and be able to take their information. We don’t know what’s going to happen with that, but that’s one part of it.
Another part of it is, Something that also happened in I believe it was in the in one of the European countries, and I can’t think of where now, where they had one of the employees actually thought he was talking to One of his co workers in the country, but the scammers were able to use a thing called deep fakes now I don’t know if you’re familiar with deep fakes, but I’ve heard
Porschia: of them
Mark: video generated people that look like the real thing could look like they’re saying something that Is tangible and something that the employee needs to hear that employee needs to hear or other people need to hear So that employees thought they were and they asked for some [00:33:00] information that cost the company eventually 25 million.
All that to say is that job scams now are a part of the way we need to think about being safe online these days. So they’re going, people are going to have to be a little bit smarter, and there’s three ways I could think of that people can be a little bit smarter and use the tools that are already out there.
One is one thing for sure, hopefully nobody’s not putting their address on their resumes anymore. Yes. Hopefully, if you are, stop it. But the second thing is, Make sure that you are I would recommend using a Google Voice phone number, which is free with a Gmail account, instead of putting your number out there.
And somebody asked me earlier why would you do that? I said people use Zelle and Cash App. with their real numbers, right? So can you imagine somebody [00:34:00] giving you a real number and asking somebody possibly, for money and not going to you, but going to them? Think about that kind of thing.
And thirdly, is I think people can use LinkedIn, I think, in this theory. I believe because of the new verification system LinkedIn has in place now, where they ask for your ID and picture and that whole process, that’s as close as we get to having a safer way of knowing that the person that actually that profile is up and when they contact them that is that person.
So let’s say you get somebody pretending to be a hiring manager or recruiter and that they tell you their name. You go look up their name up on LinkedIn. And oh, okay. That person really has a profile, but they’re really active. Just don’t stop there. Try to connect with them on [00:35:00] LinkedIn. And if they send you something back, then in verifying that, yeah, I am recruiting for that position.
Oh no. Who is this person? Report them, block, report them to LinkedIn, report them to the company that that fake scammer is representing. But there’s so many layers to this, it’s hard to narrow it down to just three things that people can do. I think really another thing that people do, to add a fourth one, is when somebody gives you a call or asks, inquires for information, let them know and say, I am betting everyone that I talk to, to make sure they’re not a scammer.
That’s going to out of a scammer for one. Let’s say you don’t hear from that person again after you tell them you’re going to call them back then that means you didn’t verify that they were the person and they ran scared you won’t ever hear from them but you [00:36:00] still report them, block them, and make sure that and even sometimes you may need to make it publicly known that this person’s going around asking people trying to give people a job that doesn’t exist.
Porschia: Yeah, job scams, to me, are I don’t want to say relatively new, but relatively new. I, it was never something I think we had to think about that much, 10, 20 years ago. And now you hear about people being scammed all of the time. Thank you for those tips. I didn’t. Even think about using a Google voice number or having clients use those.
One other thing I’ll add, because I’ve seen this with some of the job scams for most real positions. You should not be sending anyone any money as part of a contingency to get hired. And I’m sure you’ve probably seen these too, Mark, where people [00:37:00] are walk through what they don’t know is a fake, application and interviewing and screening process.
And then someone tells them, Hey, congratulations, you got the job now send us three, four or 500 or more dollars for your training or for whatever they say it’s for. And people send this money. And then, of course, they are never hear from those people again. And there was never a real job. So I know that some jobs, but I think it’s a very small percentage of jobs actually want you to pay for your own training.
And if they
Mark: I’m you’re talking about me. I don’t, I’ve never seen statistics, but it’s very small. It’s
Porschia: very small. Yeah.
Mark: But one thing I do want to mention is that it’s not just the money that people are sending. Cause some really, when you compare to your data, your private data is much more valuable than the money that she was sent [00:38:00] because Of ways scammers can make money off of your private data.
Such as, and I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this, where you get an email, say, Hey Porsche, we got this list from SHM and the SHRM conference that just happened. Do you want it? And this is an actual thing, I don’t know. But I think it’s very, it’s just very interesting. How did you get, how would you get a list from SHRM conferences of emails and phone numbers?
And they want you to pay this exorbitant amount. Now, there are companies and organizations that do pay for lists. Mind you, that’s a real thing, but not everybody’s real. It is happening. What they do is they use your data as bait. As soon as they can collect a hundred random names. Or 200 random names and email addresses and phone numbers, either, [00:39:00] or they borrow one because they can sell it to other scammers who sell it to other scammers.
So I would say that your data is the most private and the most precious thing you can possibly have right now. Then the money, losing 300, 400, that’s a big deal. But someone making tens of thousands of dollars off of your other information, that’s even a bigger deal. If you have the, they have a Google number, they’re not going to be able to get your actual number hopefully.
And if you’re using your email address, like for just specifically for a job search, like a Gmail, that they don’t have your real address and you can always. Spam folders, report them, phishing, block them, so you have better control over those.
Porschia: Very wise words. I hope [00:40:00] everyone is taking notes, Mark, about what they should do to make sure they are safe and not falling for any of these job scams.
Tell us more about the voice of job seekers.
Mark: The Voice of Job Seekers started July 13th, 2011. And what happened was somebody sent me a tweet, I wrote a post somewhere on my other blog that no longer exists anymore, and they tweeted and they said, thank you for being the Voice of Job Seekers. I said, take me long to come up with another website and a blog. And start writing all that and said that was one of the way I was going to try to be selling people stuff on it. It was something to get my voice out there and hopefully become a visible advocate for job seekers in whatever [00:41:00] role and lane I could possibly get in.
So that’s how it began, and since then there’s been, there’s more than 700, nearly almost 800 articles, and a lot of those articles, I started getting requests for them to be republished on other sites. And then you’re asked to write for those sites, original content. And then these days I get paid to write for sites.
So it has morphed into something I didn’t imagine years ago, but now it’s 13 years old. And here we are just doing it.
Porschia: Yeah. And you have a great podcast along with all of the articles and everything. And we’ll be providing a link to your website and other social channels in our show notes.
So people can find you online, but what is the best way for someone to get in touch with you?
Mark: LinkedIn or mark at [00:42:00] the voice of job secrets. com. Are the two ways they won’t get ahold of me for anything.
Porschia: Great. Great. So I like to ask everyone this question as their final question. How do you think executives or professionals can get a positive edge in their career?
Mark: They should write. Executives should write. They should write more. They should have their own blog where they can blog. And. If they do it consistently enough, I think I’ve seen some actually do it. And do it for years and they get inquiries and questions and opportunities that you can’t find on job boards.
They come from nowhere to speak at conferences to visit companies, to companies, to visit their companies. I’ve seen all types of iterations, but it, writing’s great. If you, [00:43:00] those can’t write, do videos often, but I think that’s the way of keeping their persona public. Now, if you have a private company that does, Some business and you have you have to protect copyright and intellectual property.
That’s understood. But it makes sense for a lot of executives to do that these days because people are looking for other people to follow, believe it or not, on purpose. And just because you might be a vice president of a small company or a hospital or or even a nonprofit, you’d be surprised at who may take to your voice.
Porschia: Mark, you have shared a lot of wisdom with us today, and I’m sure that our listeners can use it to be more confident in their careers. We appreciate you being with us.
Mark: Thank you for this opportunity. [00:44:00]
