Engineer Career Coach Shares Secrets on How to Apply Up and Get Promoted (Part 2 of 2)

Are you trying to apply for a position that's one level up, but you don't know how?

Perhaps you're an individual contributor and you want to be in your first manager role…

or maybe you're already a manager and you can't figure out how to apply for director level roles.

If either of these sound like you, stay tuned because you're gonna learn the best resume, linkedIn and interviewing strategies on how to do this from engineering career Coach Nader Mowlaee.

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Doug Howard: Let's continue with the presentation. So where did we leave off?

Nader Mowlaee: What you should really have on your mind, when you go into these conversations, when you go to these interviews, when you write content on your resume, on your cover letter, on your LinkedIn profile, even just before you start writing in, we're still in our head. We're still talking about the mind. Even when you speak with yourself, I want you to not talk so much or not emphasize so much where you come from, what your past experiences are, or what your skills are.

They are important, so you need to think about them, but don't put the emphasis on them. Don't focus on them more than the time and the amount of energy and the amount of content you put on talking about the problems that you wanna solve and the impact that creates. So again, when you communicate like this, when you write like this, when you speak like this, you come across as less selfish and more selfless.

So rather than being self-absorbed and focused so much on you, you're focused on the problem that the company has and the impact they create for their customers.

Look at the problem, talk about the problem first, and then you bring a solution. You are the solution provider, you are the problem solver. And then make sure you also talk about the outcome, the impact, the result of what happens when you, the solution provider overcomes that problem. Talk about the problems you solve and the impact you can create for that company and their customers

Doug Howard: Problem, impact, and benefit to the company.

I mean, that's all they really care about. When you put it that way, it's real simple. Do you have an example? Let's say I'm an individual contributor. And I'm applying for my first manager role. Do you have an example of like how I could do that? I've not been an official leadership role, but maybe I've been defacto mentoring people on my team or training people, but I have not had the title of manager.

How to Present Yourself During the Interview

Nader Mowlaee: As a mechanical engineering manager, I help mechanical designers and drafters, as well as our manufacturing team, improve their productivity in terms of how long it takes for them to submit designs from the design office to the manufacturing team so they can start the production and launch a production line faster and get products to the Canada customers sooner.

So it's always what you do. Start by talking about what you do or talk about the problem. Those two can coexist together, but that you can shift them around. But it always ends with the, it always ends with the outcome. That the outcome is measured either in time, cost or quality.

So if you're a, product test manager, verification, validation manager, you design and develop the test criteria and product test strategies, cuz that's the problem. Designing the test criteria, developing use cases, and actually performing, helping your team perform tests in a laboratory environment, gathering the data, analyzing the data. Those are the problems that your team needs help with. As a test engineering manager, you need to help that team do what they do.

You might come in defining the actual test criteria and helping them understand the use cases based on the product or the end user's requirements so that you can decrease the failure rate and increase the customer's satisfaction rating on that product.

As an engineer career coach, I help individuals improve their personal branding in terms of keyword optimization and storytelling so they can get interviews faster.

Doug you come in to help individuals develop their self-awareness, identify their own values, develop their leadership capabilities so they can successfully transition from a manager to a director and take their career to the next level and have the opportunity to, maybe manage a p and l or impact the company's bottom line, bring in new business, whatever the outcome is at a director.

All this information, believe it or not, actually comes out. It exists on a job description, especially a well-written job description. Sometimes the problem isn't there, but the problem is kind of like common sense.

Doug Howard: Okay, go on. I'm interested about that.

Reverse-Engineering the Job Description to Identify Interview Questions

Nader Mowlaee: If you like, if we look at a job description. I can give you like you see that that is the problem statement. They may not say that we have this problem, but that's the primary core responsibility of that person. It's normally the first bullet point under the list of responsibilities.

Doug Howard: I like this reverse engineering the job description to prepare for.

Nader Mowlaee: That's it. You know, that needs to be done. Whether you're an IC, individual contributor, or a manager, like they're telling you what needs to be done. They need someone to do that. Then you are bringing the solution and the impact. What is the impact? Is projects or products being launched on time. Speeding up the manufacturing process or something related to time, or reducing the time it takes to test something and send it to the next stage of that product's development lifecycle, or it's cost. Use a cheaper material if you're a material engineer manager now cost less to make the same product. Or it could be quality related. Again, even better use the cheaper material that has highest resistance to heat or environmental conditions. So it lasts longer and it's cheaper. You know what I mean? It's like double wham.

Doug Howard: What's jumping out at me here, Nader at the end of the day, there's a human on the other side that's looking at this, and this is about human influence, and that's my specialty, is just how do you use influence to increase your impact as a leader.

The number one rule that you know, I'll say to everyone, everywhere, anytime, any places you need to speak in terms of the other person's benefit. How do you speak in terms of the benefit to them? If you wanna get someone to do something they wanna do, there's two ways. Force, well, you don't have that opportunity as the job seeker. So then the other way is influence. And influence, the only way to do it is to get them to want to do it. And to get someone to want to do something, you have to say, what is the benefit to you? What's the benefit of hiring me? Is what you're saying. Why should you hire me? This is what I can do, the impact I'll have.

Right. That's brilliant. That's brilliant. I think this so helpful because engineers, we don't think this way, we're kind of like direct and to the point. Like, this is what I do and that's it.

So this makes total sense. What's the next step? But where do we go from here?

Doing Your Homework on The Company Your Applying With

Nader Mowlaee: Let's move forward. I love this Teddy Roosevelt quote that says, you, nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care. If you're not talking about the problems and, solving those problems and creating the result that the whole business was built by.

If you're interviewing at Ford and you're not talking about building better cars that are safer, that are more comfortable, so they can go from point A to B faster, you've lost them. That's such a simple idea. But that's why an automotive company, was built and you got Tesla again, how can we do all what I've just told you, but now cheaper and more environmentally friendly?

That should be the reason why you wanna work for Tesla. That's where the conversation starts. Then you can talk about how amazing they are and the designs that inspire you. There's this hierarchy to the conversations we have so we can show and demonstrate to them that we really care about the product and the company and the brand and how the company impacts their customers.

Until we do that, they're not gonna care about how much we know. But unfortunately, most people out there, whether they're engineers or not, they go right into, look at my level of education, look at what I've done in the past, look at my resume and therefore I demand.

Doug Howard: I've seen it all the time. I've seen it, I've heard it on interviews and I've seen it in resumes. I've looked past that, but other managers aren't like me. Other managers don't go there. They expect you to prove yourself to them. It's human nature.

Showing the Right Body Language During Your Interview

Nader Mowlaee : We cannot lean on the past anymore. We gotta lean forward. We gotta focus on what we want to do. What our mission is, what is our purpose? And we're gonna talk about purpose right now. That's all that matters. If we wanna improve our communication, then we need to say things differently.

The first and most foundational thing that I wanna talk about are different elements of communication. So personal communication is person to person communication. Whether it's through text messages or emails on the phone, audio only, or video format and something like that, or in person, which is the best way to communicate.

We need to break this down into how effective we are in terms of getting the message across, getting our story across, through the mode of conversation. If we're texting or emailing or messaging each other on LinkedIn, we can be only as effective as about 7%. So 7% of the entire conversation are just the words that we're writing, or here's a spoken words, but it's pretty much think about emailing someone, think about submitting a resume, and that's it.

You're not being effective. That's why resumes don't work. I normally say, even if your resume is made out of gold, like you printed down a piece of 24 k Gold sheet did, it really doesn't matter. First of all, it's not gonna be found likely. And when they read it, there's no emotion. There's no voice. I don't know if you care about us, I don't know if you're passionate about our company product. I don't know that stuff. You have to show me. I have to hear that stuff to believe it. Which is why it's better to communicate through voice, through audio, through the phone, through zoom call.

It's gonna be a lot more effective. Now we've got 7, plus 38. We are as effective as about 45%, and to make it really better. Which is why zoom interviews have become really effective and have allowed people to make a lot of decisions on video is because our body language, the way we look and, even in person how we feel, the energy and the frequency we come across. It makes the conversation whole, cause I can see the words, hear the words, feel your energy, feel your feel the point of your voice. But also see your language. See your body language, like you care about it. Are you smiling? Are you comfortable or are you rigid and not happy looking and you just look uncomfortable?

Doug Howard: Do you look like you don't wanna be there?

Nader Mowlaee: You just look like you don't want to be there. With that said, this allows us to understand after we know what to talk about, which is that big conversation, we need to make sure they know that we care.

Another level of insights I want you to understand like what really matters to that company and what should matter to you is you know who you are as a person.

Your identity is most important to them cuz it's the identity that they trust or mistrust. Identity, personality, character. I like to use the word character. What is that person's character? That's your core, that you're being evaluated by, surrounded by your values.

Company has a set of core values. You should definitely have values. And are those values coming across in the conversation? Is this why you want to work for our company? Are you really passionate about what we do, how we do it, and the impact of what we create? Or, no, your value is, making another 500 bucks per month so you can move to a bigger house or upgrade your car from a Toyota to a BMW. What do you value?

And ultimately your goals. Goals becomes more personal. What are your personal career development goals? Do you truly have that growth potential? You want to become a leader. You wanna go from an individual contributor to a manager, which means you have drive, you have that hustle in you, which means you're gonna be more productive, you're gonna be a high performance employee.

These are the three layers that are most important to the employers. If I have all the right goals and people know I have the right values, but they just don't like my character and my identity, like who I am, probably not gonna hire me. They're not gonna get it. Because you know what? That person isn't really honest. He only wants to get another employer. He wants to just get to that thousand clients. That's not cool, you know, versus, you know what, no, he was super genuine. His values are aligned with mine. I see his goal is actually my goal. There's alignment between there, so let me move forward with them. We all get evaluated consciously and subconsciously based on these three layers of who we are as a person.

Doug Howard: It's all about trying to come from a place of working together. Like instead of trying to convince someone either way, I'm coming at it from a place of influencing people. That's my expertise. I'm not like a job seeker person, but at the same time, like I see a lot of overlaps.

You're influencing them, is what you're doing, right?

Nader Mowlaee: Yeah, the principles of influence, it's embedded into the process because again, I feel like we influence others and persuade them subconsciously and naturally. You get into leadership role, you go from being an individual contributor to a manager. Now you're actually beginning to go through corporate training. And as you go to again, um, manager to director, you go, you learn persuasion. You learned organizational persuasion, you learn sales skills, you learn partnership skills. You get into public speaking, so it just really depends on what you wanna do.

Confidence and Mindset During Your Interview Wins Job Offers

Doug Howard: Just going back to the core topic of how to jump levels, this is a great way to show you can influence too by influencing them. Influence is a big skill of leadership and showing that you can win them over is, in a sense selling your capabilities as a leader. Especially if you don't have that previous background, it really showcases it.

Nader Mowlaee: Yeah. Yeah. If, if you're someone listening to this conversation, you've never been a manager, but you're here trying to learn how to become a manager for the first time. I got news flash for you. You should already feel like a manager.

You should be ready. If you are not sure about yourself, why should I be sure about you as an employer? If you don't trust you, why should I trust you?

Doug Howard: We can sense confidence in other people and like when we sense it, we're attracted to it. And when we sense lack of confidence, then we're kind of unattracted to it in a sense.

Nader Mowlaee: No, it's all over their face. Body language is 55%, and as soon as they open their mouth and we ask 'em, so why do you wanna be a manager?

It takes no more than like 30 seconds to figure out if that person's confident or not. You have to physically be present.

Doug Howard: You have to believe it.

Nader Mowlaee: You have to believe yourself first before you go into that interview. Otherwise you're just wasting your time.

Doug Howard: What's next in the process?

Nader Mowlaee: What's next? So I want to give you some insights cuz now we're getting into the real core of, what it takes to care and how to get our identity, values and our goals across. I want to create alignment within your mission and your purpose. Again, being purpose-driven is extremely important. Here's some data around, how do we as consumers react or respond to purpose-driven companies, uh, data from marketing charts.

It's really important for us to understand why do companies position themselves and develop their brand around their purpose, for us to just believe that, okay, so I should do the same thing.

If these companies are purpose driven and we are becoming more loyal to them and we feel stronger emotional connections to them, and we are likely to defend them, when they're going through a tough time or we're more proud to be associated to them and that's the power of the brand or the logo.

You want an Apple phone because you want an Apple phone, you wanna wear Gucci because it's Gucci. You wanna go work at Tesla because it's a resume builder, career builder.

So why don't we just look at ourselves as an organization, as a business of one, as an individual, you know, so, develop a professional brand around who we are because when we position ourselves, when we write our content, when we present ourselves, like that in interviews , the company or the employer or the business's reaction or response, believe it or not, it's gonna be similar.

They're gonna be more loyal to you. They're gonna make sure they get back to you on time. They're gonna make sure they follow up with you. They're gonna make sure they let you know what the next interview is, and they're gonna interview you faster. They're gonna feel stronger, if they can see that you really like their company and your purpose is aligned with their purpose and they feel like they can trust you.

Cause man, you just put on a show in that room. Like we all have goosebumps after what you just told us and how you talked about our product. We are just, we are emotionally, we are in. Can we for, can we go for lunch? Before you go? Lunch is on me. You know, like I've seen companies do this because they don't want this guy to go out of the room, out of Tesla and go to cruise or go to another company and just intervene there cuz they know it.

If they lose this guy, he's gonna get an offer somewhere else on the same day. They're gonna give him a verbal offer right there and then, you know?

Doug Howard: It's funny cause you say that, cuz that happened to me in my very first job, I interviewed at a few companies and the one that I ended up getting an offer, they offered me the lunch right after the interview.

I must have said the right things. Later on I worked there for many years and my boss told me, I wanted to make sure no one else got you. I really liked you, you really seem to fit well on the team, and all these things.

It's an emotional decision, it's the same as like you buying, that Amazon purchase, it's an emotional decision, you're buying cuz you, it feels good, it feels right, and sometimes you can't quantify it.

And that's what you gotta do. You gotta make the other people feel that way.

Nader Mowlaee: It's exactly the same. We are emotional beings. Humans make more decisions emotionally than logically. It's been proven over and over and over again.

Doug Howard: If every decision was logical, like there'd be a whole different history.

Nader Mowlaee: Exactly right. Like, like there would be no wars.

How to Eliminate Your Competition When Applying for Jobs

Nader Mowlaee: But anyways, let's move on. So with that said again, how do we find companies? How do we find some top challenges in the world, top problems, and how do we find companies, that solve those challenges, solve those problems?

Just a quick Google search away, just look for your top challenges in the field of, and enter your field, in the field of X, y, z, engineering. Put in the product and the engineering product.

So if you're in the medical device industry, put that if you're in the structural engineering industry, put structural engineering. If you in architecture design, put architecture design. If you're in consumer electronics, if you're in semiconductor manufacturing, whatever it is just put it in there and see what comes up. There's tons of articles.

Or ask our good friend Chat - GPT, or another ai, like, it really doesn't matter.

I like to read, I like to study, uh, looking at current issues in a particular sector, current issues in banking, in food manufacturing, in x, y, z, manufacturing and whatever the product is.

And then when you do that research, come back and look for companies focused on and type in the problem or type in the what it is that we're struggling with.

Doug Howard: Oh, that's clever.

Nader Mowlaee: That's how I do my research. That's how I find my companies. Again, I've done this for forever, for over a decade.

Doug Howard: I'm glad you're going through all this because like when you were saying like the problem impact, benefit before, I was struggling, I was thinking like, that all makes sense, but like how do I figure these things out and whatnot.

So this is very helpful, cause I'm sure a lot of engineers are wondering like, okay, how do I figure out these talking points and whatnot? So, this is making sense to me.

Nader Mowlaee: The cool thing with this is that you actually will come across, I guarantee everybody, I still come across problems that I didn't know existed.

You'll come across and you're like, wow, I didn't even think that was an issue. We have that issue? Or man, I didn't know they were doing that. I didn't know they were cleaning the oceans like that. Like they're actually building artificial corals, like they're rebuilding the ocean floor.

What? So it's like, man, that's fascinating. So that's how you come across new companies and new problems. And so after this new company solving that problem that you did not know they existed and you just fall in love with like, oh my God, this company's doing what? I grew up thinking about this when I was a kid. I used to go snorkeling, and you're like, okay, totally purpose driven. Now I have to be in that company.

Doug Howard: It keeps you such an advantage to be able to talk about it. Okay. This one I love. Limit your competition cuz you hit it on the head at the beginning how it's a super competitive market. It's a different market than you and I entered a long time ago. Dive in. I'm all ears on this.

The Perfect Job Searching Strategy

Nader Mowlaee: I wanna dive in, so this is the last third and last topic. This is where the juicy stuff is. So after, again, we talked about mindset, how to improve our communication by the topics, how we prioritize those topics of conversation, how we come across verbally, written verbally and, with video or in person.

Now you gotta change your strategy.

How do we actually go out there, to get the interviews. How do we get the interviews? So how do I job search?

So my question first for you is, are you job searching backwards? Chances are you are. I would say 95%. Out of a hundred people watching this 95 are job searching backwards and backwards is in the opposite direction that employers hire.

Whenever an opportunity becomes available. Let's say Doug is an engineer manager, whether one of Doug's engineers quits and goes to another company or gets promoted, goes to a different team, or just goes from a junior to intermediate to senior role. So there's a vacancy as another junior, or Doug just needs another engineer. They got a new project, his current team can't handle it. They just need one more. So someone left, someone got promoted, or we need one more of that person are three different ways a job is created. Opportunity is given to internal promotions, lateral moves, a temporary worker becomes full-time, a part-timer becomes full-time permanent and 10, 15, 20% depends on the company, its size and how flexible they are.

Positions are filled internally. If that doesn't work, company starts looking for referrals. They ask their existing staff for connections and contacts, the good old referral program, the most successful, impactful, quickest, from an employer's point of view, it doesn't cost them anything and it's pretty quick.

And they trust that person. So if, if I'm in Doug's team and Doug's known me for three years and I've been working for him as a junior engineer or immediate engineer, and I refer someone else that I know, there's already a trust link, there's a relationship there.

So I would never refer someone to my boss if I don't already trust him or her, so Doug can trust me and trust that person with more confidence so that hire can be made quickly.

If that doesn't work, the company starts networking. Number one platform for networking, it's been for many years, is LinkedIn very successful program.

A good like 20, 25% of people are just contacted, so it doesn't cost a lot of money. You could have a premium LinkedIn account, you don't really have to. And we take control of the process. I can sit here today and do research all day, message. A bunch of people have interviews ready for tomorrow as a recruiter. So it's pretty quick. It's cost is very, very low. And by this point, good 70% of jobs, sometimes 80% of jobs are filled already. You and I would never know about that position becoming available.

If those hiring programs, if they also fail. And I want you to really acknowledge what kind of position would that have to be? We used to call these ones hard to fill roles. So it's either a highly advanced set of skill that is scarce. It is a skill that is extremely in demand. So anybody who has that skill, they already have a job, they're not gonna leave their job. They're making a lot of money. Like good luck recruiting an AI engineer these days, whatever. They already making good money, they're not leaving, they're doing cool work. Or remote locations. I don't want to go work in Bakersfield, California. It's in the middle of nowhere. I like to be in San Francisco. I don't wanna go work in Northern Alberta in yellow knife Alberta. It's minus 50 degrees. I don't want to go there. So those are the positions that it's really tough to get a referral, get someone internally to go there or find someone through word of mouth or networking. So we either use professional associations, professional engineering groups, associations for mechanical engineers, chemical engineers, or we just outsource it to a recruiting agency and or just advertise online.

So most jobs don't make it to recruiting agency. Most jobs don't make it online. And the ones that do are pretty hard to fill. They've tried other easy free stuff, fast ways to recruit that person. They haven't been able to. So now you find it online. Now it's on Indeed. Now it's on Glassdoor. Now it's on that company's website.

You're assuming, oh, a job just became available, like, no, newsflash. It was available a long time ago, three weeks ago. And so much work has been done in the last three weeks. You might not like to hear it, but some cases that job's already been filled. We're just advertising it for the heck of advertising it. So we show that, hey, we know we're growing, we're hiring, but they've already picked the person.

Doug Howard: That's amazing.

Nader Mowlaee: They already know who they wanna hire.

Doug Howard: I've only been out of the corporate world for a few years now, and this is just eye opening to me. It's changed so much in, in just a few years, to my knowledge at least. It's almost like, an engineering software. It's like there's a new rev or something every year that you gotta keep up on. It's really emphasizing to me the point of like personal branding and, learning from experts like you and hearing, what do you need to know?

Cuz it's like, if you're an engineer, you shouldn't have to be an expert at this stuff. You should be good at doing your engineering job, and doing the things you need to do to be successful in your career. That's why I think it's great that people like you Nader, are teaching engineers so that they don't get blindsided by these things and stuck in neutral in their career. This is really eyeopening to me.

Nader Mowlaee: Again, I bring both perspectives in there. I've been on the other side. This is how I used to job search. I didn't even know there was a thing called recruiting agencies. I was just online, apply online, go with Google Electronics, engineering jobs, Toronto. You send like 30 resumes every day, not realizing that, another thousand people submitted a resume to the same jobs.

So we wanna switch things around, go and align our job search strategies with recruitment strategies. I call this modern recruitment strategies, but it's not really modern anymore cuz it's been like, a decade that these programs are being implemented with the invention and the dominance of social media platforms, mostly LinkedIn being the leader on top of that.

Which allows the company to develop their own brand. Hence employer branding, allows them to promote themselves. So it's not just their website, cuz website is employer branding, but all they can do is just post an advertisement and collect resumes. And that is costly. That is not effective. On social media they can engage, they can post, they can comment, there's videos, they can have fun, they can celebrate success. They can highlight their own employees. You do so much to brand yourself as a great place to work on social media. So it's all about engagement. The more time we spend with the candidate, engage with that candidate on top of that funnel, the hiring funnel, the more candidates are attracted to us, hence the power of social media or LinkedIn.

And that is where they begin to source their candidates. They won't tell you, but they like, okay, this person is a follower and a true fan. Likes and comments a lot, engages with us, has made connections with our existing employees. So has a lot of connections in our company.

That's where social recruiting comes in. They begin to contact directly or ask existing members. If I'm following Doug's Company, but I have four connections in his team, in his company, Doug's probably gonna go and ask those people. Hey, I see you're connected with Nader.

It cause it's work together. You go the same school, so that's social recruiting, and then they bring the candidates into the candidate crm. They still haven't contacted you yet. You still have no idea you're being recruited.

Doug Howard: I did this too. I had a person apply years ago, and there was no one on my team that knew him, but I saw three people that they were connected with on LinkedIn as me.

So I reached out to them, acquaintances. And I said, Hey, I'm interviewing this candidate. Do you have any thoughts? Oh yeah, he worked here. He was great. It was a big headstart for that person.

Nader Mowlaee: Go back a hundred years, you wanna buy whatever, chickens, you find another farmer, it's like, oh, I see you got good chickens. Where'd you get those chickens from? Whatever it is, it's human, it's human connection, you know?

Doug Howard: Yeah. It's real. It makes it real.

Nader Mowlaee: It's authentic, and that's only when they really let you know that, hey, that's where passive candidate nurturing is.

Hey, we're interested in you. I see you're currently working. I see you're happy. We are interested in, would you be open to a conversation? Okay, you are. Okay. Why don't you apply and then we'll go through the initial screening qualification call, and then we'll take you to an interview to evaluate you. Then you go through the actual selection process where you meet our hiring manager and the vp, the leadership team. Then we actually hire you and onboard you.

Why applying online doesn't work anymore

Nader Mowlaee: The main problem by just going to the top and applying to jobs online is that you literally, you just skipped five steps. All the steps that would allow me, the recruiter or the employer to engage with you, to get to know you.

And this is how we calculate candidate engagement. By some of the time that I've spent with you. If you're just gonna go on applying our website on Indeed, I haven't spent any time, I didn't even know you, we haven't engaged at all. We haven't had those multiple interactions. You haven't liked anything, you haven't messaged me, I haven't messaged you, I haven't messaged our shared connection. There are no interactions and I've also not seen any interests, any sustained interest from you. When they poach you, when they kind of like tap you on the shoulder, we're like, Hey, we see you're following us and you've liked and comment on a few posts and you have four other connections in our company. What's up? What do you think? Do you like us? We're looking something like that.

The structural engineer, this is how she got one of those three interviews. She was super happy. I'm like, I'm not surprised. This is literally what I told you to do last week. You know what I mean? So it's not a surprise to me, but this is how hiring is done. You're engaging with them. I told you these comments. I do this, and of course they're gonna engage with you. And yeah, go for the interview and just make sure follow up. So don't stop liking, don't stop commenting. Don't stop messaging them. Here's your follow up. Number one, here's your follow-up number two, have these messages. Keep that interest. Sustain that interest. So they spend more time with you.

There are more those interactions. Especially interactions with the hiring manager and which is most of the times our focus. So if you look at this batch of data, I've highlighted a few of them, few of the sources, cuz on the left hand side, the first column, there are a lot of different sources for hiring, from the courier side to job boards, internal recruits, referrals, internal mobility agencies, hiring managers, different types of campaigns, social media, like all this stuff.

But if you look at the big chunk of data, like a full year of data like this on, on one platform, and you look at the number of applications, there's about 13 million people who applied.

Surely most of the people got hired through the career site and job board. 69000 and 45000. But don't get fooled by that because you have to also compare that with the number of applications that were submitted. 4.9 million and 7 million. So if you just do the math and look at the probability of success or effectiveness. Look at the success rates. It's a game you're playing. Don't play the lottery. Play the game where you have a higher chance of success. I take a 19% chance of success over 0.3% any day.

Doug Howard: It seems like a no-brainer when you look at it this way and, wow, this really puts it into perspective. But it makes sense. Everything I'm hearing from people is just how confusing this job market is and how do you find opportunities and how do you get in the door? I don't think it used to be like that, but it clearly is today. And this sums it up. This really explains it well.

Nader Mowlaee: I kept the best for less, this slide is really good. I know I have highlighted five different things in order, but frankly, when I coach someone, I assign them and one hour of job searching, like on three days a week. If they want to do more, do more.

Number one, with hiring managers, we spend 45 minutes out of an hour contacting hiring managers directly, 10 minutes contacting internal recruiters. That's number two. And number three, the last five minutes is the engagement. So few likes, few comments, one post, and that's it. Number four, which is referrals, it's an expected outcome. It's part of the process. You naturally, as you're making connections, that you're, as you're engaging online, you get referred to positions. Interestingly enough, there's gonna be a lot of referrals we get from the hiring manager to the recruiter, which is the most powerful referral you can get because, the hiring manager referred you to me, I'm gonna call you right now versus one of our engineers referred you to me. Big difference, which is why the success rate, you see the referrals is 4.66%. If I contacted recruiter directly, 6.6, if I contact the hiring managers, 19.35, so this is where influence comes in.

This is what makes the big difference in terms of who's contacting, who's making decisions on me, is it the hiring manager? Or not, and then what kind of conversations I have with him or her. And then how am I coming across, what do I say, what do I focus on? It goes back to the mindset and the communication styles that we talked about.

Doug Howard: This is certainly eye-opening and it all makes sense to me.

I'm keeping this up so people can see, this is how you can contact Nader. His email here and his LinkedIn, he's all over LinkedIn all the time, giving away tips. He's on LinkedIn live. Whether you're looking for a new job, whether you're looking to level up, and apply up for a new role, he's definitely a guy you wanna keep in touch with.

Before we break off, I have a few questions for you.

Nader's Best Advice for Job Seekers in Engineering and Tech

Doug Howard: For someone who's trying to apply up, what is your best advice? With all this context that you just provided us with, how do you get that job that, I've not been in this role before. What is the number one piece of advice you'd give them?

Nader Mowlaee: Pick your target, right. Definitely has to be the right company. You must have direct product experience. You must be in the same realm. You cannot go from an individual contributor to a manager. I know there are anomalies, but we're talking about common successes.

Now you're in a leadership role, in a management role. You cannot go there and work on a product that you've never worked before. You should already have the technical engineering stuff, design stuff, products stuff, solutions stuff. You've already done that. You're kind of like tired of doing that stuff. You're tired of doing it alone. You're so confident and competent that you wanna now help a team. So you want to improve the productivity and performance and speed up launches, go into new product development where you already have previous developing experience with products in a similar category, but maybe a competitor's product.

When you wanna go from individual contributor to a manager, target your competitors. Go after in the same niche, in the same category. That's number one. So that's how you pick your companies. You gotta put your emotions out and look at it a bit more logically.

Number two, if you wanna be a manager, your contact is a director. You cannot be calling managers, that's your competitor. Your contact, the person, your hiring managers, the directors, the vp. If you want to be a director, then you should be contacting VPs and C-level executives and founders, so it's always a clear, like major level up. If you're a director, they've been a director like eight years ago now they've been a VP for three, four years. They're hiring directors, they have directors reporting to them. You've gotta follow that hierarchy. And then the conversations you're having and the problems you're talking about solving, are the problems that I would say that VP has. Cause as a director, I'm helping my VP solve his problems or her problems. The vp, hands down problems to me as a director. So that is really important. As a manager, for example, going back to individual, contributor to a manager, the manager is responsible for managing a team. That's where you influence come, you wanna influence the director, talk about how you're gonna solve his problems.

Doug Howard: You tap right into their core. You're basically like associating you with the solution. And that's a good place to be.

Nader Mowlaee: What is their pain? What is keeping 'em off at night? What do they need to do? Where do they want to get, how can you help them get to where they want to get? Go above and beyond. Help that person fall in love with you as a coworker.

Doug Howard: This is brilliant advice. How should our viewers get in touch with you?

Nader Mowlaee: We talked about LinkedIn a lot, so let's keep conversations on LinkedIn. We can actually exchange audio messages on LinkedIn so we can be a lot more, effective in terms of how to communicate all that. And at the same time we grow our network. I have a massive network that would love to invite everyone to and, lots of connections and opportunities that come my way.

Doug Howard: Thank you for sharing all this wisdom with everybody. And for those of you watching, I think a big part of interviewing is just making a positive first impression. And if you wanna learn how to make a positive first impression with anybody, be sure to watch my episode called How to Make a Positive First Impression with Anybody.

I'll include a link to that in the description of this episode, and I'll also include a link to how you can get in touch with Nader in the episode description. Thanks for watching.

Nader Mowlaee: Appreciate it. Thanks for having me, Doug.

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