Gary is a recruiting and hiring consultant. He has trained and led high-performance recruiting teams that have made well over 10,000 hires. He has seen the inside story of how recruiting and hiring happens inside over 300 companies from Fortune 100 companies to boutique start-ups.
Gary’s industry background includes software, IT, eCommerce, banking, public sector, semiconductor, engineering, manufacturing, sales, marketing, and environmental companies. His experience spans all levels including C-level executives, senior management, technical leadership, and high-performance professionals as well as support staff and laborers.
Gary was originally on the podcast in episode 58. You can listen to it here.
Gary has been involved in HireFactors for about 2 years.
Many people have varied and eclectic stories. What Gary has found is that their resume and career stories look and sound like their career -scattered and varied.
The hiring manager is looking for someone who has been doing similar kinds of things to the job description and is moving right along in their career with increasing levels of responsibility, because that is the easy hire. If they cannot make sense of your career trajectory then you will not get hired. You need to make your resume and career story portray a clear message.
A software company was looking for a software tester related to dispensing pharmaceuticals. This is highly regulated and they needed someone to test the user interface, which is very routine and monotonous. Gary found someone who had been working in manufacturing - specifically testing related to fighter aircraft. This was testing torque on bolts and welds. He had to do this day in and day out and fill out very complex forms. The hiring manager immediately kicked the resume back.
Gary explained that this person had been performing similar tasks as the position they wanted to fill, had tremendous attention to detail and would not get burned out. If this person had applied directly to this position with no one who was able to translate their skills, there is no way this person would have even gotten an interview.
This will be a 4-episode series where the first 2 episodes are comprised of the first feedback session. The next 2 episodes are the 2nd and 3rd feedback sessions. I do not record the 4th feedback session as it is a review and usually gets too personal for this podcast. This is the 2nd half of the first feedback session.
You will discover that Phil has a big gap in usual versus needs scores in the area of insistence. He is very structured, but he is also a big-time problem solver. From his behavior, you would never know he is a problem solver. I call this being a structured anarchist. He loves rules as long as they are his rules. He also has an interesting combination of being a problem solver and being a sensitive guy. In the engineering world, this is very uncommon and we will see later on that this is a superpower.
This week I start the next Career Pivot evaluation series called "Can Phil Repurpose His Career?". This will be the fourth individual I have done this with. Previously, I worked with Tim, Sarah, and Juan (not their real names). This time it is Phil, a gentleman in his early 60s, who spent 20 years in the military and then the last 10 or so years in the private sector. What you will hear is the military was a good fit for Phil and served him well. Since leaving the military, work has been a mixed bag. As he looks to move on to an encore career he wants to learn more about himself so he makes a good choice.
Most of these episodes are all in the top 10% of downloaded episodes for this podcast. This will be a 4-episode series where the first 2 episodes comprise the first feedback session. The next 2 episodes are the 2nd and 3rd feedback sessions. I do not record the 4th feedback session as it is a review and usually gets too personal for this podcast.