[2020] Career Hacking™: Resume, LinkedIn, Interviewing +More

Copywriting for the purposes of writing a resume / CV is specialized. Not only that, but having a well-developed resume can make a big difference on your job search. In this introductory lecture, your instructor, Davis Jones, will introduce you to the subject of business writing for resumes and share the layout of this and the following sections of Eazl’s Career Hacking course with you.

One of the most important things to realize when you build your resume is this: you don't want to be everything to everybody. In other words, you don't want to claim to have a very broad range of skills that apply to many different kinds of jobs and organizations. Recruiters want to know that you have skills for the specific position they are looking to fill. This is why it is important to pick your Big Six Skills™ and talk about them, then continuously refer back to them throughout your resume, LinkedIn® Profile, and cover letter. It is essential that you learn to find your Big Six Skills™ as they pertain to your job search.

You are an iceberg. People often sell themselves short when they reflect on skills that they have. The reality is that you need to present your life experiences in a way that helps other professionals understand how their organizations can use your skills and experiences to make progress on their business goals.

If you are a young job seeker and don't have much professional experience, that is okay! For any candidate, finding relevant bullet points is about reflecting back on past experiences (from schooling, part time jobs, projects, athletics, volunteer work, hobbies, and other life experiences) and framing them in a way that makes sense for the Big Six Skills™ that you're presenting.

Some organizations--especially large ones--often use algorithms to process resumes. Usually, these algorithms are built into recruiting platforms (like LinkedIn®, Indeed.com®, Dice®, etc.) that employers use and ATSs (applicant tracking systems). This means that it's important for you to learn about job search SEO (search engine optimization).

If your resume doesn't have the right buzzwords, language, or key words in the copy, then it may not even make it in front of a real human being. In order to get past the robots, use our Step By Step Guide to the A.R.P. in order to keyword optimize your resume and LinkedIn® profile.

Business writing can be difficult. Copywriting for something like a resume can be even more difficult. In this lecture, you will learn how to phrase your experiences on your resume so that they make an impact. You will also learn grammatical patterns (for example, using the progressive tense) that will make your resume and the text in other job search materials you create (like your cover letter and LinkedIn summary) feel more energetic and attractive to the people who read them.

Business writing for your job search is about using brands, quantities, and details. When your copywriting strategy includes these components, your resume and the text on your LinkedIn® profile will help you build trust with readers, and that's crucial! Here, you'll learn how to think about each bullet point and use Eazl's supplementary tools to develop high-quality copy for your LinkedIn® profile and resume.

Whether you are or an executive, a programmer, or an entry-level professional, your executive summary is often the first thing that a recruiter or hiring manager will read about you. It is essential that you know how the executive summary of your resume / CV fits into your overall personal brand (Eazl likes to think of this as your “professional brand”) and to your overall job search strategy. In this lecture, you will learn how to use the Eazl resume template and how to write your executive summary.

In this lecture, we will “bust some myths” about resumes and resume writing. By redirecting mental energy that might have been directed towards these topics, you can better-focus your career development efforts and, instead, focus on resume design and on developing your resume writing skills.

In this lecture, you will learn how to avoid some common mistakes that people make when they are first joining the workforce. You will learn how to avoid looking unprofessional and downgrading your candidate profile in the eyes of a recruiter or hiring manager. Let’s make sure that you are managing your professional brand... professionally.

After your instructor, Davis Jones, did his Masters of Business Administration (MBA), he had a difficult time finding a job. You are going to hear the story behind the resume that you are about to create and also learn about the layout of this section, where you will actually “put pen to paper” and write a draft of your resume.

Inside this text lecture, you will find more than 50 professionally written resume / CV samples and be able to choose from four Eazl resume templates. Each of the templates provided is custom built for a different job seeker persona. So, if you are a student, make sure to grab the template for students or recent graduates and if you are an experienced professional, make sure to grab that template instead.

Inside this resume writing tutorial, you will watch your instructor use target job descriptions as the basis for reverse engineering a real candidate's Big Six Skills™. This is a very important skill for you to have. It will serve you well to be able to look at the kind of job role you are targeting, reverse engineer the skills required for the role, introduce your own, unique skills that are relevant for that role, and mix all of that together to develop six skills around which your job search strategy will be based.

Whether you worked (or had an internship, or did freelance or contract work for) a nonprofit, a publicly traded company, a small business, or a startup, the way that you describe the organization matters. Fundamentally, every organization has stakeholders. Whether they are vendors, participants in a supply chain, clients, or employees, this information, when included on your resume, helps you bring the organization to life. It “makes the invisible visible“ to the reader. In this guided tutorial, you will learn how to bring the organizations from your past to life on your resume.

Search engine optimization (SEO) isn’t just for websites anymore. Today, there are bots and algorithms that process data that you provide (both actively and passively) and pass findings based on that data to potential employers. So, in this lecture, you’re going to see how your instructor uses publicly-available information to reverse engineer a search engine optimization strategy for your job search.

In this lecture, you’re going to watch your instructor craft copy for a resume / CV. Fundamentally, you break each professional experience listed on your resume (whether the experience is for a project, a contract role, a full-time role, or an internship) into parts. These parts should align with your Big Six Skills™, and each bullet point needs to be compelling and rich with details. You will see how this is done inside.

Volunteerism can be used as evidence that you have developed a skill in the past. In this lecture, you are going to see how your Career Hacking™ instructor leverages a candidate's experience in a volunteer role, reframes it, and aligns it with one of the candidate's Big Six Skills™.

Under each organization you list in your resume (and, if you have been promoted, more than once) it will be necessary to describe the basic functions that you performed in your job role at that organization. In this lecture, you’ll watch your instructor describe the job that somebody did--at a high level--in a role that they list on their resume.

In this lecture, you’ll see a guided tutorial where your Career Hacking™ instructor develops an executive summary on a candidate’s resume. The resume / CV template provided by Eazl has a detailed description for your executive summary that includes guide words. You will see how it is used so that it is easier for you to use it when you write your own resume.

The education section of your resume / CV is increasingly important. As professionals engage in continual education and re-education engagements throughout their careers, this part of your resume will be used to demonstrate your foundational education experiences and also those learning experiences that qualify you for roles that require more specialized education. You will watch how your instructor uses the format of the Eazl template so that it is easier for you to customize the education section of your resume.

In this video, you will get additional support for developing copy for your resume. Because writing a resume is similar to technical writing or specialized business writing, developing your resume bullet points is both important and difficult. So, you will watch your Career Hacking™ instructor develop this content in the hopes that it makes it easier for you to develop great content for your resume / CV.

In this section, you will see how your instructor uses a job seeker’s experience with an on-campus position (for example, supporting a professor on a research project, working a job associated with an educational institution, etc.) to demonstrate that the candidate has a skill required for a certain job. This lecture is especially important for current students (at both the Bachelor’s and Master’s level) and for people transitioning out of academia and into the private sector.

Pay attention to this lecture! Increasingly, employers want to see that you have both educated yourself in an area and that you have done actual work projects in that area prior to considering you for a role within their organization. So, your ability to use internships and work projects to show progress towards a new career field is important. You will see how your instructor leverages a candidate’s internship and a volunteer work project to prove that they have skills that are necessary for the job they are seeking.

This lecture is especially important for international students and non-native English speakers who are looking to work for organizations that conduct business primarily in English. It is also applicable for you if you are a native English speaker who is applying to an organization that does work in a language that is not your native tongue. You will also learn how to emphasize your knowledge of important software packages that, by highlighting them, might enable you to get preference over other candidates in the eyes of a recruiter or hiring manager.

In this lecture, you will learn how to use hyperlinks to bring your resume to life and encourage people reading your resume to spend more time with your candidate profile. As the world moves more towards “makers,” it is increasingly important to provide digital proof that supports what you assert in your resume, which you can often do with the smart use of hyperlinks. You can almost think of your CV / resume as more than a document. It’s your digital career development hub.

Applicant tracking systems (or ATSs) are now used by almost every major employer in the world. In this optional video that lives on Eazl‘s YouTube channel, you will learn the details of how these software packages work and what it means for the formatting of your CV / resume.

People who specialize in computer science, commonly called “programmers” or “developers,” have a special opportunity. Because much of the work that you do (if you are reading this, assumedly you are a developer) lives in the digital world, it is much easier to prove your skills then it is for someone whose work cannot be viewed in the digital world. So, in this optional video that lives on the Eazl YouTube channel, you have the opportunity to learn how one technical recruiter suggest you use profiles that are unique to programmers and developers to create a more effective resume.

In recent years, LinkedIn has purchased a number of artificial intelligence / machine learning companies. LinkedIn itself has also been acquired by Microsoft. Clearly, LinkedIn is becoming an increasingly important social network for professionals and a hub for recruiters worldwide. More than that, LinkedIn is becoming rich with algorithmic technologies, artificially-intelligent software programs, and technology solutions tailored to the needs of employers and hiring managers. In this introductory video, your instructor will share the layout of the LinkedIn section of Career Hacking™ and introduce you to some of these foundational concepts.

Visual learners abound in the world. In fact, some social scientists say that humans are best-adapted to using images to learn. In this lecture, you will learn why it is so important that your professional brand speaks using visual assets (like videos, Slideshare or PowerPoint presentations, images, etc.) in addition to assets that are primarily text (like your resume). You are also going to learn strategies for finding these visual assets and how to strategically align them with your Big Six Skills™ on your LinkedIn profile at the conceptual level.

In this lecture, you are going to learn how to enhance the delivery of your personal brand (at Eazl, we like to think of this as your “professional brand“) with videos sourced from YouTube. Once you are able to find these videos, you can then add them to your LinkedIn profile so that you can align your messaging between your resume, LinkedIn profile, presentation in interviews, etc. You can optionally follow along with your instructor as he does this so that you can perform the same workflow for yourself and add visual assets like the ones you’re seeing in this video to your own LinkedIn profile.

Slideshare is now a LinkedIn company. It is also a source of presentations (think: PowerPoint presentations) that are all professional in nature. So, this is a great source of visual collateral that can be added to your LinkedIn profile to enhance your professional brand. You can optionally follow along with your instructor as he goes through this workflow so that you can do this for your own LinkedIn profile.

There are many misconceptions around professional headshots (some people would recognize these as the profile photos for social networking sites like LinkedIn or GitHub). Unfortunately, many people think that a headshot needs to be centered around physical appearance. That is not what is shown by the research. In this lecture, you will learn how to approach your professional photos on websites like LinkedIn.

Today, almost everyone has a very high-quality camera in their pocket. So, in this lecture, you will learn some tricks for taking your own high-quality professional headshot. After watching this lecture, you might want to work with a friend and upgrade your headshot on professional networking sites like LinkedIn.

When somebody sees your LinkedIn profile (whether they see it in a LinkedIn post, a snippet of your profile URL on a search engine, or on your profile page) your headline will be featured prominently. In this lecture, you will learn how to optimize your headline so that it is doing important work for you.

In this lecture, you will learn how to write a LinkedIn summary that advances your job search. Make sure to download the Guide to LinkedIn Summaries in the resources section of this lecture, as it is one of the most important resources Eazl offers as a part of your Career Hacking™ learning experience.

Personal branding (at Eazl, we like to think of this in terms of “professional branding”) is top-of-mind for many people on the job search. Whether you’re trying to work from home, apply for remote work positions, or find a job in coding, your LinkedIn profile is the channel through which your personal brand is most-frequently delivered to people involved in recruiting. In this lecture, you’re going to learn how to design a few core elements of your LinkedIn profile.

Your LinkedIn profile headline is extremely useful and important. First, it signals whether your LinkedIn profile is relevant to recruiters involved in IT recruiting vs. those involved in non-technical recruiting vs. people interested in hiring freelancers. Second, it is searchable, so, when you intelligently apply technical writing skills to your LinkedIn profile headline, you can improve the searchability of your LinkedIn profile--which is important, because social recruiting is an increasingly-common way of hiring employees.

Visual communication is an effective personal branding (or “professional branding”) method. For example, if you see a candidate with a video about java (the programming language), you’re going to assume that this person is interested in coding. If you’re involved in IT recruiting, that might mean that you’ve found a good candidate. So, in this tutorial, you’re going to learn how visual assets be used to help you with you personal branding / career development and, ultimately, help you find a job.

Because you’ve already spent time on resume writing / CV writing for this job search, you can now leverage this work on your LinkedIn profile. In this tutorial, you’re going to see how your instructor helps you use your resume writing skills to attract recruiters engaged in social recruiting on LinkedIn (and enables you to make your LinkedIn profile more searchable) by converting your cv / resume text into copy that you can use on your LinkedIn profile.

In this tutorial, you’ll continue your personal branding (or “professional branding”) Career Hacking™ work . You’re going to learn how you can use the visual assets you’ve found to support strategic your job search messages to improve your LinkedIn profile’s searchability (a version of “SEO” that’s relevant for your career development).

Professionals who are hiring employees, hiring freelancers, or hiring developers on LinkedIn will almost always look at the education section of your LinkedIn profile. It’s also important to note that the research shows they’re often comparing what they’ve seen on your cv / resume with what they’re seeing on your LinkedIn profile. This is why social recruiting has become such a common way of recruiting. So, in this lecture, you’ll see how to optimize your education section (including how you include a certification or other non-traditional form of education).

The smart use of technology is important for your job search and for your career development in general. In this tutorial, you’re going to see how to set yourself a professional-looking LinkedIn profile URL. Not only will this be handy to share with people involved in recruiting via email, but it also helps with your resume design. That’s because, if you notice in your Career Hacking™ template, including your LinkedIn profile URL in the header is a key part of the Eazl resume design. A really long URL will break the template, so this lecture on the custom URL will help you.

You’re also going to learn how to prioritize your skills on your LinkedIn profile. For example, if you’re currently displaying that you have communication skills on your LinkedIn profile but you’re looking for a career change into coding, you need to change how your skills are presented on your profile.

Your LinkedIn profile includes a banner, which is a great place to work on your personal branding. In this lecture, you’re going to learn how you can leverage your visual communication skills by sourcing and adding a custom banner for your LinkedIn profile.

In this video (which lives on the Eazl YouTube channel), you’ll have an additional opportunity to develop your digital soft skills / social skills and to build your LinkedIn profile. Specifically, when you have multiple LinkedIn profile recommendations, people engaged in social recruiting / hiring people via LinkedIn will be more likely to reach out to you.

After designing a high-quality LinkedIn profile, you’re ready to meet professionals involved in hiring people and other professionals who can help you with your career development. In this replay of a live event we created for the Career Hacking™ community, you’ll learn how professional networking works (at scale) on LinkedIn. Going through this exercise is also a great way to build your digital soft skills and digital social skills. It’s also especially important for people looking for remote work / work from home situations, because the ability to build relationships in the digital world is a major advantage in these situations.

Your cover letter can be an important tool in your successful job search. However, it’s important that you leverage specific writing skills here, because people who are hiring employees don’t want to read irrelevant / unprofessional details on your cover letter. In this lecture, you’ll get introduced to the cover letter section of the Career Hacking™ course.

Eazl has created more than a dozen cover letter resources for you as a part of the Career Hacking™ program. You can find all of those cover letter resources in this text lecture.

If you’re making a career change, looking for remote work / work from home jobs, or having a specific resume design challenge, you might feel like you’re facing a unique career development challenge. In this lecture, you’re going to learn how to address a unique career development challenge on your cover letter. You should also remember the concepts in this lecture when you have a job interview and you want to confidently address this career development challenge with a hiring manager.

Your cover letter requires you to develop and use a specific writing skills. You need to blend technical writing, persuasive writing, and resume writing skills on your cover letter. In this lecture, you’ll also learn how to design your cover letter in a way that you can customize it for the many organizations you’re likely to encounter on your job search.

When you’re on the job search, your soft skills, communication skills, and social skills will come in handy. Learning how to “read your audience” and blend into the culture of an organization is an important skill (in general), a helpful skill to leverage on your cover letter, and one of the interviewing skills you’ll want to develop. In this lecture, you’ll learn how to research the culture of an organization so that you have the foundational concepts required to practice this important soft skill on your job search.

In this guided tutorial, you’ll work with your Career Hacking™ instructor, Davis Jones, to write your cover letter. Hopefully, this will help you develop the unique blend of resume writing, technical writing, and personal branding communication skills you need to leverage when you write your cover letter. After you watch this video, try your own hand at writing your cover letter!

If you want to find a job that you love, you might have to change your approach a bit. Often times, the best opportunities become available to people who apply an entrepreneur’s mindset to their job search. Also, many people engaged in a job search today would prefer harder-to-find situations. For example, maybe you want to work from home? Maybe you want to make a career change into something more lucrative? These hard-to-find career development situations will be more accessible to you if you leverage outside-the-box approaches to your quest to find a job. In this lecture, your Career Hacking™ instructor, Davis Jones, will introduce the section on integrating technology and professional networking into your job search.

In these Voices from the Field lectures in your Career Hacking™ course, you'll get perspectives on key career management issues from experts with a variety of backgrounds related to career support. Here are a few short introductions on each of them:

• Daniel Kimble ?? is an executive coach based in Silicon Valley who also hosts the Unshakeable Influence Podcast.

• Spencer Hamilton ?? and Sandra Richez ??+ ?? are members of the leadership team at the EDHEC Business School Global MBA program.

• Carlos Miguel Alves Pereira ?? is a career coach and recruiter specializing in Brazil's finance sector.

• Ibrahim Hasan ?? was formerly the head of career services for Remington College, a technical college in Mobile, Alabama.

• Nick Livingston ?? is a rockstar technical recruiter and one of the founders of Honeit Recruiting Software.

Many candidates only know the job search from the candidate side of things. After all, only a small percentage of professionals make money by recruiting for a living. However, it helps you to know what the “other side” is thinking. For example, if you’re interested in getting a coding job, how does someone who’s hiring developers approach their job? In this lecture, you’re going to learn how a standard recruiting workflow works. You can apply this knowledge to your interviewing skills, particularly, by converting it into actionable social skills /soft skills that you use when communicating with hiring managers and prospective employers.

Eazl chooses to introduce you to Job Search CRM (CRM stands for “customer relationship management”) as part of your Career Hacking™ learning experience so that your candidate profile can, potentially, appear at the right time to the right person--someone who’s hiring people like you at that moment. You might not realize it, but recruiters (who are constantly hiring employees) might have a need for someone exactly like you… next week. In this lecture, you’ll learn what Job Search CRM is and how you can convert this knowledge into actionable communication skills / technology skills that help you find a job.

When you master the ability to keep in touch with a wide network of relevant professionals, you’re employing social skills that can translate into career development opportunities and, ultimately, more rewarding work. In this lecture, you’re going to go through the process of setting up your CRM system. In addition to using tools like Podio, Davis has built a Google Spreadsheet with some custom code that powers an automated follow up reminder system. You can use this new Career Hacking™ Hub to manage your job search CRM. It's free and easy to use.

It might seem like a distant connection, but your ability to use search engines (not at a basic level, but at an advanced level) is critical to your career development. That’s because, in a world where there are databases with more than a million jobs currently listed, you need to be able to find a job opportunity that suits your specific situation. In this lecture, you’re going to learn what Boolean search operators are and how they will help you find a job.

In this short tutorial, Davis Jones, your Career Hacking™ instructor, will relay a hack that was shared by a Career Hacking™ student and builds on your new Boolean search skills.

So you’ve spent all this time on resume writing / cv writing and resume design. Who’s going to read your resume? It’s important that you know who the first touchpoint is in a team engaged in hiring people. In this lecture, you’ll start seeing why the technical writing skills (as they apply to your resume) that you developed earlier in the course really start to matter for your career development.

An entire industry exists around hiring people. There are people who specialize in hiring freelancers. People who specialize in hiring developers. People who specialize in hiring accountants. These people are often called “contract recruiters,” “headhunters,” or “staffing agents,” depending on the context--and they can help you find a job. However, when you interview with them, it’s not like a traditional job interview. So, in this lecture, you’ll learn how to work with people involved in this kind of recruiting.

When we think about companies, we tend to think of the big names. Google. Amazon. However, there are often great opportunities with companies that are large, but not massive. In this lecture, you’re going to learn about the role that small and medium-sized businesses (sometimes called SMEs) can play in your career development.

Professional networking is seen as a huge challenge for people looking for career development opportunities. So, in this lecture, you’re going to learn about CCMM--a process that we teach Career Hacking™ students to help them develop communication skills, social skills, and soft skills. These skills will be useful to you when you’re looking to find a job and for your general career development.

Note: The guide found in this resources section is a re-posting of the CCMM guide found attached to the Job Search CRM module.

In this lecture, you’re going to work with your Career Hacking™ instructor, Davis Jones, on your professional networking skills. These are important soft skills / social skills for your to develop, and we’re going to focus on using your LinkedIn profile as the basis for applying your new professional networking skills.

Social recruiting is a big thing, right? So why can’t you leverage some of the same technologies to help you with a career change or a job search? You can. In this short tutorial, Davis Jones, your Career Hacking™ instructor, will take you through the process of researching organizations on LinkedIn. You can also use this technique to gather information about an organization prior to a job interview. That way, when you’re in the job interview, you appear to be well-informed about the organization. It’s sort of a roundabout way of appearing more confident and displaying your communication skills.

You probably know that many of the best career development opportunities are never publicly available. In this lecture, you’re going to get some data that will prove to you that developing your professional networking skills and leveraging your social skills in the context of a job search can help you crack open hidden career development opportunities.

Here's one "hidden job market hack" sent in by David Williamson, one of your fellow Career Hackers:

"I'm in warehousing, and lots of companies don't post their higher-level positions on job boards, however they do post for things like forklift drivers and other general laborer positions. That can be a great way to find family run or other small/medium sized companies etc that you've never heard of and then reach out directly from there."

“Informal chats” are a delicate thing. They require you to employ delicate communication skills, to be graceful (which is, itself, one of the most important social skills), and to engage in a mutually-beneficial dialog with someone new. However, as you develop the ability to meet new people (particularly in the online world--especially if you’re looking for remote work), you’ll create career development opportunities for yourself and, potentially, improve the outcome of your job search.

In this lecture, you’ll hear how Davis Jones, your Career Hacking™ instructor, meets a recruiter who he met on LinkedIn. Davis has his own communication style and you have yours, but this video should help you be more confident that informal chats are commonplace, and that your ability to participate in them is one of the communication skills that will help you improve the outcomes of your job search.

On your job search, two ways you can enhance your communication skills (and improve the outcome of your job search) are: (1) including interview preparation in the way you think about interviewing skills (2) learning to read your audience (one of the most important soft skills for your career development, generally). In this lecture, your Career Hacking™ instructor, Davis Jones, will introduce the interviewing skills section of the course.

Whether you’re going in for a java interview, another kind of coding interview, or a job interview for a non-technical role, there is a common sequencing to job interviews. By learning this common sequence, you can properly calibrate how you approach each interview and apply this new knowledge to enhancing your job search communication skills. In this lecture, you’re going to learn how each job interview along the way is, typically, expected to address a particular hiring concern for the recruiter, hiring manager, or other person you speak with in the interview.

A good salesperson can sell you something without being pushy. When Eazl had just launched the Career Hacking™ community, people on the job search consistently felt like they had to communicate their value, but they didn’t want to feel like they were being pushy. So, in this lecture, you’re going to develop your communication skills in this area. You’re going to learn the important soft skill of “selling yourself without selling.”

What does someone hiring employees look for in a candidate? You don’t have to guess anymore, because we have some data to share with you on this topic. In this lecture, you’ll receive some data that helps you build your job search communication skills by learning how to prioritize certain topics that you choose to speak about in a job interview or even in a casual conversation with someone who is hiring people.

One of the most important interviewing skills is preparation. Whether you’re going in for a coding interview or a non-technical job interview, being able to show the person doing the recruiting that you’ve researched the organization and that you are already “on the road to working for them” is likely to enhance your chances of finding a job with the organization. In this lecture, you’ll learn about the BORG System for preparing for a job interview.

Professionals in the business of hiring people often use references to validate what they’ve read on your resume / cv or heard from you in a job interview. In this short interview, you’ll meet one person involved in recruiting and learn about their attitude towards references.

The ability to use the “crisis narrative” structure is usually one of the communication skills you’d associate with a creative writer, not someone working on their career development. However, for people on the job search, being able to convey your professional experiences in a narrative format is one of the communication skills you need to develop. So, in this lecture, you’re going to learn about the “crisis narrative” structure. You should challenge yourself to think about one of your previous work experiences and convert it into a “crisis narrative” structure so that you can build your job search communication skills.

The resources in this text lecture will help you practice your interviewing skills. When using these tools, challenge yourself to respond to the practice questions with purpose. Try to omit any “ums” or other words that don’t clearly reinforce the Big Six Skills™ you’re conveying when participating in a job interview.

In this lecture, you’re going to learn how to handle the “weakness question”--a question that you might hear in a job interview. This should help you develop your job search communication skills and be more confident next time you’re in a job interview.

Research shows that being able to participate in “small talk” is one of the communication skills that is most useful in business settings… and certainly useful when you’re participating in a job interview. Small talk might not be thought of as one of the most important interviewing skills, but remember, you’re going to be working with these people, and showing that you have social skills is important. In this lecture, you’ll learn communication skills associated with small talk so that you can leverage these skills next time you’re in a job interview.

We often think of “communication skills” as “speaking skills” or “writing skills.” However, your listening skills can often be the ones that help you find a job. People engaged in hiring employees often share important information that you can use in a job interview, so in this lecture, you’re going to practice developing one of the most overlooked communication skills--listening.

In this lecture, you’re going to develop one of the most helpful communication skills for a job interview. You’re going to learn how to respond to a question for which you don’t have an answer. After all, you’re not expected to have all the answers when you’re in a job interview (in fact, they might be asking you a question you don’t know the answer to on purpose), but you do need to know how to respond like a competent professional.

Participating in a job interview can be nerve wracking. Being able to calm yourself, gather your thoughts, and keep a positive attitude is, in fact, one of the most useful interviewing skills you can develop. In this lecture, you’re going to learn what the social science research says regarding strategies you can use to calm those nerves when you’re participating in a job interview.

“You only get one chance to make a first impression.” In this lecture, you’re going to learn about a few soft skills / social skills that you can leverage when you’re participating in a job interview. Using these approaches can help you improve your interviewing skills and the outcome of your job search.

The phone interview is a unique kind of job interview… and you’re likely to encounter one on your job search. As you’ll see in the video, a phone interview requires you to hone your communication skills for a medium that is purely audio. There are some neat findings from social science research that will help you ace the phone screen, and you’ll find them in this lecture.

Candidates are increasingly being asked to participate in a video interview… and some candidates have even created a video resume. So, how should you handle yourself on video? In this lecture, you’ll upgrade your communication skills in this area and, by doing so, enhance your career development more generally--because video is becoming a big part of work for many professionals.

People who are in the business of IT recruiting, technical recruiting, sales recruiting, and other specialized recruiting verticals can be a great source of help on your job search. They can help you make a career change, find a job when you need something quickly, and even be part of a long-term career development strategy. However, when you go in for a job interview with a contract recruiter, you need to tailor your communication skills in a specific way. In this lecture, you’re going to upgrade your interviewing skills specifically for the agency / headhunter / staffing manager interview.

In this lecture, you’re going to see a short mock interview between your Career Hacking™ instructor, Davis Jones, and a Fortune 500 recruiter.

One of the most important communication skills for your job search is your ability to follow up with professionals engaged in hiring people. In this text lecture, you’ll get resources that help you in this area.

In this lecture, Davis Jones, your Career Hacking™ instructor, will introduce you to the soft skills portion of the course. In this section, you’ll get exposed to important social skills that will help you with your general career development, help you when you go in for a job interview, and help you find a job. Shortly after watching this section, you should practice using these skills yourself.

One of the most important soft skills you can have is the ability to disagree with someone without being disagreeable. Professional environments require more than technical skills, they also require strong social skills. After watching this video, challenge yourself to give feedback to someone in a way that will neither cause a problem nor detract from the content of your message to them.

“Sometimes the most powerful statement is a good question.” Next time you go in for a job interview or engage in a professional networking situation, try to ask a question that matters.

You’re likely to experience the need to develop relationships with a new person or a new team multiple times in your career. Your ability to build these relationships is key to your career development and will help you in the days after your job search is complete. In this lecture, you’re going to practice finding common ground with someone, which is one of the most important soft skills you can develop.

Your ability to give someone praise without sounding phony can often set you apart from others. So, in this video, you’ll develop your communication skills around giving praise to others at work.

Sometimes, the most important thing you can do for your career development is to take a step back, evaluate the different paths before you, and design a strategy that aligns with your goals. In this lecture, you'll learn the Career Hacking™ community’s method of aligning your values and other key parts of your psychology with your career development plans.

In this lecture, you’ll see how Davis Jones, your instructor in Career Hacking™, uses the VISTA tool. After you watch this video, download the VISTA career development tool and try it for yourself.

The job search is different when you're an experienced professional. Maybe you've been making a six-figure salary for over a decade. Maybe you feel like hiring managers and recruiters, if they're much younger than you are, just don't understand the value of your experience. Maybe you've experienced age discrimination on your job search already. What's the best way forward when you're a job seeker with a lot of experience? In this text lecture, you'll find resources for working on a midlife or later-life career change.

Salary negotiation is a tricky part of the job search. You don’t want to create a bad relationship with your new employer before you’ve even begun working at the organization, but you also want to make sure that you’re getting properly compensated. In this lecture, you’ll learn how to approach salary negotiation, which communication skills you should employ when you’re in this situation, and what extra tools you should bring into these discussions. You’ll also get a preview of the “Further Study” lectures available to you as a part of Career Hacking™.

Charles Hugh Smith believes that “accrediting yourself” is a key part of your career development. If you’re someone who has certifications or wants to get certified in a new area, you can think of these efforts as “accrediting yourself.” So, in this interview with Mr. Smith, you’ll learn how his approach can be applied to your long-term career development or to making a career change.

Many candidates feel that an employment gap is one of the trickiest challenges in resume writing / CV writing. How do you handle it? In this lecture, you’ll learn how to handle these gaps on your CV / resume.

You can modify the template you have as a student in the Career Hacking™ course to (1) keep your resume focused on relevant, recent work experiences and (2) show that you have a lot of work experience. In this lecture, you’ll build the resume writing skills you need to encapsulate your work experiences into a resume / cv of reasonable length.

If you are a young job seeker that could be identified as a high school student, college student, or a candidate with "no experience" then the key is to realize that you do have skills. Identifying these skills and framing them correctly in your resume will give your resume power. Also, know that people recruiting young candidates are not looking for experts--they're looking for people who want to learn. You'll also see how to reformat your resume in a way that's optimal for candidates looking for their first position or internship.

In this lecture, you’ll learn the resume writing strategy that enables you to show tenure with an organization while also showing that you’ve been promoted within it.

In this lecture, you’ll learn the resume writing / CV writing strategy that enables you to use an incomplete degree on your resume with confidence.

Are you interested in entrepreneurship and startups? If so, you might want to consider working to find a job with an early-stage company. In this lecture, you’ll learn how you can tailor your job search strategies for startups.

If you’re interested in making a career change that includes changing locations, this lecture is for you. Davis Jones, you instructor in the Career Hacking™ course, often worked with candidates conducting a long distance job search. In this lecture, you’ll learn how to find a job when you’re relocating.

If you have the opportunity to participate in a rotational / leadership development program, you might be able to greatly accelerate your career development. In this lecture, you’ll learn what these programs are and how you can tailor your job search for them.

If you’re going to need to participate in a coding interview, this short interview is for you. Inside, Nick Livingston--someone who specializes in IT recruiting, will help you understand how people in the business of hiring developers think.

If you want to get a US Visa and work in the US, this lecture is for you. Inside, you’ll learn about the different options for a US Visa from Ari, an immigration lawyer in the US and Nick, a corporate recruiter who has helped candidates get a US Visa for work in the past.