PhD Transition Report On-Demand

Here’s a quick rundown of this week’s episode…

• First, Isaiah explains why you should always be ready to pitch yourself to employers
• Next, Isaiah discusses why PhDs often fail when they deliver their elevator pitch
• Finally, Isaiah explains how to craft a proper elevator pitch that will resonate with employers and recruiters

There will be rare occasions in your job search where you will achieve moments of focused attention from those you’re connecting with, whether it’s after they talk about their interests and pause to ask you “What about you?” or from the moment you start your first in person interview when the interviewer says, “Tell me a little about yourself.”

These moments will be very fleeting so you need to be prepared for them. You will have seconds, literally, to impress the other person. You won’t impress them with your accomplishments but with the concise delivery and impactfulness of your elevator pitch.

Your elevator pitch is a personalized, top-of-mind script that you can deliver in an encounter with decision-makers. It should highlight what you could uniquely offer the company to advance its mission and goals.

Creating an elevator pitch is your chance to break free of the academic stereotype: non-social nerds who can only hold conversations with other non-social nerds about their latest experimental findings.

A recent report in Nature showed that many postdocs struggle to communicate their knowledge to non-scientific audiences. As the article notes: “[PhDs deliver an elevator pitch] the same way as they would do it to a lab colleague — resulting in a lot of glazed eyes and wrinkled brows.”

But you can be different. You can craft an intelligent, succinct, and rationale-based elevator pitch. The key is to practice and revise your pitch until you have developed a winning introduction that can be expressed in a conversational tone.

An elevator pitch is a personalized, top-of-mind script that you can deliver in a connected way. In order to create an effective pitch, you need an answer three questions about yourself:

Who are you (both professionally and personally)?
What do you want?
Why should someone else care?

An example of an effective elevator pitch is, “I’m an immunology expert who loves to bake – German chocolate cake is my favorite recipe! – and I’m seeking a project management role because I want to help coordinate research into treatments that will help cure XYZ disease and improve patient lives.

With your pitch in place, all you have to do is present it to your target with confidence and good body language. Of course, truly pinning down who you are professionally in addition to what you want and why are not easy tasks. It takes careful thought and execution of a proper process to arrive at a simple sentence that communicates your professional who, what, and why. This effort is worth it however. An elevator pitch that showcases who you are, what you want and why will make you stand out from other job candidates and will result in referrals, interview invites, and job offers. 

If you’re ready to start your transition into industry, you can apply to book a free Transition Call with our founder Isaiah Hankel, PhD or one of our Transition Specialists. Apply to book a Transition Call here.

The post How To Pitch Yourself To An Employer appeared first on Cheeky Scientist.

Here’s a quick rundown of this week’s episode…

• First, Isaiah examines what most PhDs waste their time when networking the old fashion way
• Next, Isaiah discusses the difference between connecting and networking
• Finally, Isaiah explains why it’s so important to have a good networking strategy and how to use it to get job referrals

I wasted the first three years of my graduate school career networking the old fashioned way. I would go to internal seminars with the same people over and over again, arriving just in time and leaving right after it was over.

Once or twice a year I would go to a conference and stand in front of some last minute poster I made like a used car salesman begging people to care. I would collect business cards and university cards at my poster and think “I’m networking! I’m networking! It’s happening! I’ve been discovered!” Only to go home after the conference and never have anyone who took my card or gave me a card reach out to me.

Then, like all PhDs, by the time I reached my last year of graduate school, I complained about not having any industry connections or career options outside of doing a postdoc. What I didn’t realize at the time was that I had never done any networking in graduate school. Sure, I connected with people. But, I never networked.

Connecting is what happens when you meet someone. Networking is what happens when you follow up with them to build a professional relationship.

Most PhDs never network. They meet someone at a conference, seminar, or poster section in person, or they press the blue connect button on LinkedIn, and that’s it. Understand – when you’re a job candidate searching for a job, it’s your responsibility to turn networking into connecting. There is no substitute for networking and your career will never reach its full potential if you don’t network.

It’s been proven time and time again, even in academia, that networking is the key to funding and success. Nature, Science, Cell, and the like have reported over and over again that it’s not the best research that gets the most funding. It’s the most well-connected researcher that gets the most funding. Period. 

If you want a PhD job in industry, you must network by building professional relationships that go beyond just connecting. You must also learn how to end your networking efforts with requests for a job referral. A job referral is the result of building a strong professional relationship and can be achieved consistently by following a proven networking process. 

In terms of sequence, you will connect with an industry professional, network to build a professional relationship and then ask for and receive a job referral for an upcoming or open position at a company. Connect. Network. Get referred. A referral most commonly comes in the form of an industry employee working at a company of interest passing your resume on to the hiring manager for an open position, or given you permission to use their name or referral code when uploading your application online.

It is easier than you might imagine to be referred for a position if you have networked confidently and appropriately because industry employees are often incentivized to refer you, with the average employee referral bonus being between $1,500-$2,500.

Getting referrals doesn’t just happen. Neither does networking. You have to get organized, create a strategy, and work for it …and you have to start now. 

If you’re ready to start your transition into industry, you can apply to book a free Transition Call with our founder Isaiah Hankel, PhD or one of our Transition Specialists. Apply to book a Transition Call here.

The post The Difference Between Connecting And Networking appeared first on Cheeky Scientist.

Here’s a quick rundown of this week’s episode…

• First, Isaiah reveals why you shouldn’t add academic titles to your LinkedIn headline
• Next, Isaiah discusses how to find out the terms that employers are looking for and you should add to your headline
• Finally, Isaiah reviews how to craft a LinkedIn headline that will ensure you appear on searches

The headline is the first text that appears in your LinkedIn profile, and the keywords in this section factor heavily into LinkedIn’s search algorithm. Don’t waste that valuable space on academic words like “postdoc” or “PhD student” that will never appear in an employer’s search.

Your headline needs to include the information that employers are actually searching for. Unlike PhDs, most hiring managers and recruiters don’t enjoy doing research. They’re trying to find candidates quickly and the search terms they are using are the simpler versions of the skills you think are so important.

You have to learn the language that employers for the jobs you want are using because that’s the language they are typing into LinkedIn Recruiter and other recruitment search engines.

The good news is you can find out what this language is simply by familiarizing yourself with the job descriptions these employers have posted. After reading 20 or more postings for your target position, you will have a superior understanding of the search terms employers are using for those roles.

You can hack these job postings quantitatively by using word cloud software – choosing the largest words in the word cloud (those used repeatedly in your chosen job postings) to use on your LinkedIn profile.

Consider the employer’s perspective. If they want to hire a Project Manager in London, UK – what are they going to search? “Project Manager” “London.” Enter.

Make sure your headline reflects this by putting the name of the job title or job titles (two at the most) at the start of your Headline. If a particular transferable skill and technical skills are used the most in your selected job posting, put them in your Headline next. Notice that you are answering key questions for the employer when you do this.

Your LinkedIn headline should answer the following three questions for an employer:

What do you want professionally? You can answer this question by adding your desired job title(s) to your headline.

Who are you professionally? Answer this question by sharing the technical and transferable skills you have that are relevant for the job. Aim to include three to four skills here.

Where do you want to work? Answer this question by adding your preferred location. If you want to relocate, add the location where you want to work, not your current location. You can also indicate your willingness to relocate by adding “Willing To Relocate” to your headline.

If you’re ready to start your transition into industry, you can apply to book a free Transition Call with our founder Isaiah Hankel, PhD or one of our Transition Specialists. Apply to book a Transition Call here.

The post What To Put In Your LinkedIn Headline appeared first on Cheeky Scientist.

Here’s a quick rundown of this week’s episode…

• First, Isaiah discusses the structure of a relevant LinkedIn summary and why you shouldn’t just paste your resume in this section
• Next, Isaiah explains the type of experience that you should add to your experience section
• Finally, Isaiah reveals the importance of the volunteer experience section and why you should take this section seriously

Your LinkedIn Summary is not a place to copy and paste your resume. This section is crucial to getting a phone screen because it’s the first place where employers will click to learn more about you and to find your contact information. It’s a major hook for your profile.

Here, unlike your resume, you should write in the first person and let your personality shine instead of sounding robotic and boring.

That said, you should still use keywords and maintain a professional voice throughout your summary. Start by introducing yourself and your professional brand in narrative form. Make your narrative future-facing and focus on what you can contribute to an organization.

The layout of your Summary should be clean and include lots of white space. Write in short paragraphs and leave enough space between your paragraphs and bullets. This will make your summary much more readable and will encourage the viewer to continue scrolling down.

In the past, LinkedIn’s Experience section was more specifically termed, “Work Experience.” The change to “Experience” is significant because it encourages job candidates to include all relevant experiences to their profiles, not just past job titles.

As such, you should add all relevant, previous experiences to your LinkedIn experience section, including both work and non-work experiences.

Similar to your resume, you will want to include at least three bullet points for every experience section you add to your LinkedIn profile. Remember though, your bullet points must start with a transferable skill and end with a quantified result, with a technical skill sandwiching the two together.

Focusing on your results and positioning them as evidence that you can achieve similar results in the future for your companies of interest will help employers envision what you can achieve for their company.

The above process should be duplicated for your volunteer experience section because employers highly value this particular section on your LinkedIn profile.

Don’t make the mistake of just listing the name of the institution you volunteered with here. Instead, take this section as seriously as your experience section and add bullet points with key skills and results to show what you accomplished as a volunteer.

Did you take your volunteer work seriously? If so, show it.

If you’re ready to start your transition into industry, you can apply to book a free Transition Call with our founder Isaiah Hankel, PhD or one of our Transition Specialists. Apply to book a Transition Call here.

The post How To Write Your LinkedIn Summary & Experience Sections appeared first on Cheeky Scientist.

Here’s a quick rundown of this week’s episode…

• First, Isaiah explains why you should add quantified results to your resume 
• Next, Isaiah discloses why PhDs have such a hard time figuring out what quantified results to add to their resumes
• Finally, Isaiah reviews how to craft the perfect bullet point for a resume that will catch the eye of employers and recruiters

Every single bullet point on your resume needs to end in a qualified result. You can easily transition to this part of your bullet point using language like “resulting in…” “as demonstrated by…” or “as evidence by…”.  

It is challenging to sit down and figure out your past results and then to quantify them? Yes. It is certainly more challenging than just listing skills, duties and experiences in your resume, but is the only way to move past the resume stage to the phone screen stage.  

Eye tracking studies have shown that employers’ eyes pause at length on numbers. But there’s a catch. The numbers have to be written numerically, as in the number “10,” not “ten.”

Examples of qualified results include: “resulting in # of ABC reports” or “resulting in # publications, including a publication in ABC journal,” whereby “#” refers to a numerical value like “10”.

The main reason is because many PhDs experience a sense of imposter syndrome when formulating the results section of their bullet points. In short, they don’t think they have achieved any worthwhile results.

PhDs often feel like they can’t claim a result as an achievement if anyone else was involved. If somebody else touched the figure, paper, or presentation, these PhDs think it was a joint effort and feel guilty adding the result to their resume.

You need to claim the results that you were a part of because no one is going to claim your results for you. If you do not have the courage to claim ownership in part or in whole over your past achievements, why would any employer ever hire you?

To finalize the perfect 3-part bullet point for your industry resume, you will need to sandwich the transferable skills you placed at the beginning of your bullet points together with the quantified results you placed at the end of the bullet points.

How do you make this sandwich? With your technical or specialty skills, but only those that are relevant to the job at hand.

Examples of how to structure these technically stacked connecting phrases include: “with in-depth knowledge of XYZ research technique,” “experience in XYZ instrument including XYZ instrument,” and “with an ability to develop and test questionnaires related to XYZ field.”

If you’re ready to start your transition into industry, you can apply to book a free Transition Call with our founder Isaiah Hankel, PhD or one of our Transition Specialists. Apply to book a Transition Call here.

The post Putting Quantified Results On Your Resume appeared first on Cheeky Scientist.

Here’s a quick rundown of this week’s episode…

• First, Isaiah discusses what mistakes PhDs commit while crafting bullet points in their resume 
• Next, Isaiah reveals why PhDs need to craft better resume bullet points to be hired into the industry
• Finally, Isaiah explains what recruiters want to see in PhD resumes

Your resume is your marketing document. The most challenging part of putting the resume together is carefully crafting the bullet points. Think about the last resume or academic CV you created. What did you write for the bullet points? Was any research involved? You either found a job posting you liked or merely thought about a job title you liked and started crafting bullet points.  

Points that you assumed would sound impressive for that job based on your past experience. Focused on the complex technical skills you learned in academia. Emphasized the number of years of experience you had in your PhD field or other academic field. Didn’t talk to a company who was actually hiring for the role.  

You probably didn’t even look at a job posting carefully.  Just skimmed the posting to get a “feel” for the role. Didn’t perform keyword research.  Or data inquiry. Just you pulled stuff from your memory at the time. This unstructured and sloppy resume strategy is a losing strategy. Hence, your resume is not getting any responses from industry employers.

Communicating your PhD value to the employer in the language of the industry is imperative. Get serious about the information you are writing on your resume. Look at every bullet point from the viewpoint of your audience: the employer. What is the number one thing they care about over everything else? It’s your ability to get hired. To learn the role quickly. Get along with everybody else on the team and fit in with the overall culture of the company. This is what industry employers care about first.

 They want to know that if they hire you, you will not disrupt their current team or their current processes. They care more about what is working already. And who is working for them already than anything you can bring to their organization. The hiring manager’s own job is on the line if they hire a PhD who torpedoes the company’s already highly functioning team. Therefore, your resume will be carefully evaluated to ensure that you are not just another awkward, arrogant or defensive PhD coming out of academia. The only way to ensure that you understand what is important to industry employers is to start every bullet point with transferable skills that these employers prize most. 

Transferable skills are most important. Quantified results are a close second. Recruiters and hiring managers are amused when they see a resume that starts with “10 years of experience in…”. Experience must match achievement. Industry employers ask, You have a PhD? So what? If you have the exact skills the position calls for? So what? You worked with a Nobel laureate? So what? 

Ask yourself “So what?” over and over again as you write your resume bullet points until you get to a result that matters. And then quantify that result. What good are your skills if you haven’t used your skills to achieve anything? Who cares if you have “10 years of microbiology experience” or similar? What have you achieved during those 10 years? Anything at all? 

Academia rewards tenure (not anymore given the free fall of tenure positions in academia), not industry. The good news is you have achieved meaningful results in your academic career. Acknowledge them. The exact result you have achieved matters less than your understanding of the importance of results, And your ability to communicate your results. 

If you’re ready to start your transition into industry, you can apply to book a free Transition Call with our founder Isaiah Hankel, PhD or one of our Transition Specialists. Apply to book a Transition Call here.

The post Crafting Better Resume Bullet Points appeared first on Cheeky Scientist.

Here’s a quick rundown of this week’s episode…

• First, Isaiah discusses why it is important for PhDs to have a pleasing personality
• Next, Isaiah reveals how can PhDs put their best qualities forward
• Finally, Isaiah explains why your professional brand will follow you throughout the entire job search process 

If the number one reason employers aren’t hiring you right now is invisibility, or obscurity. Then ignorance of likability, personality and your own professional brand is the second reason. Likability doesn’t mean winning a popularity contest. Not meaning trying to be nicer, funnier, or more agreeable. The truth is that some people hate all of those qualities, while others value them. Employers want to know if others can work around you for 8 hours. Are you likeable?

The problem with likability – everybody likes something different. This also changes depending on their mood. It doesn’t mean you have to change your personality. Rather it means that you have to put the best qualities of your personality forward.

PhDs can put their best qualities forward through proper communication, both verbal and nonverbal. But which qualities should you put forward in the first place? That’s for you to decide. And once you decide, either actively or passively, these qualities will make up your professional brand. If you give a handful of strangers a post-it note and ask them to write down three things they can always count on you for. As well as three things they can never count on you for. What are the people that know you best going to write down? What are the people who barely know you write down? The whole pattern of their answers is a strong indication of your professional brand. Or how you will come off to employers prior to being hired and certainly after being hired. You could take the above exercise a step further. Ask different questions to tease out exactly how people see you. What three traits describe me best? What did you first think of me when you first met? How has this changed over time? What made it change? 

The key is to understand your current professional brand. How do you come across to others holistically? Once you find this. All you have to do is find an employer who is aligned with your professional brand. Or adjust your professional brand to align with an employer whose brand you value. You will likely end up doing some combination of the two.

Your professional brand will follow you throughout the entire job search process. Although employers want to know if you are likeable enough to work with for the 8 hours starting from your interview. How will they know that? Communicate it on your résumé. Tell as a story in your LinkedIn profile’s Summary section. Showcase by your pacing and tonality on a phone screen. Indicate by your nonverbal cues during video interviews and visits. Show them that you are the best candidate to work with for 8 hours and more.

As a PhD we didn’t spend much thinking about how we were perceived by others behaviorally. At least not in academia. Only obsessed with how logical our arguments were. Does your professional brand say you care more about competency than likability? Or the other way around? Does it say that you are technically superior in a niche field? But underdeveloped in core transferable skills like time management, project management and chain of communication? Or it says that you are management material and should be put in a Senior, Principal or executive-level position? Does it say you need 5 to 8 years of entry-level training first? 

Most importantly, do you know who you are? Or, are you willing to be anything to everyone as long as you get hired? Like an amoeba morphing your personality and goals into whatever others want them to be at the time? Either you’ll decide your professional brand for yourself or someone else will decide it for you. You don’t have to wait until you reach the highest levels of success in business to make this decision. You can make it now.

If you’re ready to start your transition into industry, you can apply to book a free Transition Call with our founder Isaiah Hankel, PhD or one of our Transition Specialists. Apply to book a Transition Call here.

The post What Would It Be Like to Work Next To You For 8 Hours? appeared first on Cheeky Scientist.

Here’s a quick rundown of this week’s episode…

• First, Isaiah discusses why it is important for PhDs to set specific target 
• Next, Isaiah reveals what are some system-oriented skills
• Finally, Isaiah explains what are people-oriented skills that PhDs can leverage 

There are 3 main flavors of transferable skills. Systems-oriented, people-oriented, or self-oriented skills. PhDs must communicate two to three skills from each of these categories. List them on your resume and LinkedIn profile. Be ready to discuss them during the interview process. Connect these skills with experience. Communicate how these transferable skills have helped you achieve relevant results in the past. And how they will help you perform better than other candidates at the job at hand. Your previous academic experience and even life experience is proof that you are an expert in at least one subject or discipline. 

The key is phrasing the skills in a universal way.  If you helped manage your lab’s budget. List “financial acumen” as one of your job skills. Ensured that certain antibodies or other reagents were always in stock in the lab? This is important so that everyone can continue executing their experiments. List “risk mitigation” or “risk management.” 

Do not underestimate the importance of systems in business.

You have systems-oriented skills associated with the expertise. Most likely already listed on your past resumes. Systems are responsible for allowing a business to scale. Systems are imperative. As a PhD, you have lived and breathed systems. The only difference is you have called these systems by different names in academia.

Protocols, procedures, methodologies and lesson plans are system-related skills in academia. As a PhD you have handled those. A PhD-level job candidate understands systems and communicates in today’s job market. Take time to carefully brainstorm. Understand, and communicate the process-based skills that you have during your industry transition. The other potential options include documentation, record keeping, writing standard operating procedures. Others are regulatory acumen, production, quality control, quality assurance, creating return on investments, or simply “systemization”.

People facing skills are important for PhDs. PhDs with people-oriented skills can adapt to sudden changes in circumstances. They can effectively communicate with team members who may or may not be in the same office. Flexible, versatile and well-adjusted even to remote work and decentralized workforce. So, PhDs flexible to work with other personality types in an office. Able to mentor, train and work with people who have less technical expertise than you. Can you work cross-departmentally to accomplish goals that will affect the entire organization? Or handle digital cross-functional collaboration? But, do you know what “organizational behavior” is? People-oriented transferable skills are performance management, change management, personnel development. Others are virtual training, project management, task delegation and chain of communication. 

Employers appreciate people-oriented relevant transferable skills. Indicates to them that you would be a good leader and collaborator. Hard work, initiative and learning quickly are important skills. Some other self-oriented skills include completeness, stress management, innovation, research, technical literacy and autonomy. 

Industry employers need to know if you can collaborate with others and not constantly annoy those around you. And whom other people can respect based on your competency. Self-directed ability to bring your own ideas to the table is important. Strategic thinking and creativity to solve existing problems. are the self-oriented transferable skills that will make you an asset to any organization.

If you’re ready to start your transition into industry, you can apply to book a free Transition Call with our founder Isaiah Hankel, PhD or one of our Transition Specialists. Apply to book a Transition Call here.

The post 3 Flavors Of Transferable Skills appeared first on Cheeky Scientist.

Here’s a quick rundown of this week’s episode…

• First, Isaiah discusses why employers look beyond technical skills
• Next, Isaiah reveals what are the transferable skills
• Finally, Isaiah explains how PhDs can communicate their skills to the employers

PhDs love their technical skills. When I landed one of my first industry jobs, I thought I was adding value to my team by talking about technical skills. Things like “statistical significance”, “reproducibility” and a hundred other academically minded concepts. This language was awkward and irrelevant for the position I was just hired into. My recruiters and colleagues thought, “What is he talking about? Is he trying to teach us a basics stats class right now? We’re not an academic lab functioning on $50,000 a month. Rather we’re a 100 million dollar plus a year company. 

Companies need you to focus on bigger, more business-minded concepts. Like integrating your efforts within their Agile project management system, gaining awareness of their brand. Or helping them develop some new conference collateral, and ensuring the R&D product pipeline stays full. “Agile project management” “brand awareness” “conference collateral” “product pipeline”.  I knew the general definition of these words and understood them a little. But I could not converse intelligently about them relative to the company’s specific goals, products, processes and larger vocabulary. 

If you want to get hired into an industry job, you have to start speaking the language of industry. And this starts with understanding which skills industry employers value the most.  

Transferable skills are the softer skills that transfer from sector to sector, company to company and job to job in industry. PhDs struggle to list even the most basic skills that industry employers are hoping to see. Skills as project management, time management, writing and editing, and market knowledge. These sound too simple. Academia has taught PhDs that simple means less intelligent and less valuable. Most often the opposite is true. Most PhDs do not even list research, analysis, work ethic, innovation, comprehension or problem solving on their resumes or LinkedIn profiles. Why? Too simple. PhDs prefer to list niche-specific skills that sound impressive like fluorescence microscopy, real-time PCR, quantum mechanics, artificial intelligence, machine learning. 

Anything with the words qualitative or quantitative in it. 

Some of the most overworked and underpaid people in the world right now are PhDs Despite all education and advanced technical training, most PhDs are not successful when it comes to their careers. You may have spent your time in academia developing some extraordinarily complex laboratory technique. Or you are an incredible computer programmer. Did you study for two years straight to master a field and then spend several years compiling a thesis that helped push a niche scientific field forward? Great – the technical skills you learned along the way will be obsolete in a few years. Many of them are obsolete right now. 

The labs in industry are gigantic. Each may be the size of a football field. They are full of hundreds of millions of dollars of advanced robotics doing thousands of experiments in real-time. So, the techniques that you do daily in the labs as PhDs are done automatically. Huge amount of data is generated every minute. Face the reality that all of the technical skills learned in academia don’t matter much. The only skills of any value are those related to your ability to understand these robotic systems. Skills to manage them and to manage the technicians working alongside the robotics. Your ability to strategically map out which experiments to run next is important. 

Realize that your transferable skills are more valuable than technical skills. 

If you’re ready to start your transition into industry, you can apply to book a free Transition Call with our founder Isaiah Hankel, PhD or one of our Transition Specialists. Apply to book a Transition Call here.

The post Employers Aren’t Hiring Your Technical Skills appeared first on Cheeky Scientist.

Here’s a quick rundown of this week’s episode…

• First, Isaiah discusses why it is important for PhDs to understand employer attention
• Next, Isaiah reveals what PhDs can do to grab this attention
• Finally, Isaiah explains how can attention help PhDs to be hired in well paying roles

PhDs must have the attention of the employer. What happens if you stop pursuing attention in your industry job search at any time? Then whatever attention you have gained will quickly leave you for another job candidate. Consider the position of the hiring manager or recruiter whose attention you are trying to command. A hiring manager wanting to hire a PhD for a position at the company would want the job to be easy. Considering that at times recruiters are trying to hire job candidates for 12 different positions. On top of this, the need to hire could be urgent. 

This is the state at which you will meet most hiring managers and recruiters. Also consider the fact that the vast majority of hiring managers and recruiters are not PhDs. Of course, neither do they enjoy research. These people are not highly trained researchers like you. They probably have not even read a book since primary school (over 50% of the general population hasn’t). 

Did you think that the hiring managers and recruiters whose attention you are desperately seeking are joyously reading through hundreds of resumes. And doing intensive research in hopes of finding you? Instead, they are skimming through resumes at a rate of 5-7 seconds according to annual resume eye-tracking studies. They are in a hurry. To hire someone who is right at their fingertips. Or someone delivered to them via a silver platter by another employee at their company through an employee referral. 

Getting attention to be hired in the industry does not have to be hard. It’s about showing up in the right places. Places where you are visible to the employers in a professional capacity. 

You can increase attention simply by putting yourself into the right LinkedIn groups. Or other online meetups and forums. Show up to in person networking events and conferences too. You can also put your resume on your own free personal website. Send personal messages to people connected to on LinkedIn. Leverage the bevy of other current and new networking-based social media platforms. Increase your visibility. Keep your ear to the ground in terms of opportunities. 

For now, just start showing up – everywhere.

Reaching out or networking to grab employers attention is not hard. Do not overthink it. There will be time to qualify your connections and job leads later. For now, just get some eyeballs on you. Take a few minutes and do a web search on the definition of impressions, engagement and conversions when it comes to advertising. The impression metric, or reach of an advertisement refers to how many people view that particular advertisement.

When you are looking for an industry job, you are the advertisement. But you currently have no impressions; no eyeballs on you. In advertising, engagement refers to how many people interact with an advertisement. How many clicks does the ad get? And how many people comment on it? How many people drive by the billboard daily? For an industry transition, your LinkedIn engagements are imperative. The number of people you send a message to on LinkedIn. Or have any type of conversation on LinkedIn is your engagement metric. Focus on increasing your impressions. 

Impression leads to attention. Your job candidacy is starved for attention right now. It is also at the top of the hiring funnel from your point of view. By getting attention through impressions, you can start conversations. Set up informational interviews, generate job referrals, get interviews and attract job offers. 

If you’re ready to start your transition into industry, you can apply to book a free Transition Call with our founder Isaiah Hankel, PhD or one of our Transition Specialists. Apply to book a Transition Call here.

The post The Attention-Driven Job Market appeared first on Cheeky Scientist.