Career Club Live with Bob Goodwin
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Career Club Live with Bob Goodwin
Mark Herschberg - Career Club Live
In our upcoming interview with Mark Herschberg, we delve into the transformative power of AI, particularly ChatGPT, in the context of resume and email writing. We explore how ChatGPT provides essential tips for creating an outstanding resume, such as using impactful action verbs and quantifying your experiences to make your CV stand out.
Learn how to leverage ChatGPT for efficient editing of existing resumes and emails, enhancing clarity, removing redundancies, and ensuring sharp and effective communication. Mark introduces an intriguing concept—transforming your accomplishments into exciting, action-oriented statements.
Find out how ChatGPT can assist you in rephrasing sections of your resume to showcase your achievements more effectively. Eager to elevate your professional writing skills and make a lasting impression in the job market? We invite you to join us for this engaging discussion. Discover the untapped potential of AI in your resume and email writing.
#CareerClubLive #AIinJobSearch #ResumeEnhancement #InterviewPrep #AIAssistance #JobSeekingTools #BrainBumpApp #HumanExpertise #CareerGuidance #JobHuntingTips
I know you're gonna find it. You've got to keep on at it. Hi everybody, this is Bob Goodwin, and welcome to another episode of Career Club Live. Today's episode is brought to you by some new free resources we're making available on the website. If you are in job search and looking for some help with networking maybe some things that are holding you back in your job search even what to answer with what's your greatest weakness All those are available for free on the websites. We'd love for you to go start taking advantage of some of those as well.
Speaker 1:I want to let you know that we will be having a webinar starting on October 20th. We have more details to follow on that. And then, lastly, if you're not subscribing to our newsletter, we encourage you to do that. We just very recently revamped that. There's a lot more content on it. We'd love to make sure that you get that every week. So with that, we'll start getting ready for the episode. Today's guest is one of only now two repeat guests that we've had since we've been doing Career Club Live for almost two years. So our guest today.
Speaker 1:I'm going to read this because his background is crazy. Impressive is Mark Hirshberg, and Mark's the author of the Career Toolkit Essential Skills for Success that no One Taught you. He's also the creator of the Brain Bump app, which we'll be talking about in a few minutes. Mark spent his career launching and developing new ventures at startups, Fortune 500's, academia and has over a dozen patents to his name. We could stop right there, but there's more. He helped to start MIT's career success accelerator, where he teaches annually. At MIT. He received his BS in physics, a BS in electrical engineering and a masters in engineering as well, and computer science, focusing on cryptography. At Harvard Business School, Mark helped create a platform used to teach finance at prominent business schools. He also works with many nonprofits, currently serving on the board of Plant A Million Chorals. He's one of the top ranked ballroom dancers. Of course, he was in the country in a listen, New York City, where he's known for his social gatherings, including his upcoming annual Halloween party and his diverse cufflink collection. With that, Mark welcome.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:I am honored to be in that exclusive club of just two people who have been back on your show so we're going to have to update your bio so you can work that in, okay, because I mean I wouldn't want to shortchange you on that. But in all seriousness, I'm not welcome. You're just a plethora of knowledge and your insights and we've gotten to know each other even more over the past year and a half since you first appeared on Career Club Live. It's really a pleasure to have you back, so thank you.
Speaker 2:Thanks again for having me.
Speaker 1:No, 100%. So are you getting ready for your Halloween party?
Speaker 2:I am just starting to do the planning and preparation for it and just hoping we don't see any COVID spikes. Because one thing about a New York City apartment at my parties we are elbow to elbow, you are inches from other people, and so if I see the numbers rise I may have to postpone it, which would kill me. But hopefully we can get the Halloween party in before the fall COVID spike.
Speaker 1:I hope you can. I hope you can Very quick. Can you tell me just a little bit about plantamilion corals?
Speaker 2:This is a wonderful nonprofit started by Dr David Vaughn. He is an expert at growing corals. Now what's been happening in our oceans? Of course, temperatures have been rising and corals you may have read they've been bleaching, they're dying out, and corals are the cities of the sea.
Speaker 2:Most marine life is around corals and so if we're losing the corals, we're losing a lot of the ocean population. We're losing the places they come together to find food and reproduce. So making sure we have strong coral colonies very important, and what David has figured out is a way to fast grow coral so we can basically have them reproduce in the lab and create lots and lots of them, grow them to a level where we can now put them in the sea. It's kind of like fostering kittens or puppies, where you take care of them for a few weeks and then you can send them out, in those cases, to other families. We can put them in the sea and we're picking species that are more temperature tolerant. So this is a wonderful 501 3C nonprofit and we are trying to repopulate the coral in the seas to help keep our ecosystem working.
Speaker 1:You and I are going to follow up on that one. That's very cool. So among your, you know, one of the things that we didn't talk about in your intro is that you are also a chief technology officer and you serve as a CTO fractionally. You've done it full time and so, as you and I were talking a few weeks ago, we went down the road of AI because obviously that's on the tip of everybody's tongue, and so today's episode is kind of beyond two passion points for you and me. One is the technology piece, but the second one is career. And do you mind just giving people because I mentioned the career toolkit book just briefly, but do you mind giving folks just kind of a brief overview of the thesis of the book, and then we can kind of dive into our topic.
Speaker 2:There are a number of skills that we have all heard about, skills like networking, negotiating, leadership important skills that no one ever actually taught us. And so this book has 10 skills, 10 chapters. It has career planning, leadership, networking, communication, management all these skills. Each chapter they stand alone, so you don't have to read in order. You can say I'm going right to that networking chapter, right to the negotiation chapter. Each one helps you do a mental shift how to think differently about that skill, and then concrete, actionable things that you can do to get better. And so that's the book, and the tips from the book are also available in the app that we'll be talking about later as well, which is a free app.
Speaker 1:Cool, awesome, yeah, and we'll be showing a QR code and some other things to make it easy for people to locate the book and the resources. But so today's Venn diagram is technology meets career stuff.
Speaker 1:And obviously at Career Club we're working a lot with folks who are actively in job search or currently employed and not in love with their job and are starting to kind of explore and take control of their career to identify a role that's more meaningful to them. So we're not going to do a total primer on AI, but just some of the tools that are out there today. Some people will be familiar with. Maybe a couple of folks won't be quite as familiar with, but we talked a little bit about lists like ChatGPT, bard, jasper on the graphic side there's Dolly other tools or things that you would sort of just add to the arsenal of AI.
Speaker 2:Now this list is growing nearly every day. I, a couple of times a week, get some email on one of the threads and tech communities I'm on about oh, here's a new tool. I'm forgetting names, unfortunately, but some of the ones that I've seen that have been a little more useful are ones that help you create PowerPoints, because many of us have to do presentations or jobs. I know my PowerPoint skills. I can put things on there, but I can't make it look great. These things will just do layouts and make it fantastic. I already use it for images because now I can get free, untarget images, but they can do whole PowerPoint presentations, the layout and the formatting and the styling.
Speaker 2:Those of us in technology there is co-pilot, many of us who are coding. Now we've got that little angel on our shoulder who's saying, oh wait, do this, change that? Oh, thanks, I totally forgot about that. We'll probably see similar tools, not just encoding, but in other areas. We're going to see some of the coming months in areas like Finance for Law saying, oh, don't forget about this. Some of those tools already exist. Pre-publication of LLMs. They're just more narrow in scope.
Speaker 1:Yeah, just with chat GPT, because that's probably the best known one at this point. There's 3.5 and 4.0, and 4.0 is the paid version. I think it's $20 a month for subscription to that, a little bit more updated. I think the free version of chat GPT is updated through September of 2021. In 4.0, I believe this is a year advance from that, so September 2022. To your point, some of these tools are actually just plugins on top of some of these existing platforms. So you said co-pilot. Well, there's a resume. Co-pilot is one of them. Again, for very little money, if any money, you can download the plugin, take advantage of the most current version of chat GPT and then have the use case inspired plugin on top of that to help coach on writing a resume, as an example.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's certainly one use case. The thing to recognize is that. Just a few things when I emphasize this, some base knowledge. First, knowledge is a key word here, or rather the lack of knowledge. I was actually just not a call with a bunch of technologists. Remember that even though data has been fed in from certain dates and, depending on your version, getting different dates and it has more training data, the system itself doesn't have knowledge. It does not understand, it does not get this concept. It is in some sense, a giant autocomplete. This is important because for whatever we employ it, whatever purpose, it doesn't understand the way we understand. It's just saying I see a lot of these words go together and that's why I'm recommending it Now for things like our resume. Fantastic Resumes aren't super complex, deep things and there's reason words tend to go together on resumes. But as you use it for more complex things, just recognize it doesn't have knowledge and this is why, for example, we see hallucinations. We see it make things up as we talk through this conversation. Recognize that, whatever you have it, do you have to be that final check? You have to go in and say wait a second, does this make sense?
Speaker 2:There's a now famous example of the lawyer who said I'm going to have chat GPT write up this brief for me, this motion. It was the right idea because it's good at doing something that's templated. That's well. Here's the process. You think about resumes. They're very structured. All of our resumes look the same and most legal motions look the same, but it's the details about how many years you worked at this job, at this company or in his case, it was this case he's citing. Chat GPT doesn't know that, doesn't have knowledge. It just said well, I know I need to insert a name, and then there's a verse and then there's another name and so I'm going to make up a name. Or Johnson appears a lot. I don't know what name was used. It's like, oh, let's do Johnson versus Smith because those are common names and made one up. So when you use it for your resume, same thing you're going to have to do that check because there's no underlying knowledge.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a great call out and I think that for folks that have been playing with this, even just a little bit, you start to see that it's good at starting something for you.
Speaker 1:What it's maybe less good at is taking you all the way to bright. So I think it's a great call. One of the things that I've noticed and I don't know if this is in your domain or not, but is Bard, which is Google's version of LLM, is actually more current so it's actually as current as Google is right now and have found that it can be better for things that are of a more factual nature versus chat GPT, which is not an original thing, I'm going to say is more of a word calculator, versus Bard, which actually, in my experience, is less a good word calculator and is better at a little bit of facts, a little bit of knowledge, because Google has a little more knowledge, bias and just hey, all these words appear together. So we'll talk about a use case in a few minutes. But did you have any background experience with the difference between Bard and chat GPT?
Speaker 2:I've used primarily chat, GPT and then the Bing equivalent. I have not personally spent more than probably 10 minutes on Bard, so I probably can't talk about what's going on there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so what's kind of came over on, because there's you mentioned resumes. That's probably a good place to start. You know, it's a very good use case for chat GPT because, as you say, resumes are templated. They tend to have words that would go together. It knows best practices for resumes, like starting with an action verb, like quantifying experiences. We've had very good luck, you know, just showing people, hey, give me best practices for writing a resume, and here's 11 bullets that are all good, they're true, to just start getting people's minds organized, not just on the outline of what a resume should be, but actually the content of what it should be.
Speaker 2:And that's certainly a common way things get used. In fact, a lot of my writer friends will say, well, I don't want AI to write the story for me because that feels wrong, but how can I use it? And they'll ask it I'm going to write an essay or an article on this topic. What are some things I should think about? And they're not using it to write all of it, saying, well, here's three or four points to keep in mind. So you're talking about something similar here. Right? What are good techniques that I should use when writing a job description, when summarizing a resume, whatever? Now, in theory, we could get the same thing with a web search, because if you just say what's the search, you're going to see. We've seen lots of content. You know top 10 resume writing tips or three ways to make your resume stand out and what this is doing. It's kind of amalgamating and summarizing, so you don't have to look at 20 things. You can see the summary of all that and more that's read. Now, that's a very common technique. I'm going to give you another technique, which is taking what you have and then rewriting it. Now, this is a technique.
Speaker 2:I've seen people do this a lot with emails, and you can do it with your resume as well. If you've ever had one of those times where you fire off an email, you're like, oh, I'm so angry and you're right this email. And if you've done this a few times, you start to say wait, I should not press send yet. No, this is going to come back to bite me. I need to cool off, and so a technique you can use now is to say to one of these LLMs here's my email. Make this sound more polite, less hostile or more differential to the senior executive about to send this off to, and it can help rephrase it.
Speaker 2:And you can do that with parts of your resume as well, where you can say here's what I wrote. How do I make this seem more exciting? Or like I accomplished more and more action oriented, as you noted, and it's going to give you some suggested rephrasing. You could even take in say here's some other stuff they did in the job. Here's the seven things I accomplished. You think of the bullet point version. How would you put this into a narrative and then see if we can turn out two or three sentences on that?
Speaker 1:So that is a very important thing that you're talking about, mark. So thank you because, well, we may not dwell on this for 15 minutes. For people who are listening or watching this, what Mark is sharing is, like, really really important, is it?
Speaker 1:can take your existing work and then you ask it for recommendations on how can I rephrase this, how can I make this more impactful. But it's not as a mind reader, it doesn't know your life, so only you can tell it. You know those kinds of things, but what it can help you do is express them in the most effective way possible, because the reality is most of us aren't good writers. I mean, what do we mark like in a fifth grade level? Or I mean seriously, I think that's kind of common. So it's like well, why don't we let it be good? It would. It's good at again, kind of going back to a word calculator. Nobody feels bad about using the calculator. It's like I don't know what 13,797 divided by 52 is. It does you know your calculator can figure that out on the fly. Chat GPT is really good. Here's what I'm trying to accomplish. Can you make it better?
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and so we have to recognize I've actually compared it to a calculator. Now there's some other implications of this and I calculator. I'm suspecting most of us, including you and I, aren't even allowed to remember. When calculators came out, there was the big fear where everyone said, well, now no one's going to need to know how to do math and we're going to be a nation of people can't do. It Turns out many of us unfortunately still can't do math, but not because of calculators, for other reasons. But people like myself.
Speaker 2:I spent a lot of time studying math. I used to be very good at it. I'm probably not as good. I can't do the long division in my head the way I used to, and that's okay. I have calculators for that and I don't need to do that by understand what's going on underneath. And so the same thing here when we use it for writing, for writing resumes or essays or emails or anything else. As long as you understand. What am I trying to do with this resume? What's the purpose, what do I need to convey for this resume to be effective? Then whether you write a particular word or sentence is less important. So, just like with the calculators, totally use it, but that doesn't mean you can abdicate that fundamental understanding of what it needs to do and how you hope to see it do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so that's just really really good advice. And we were working with a client yesterday on a resume and she and then this is again where I think a lot of folks struggle is they've tried to cram everything that they've ever done Right You're smiling because it's really common, because we don't leave anything out and who knows when that's going to be the one thing that somebody's interested in. But we took just a really dense resume and dropped it into chat GPT and said please edit this for length and clarity. I think the idea of resume is something under a thousand words and this was like 1400. And so there were a lot of redundancies, things that just weren't helpful, didn't actually drive any additional impact or clarity. And you know how fast it works Like in 10 seconds it's like and you've got something that's way cleaner, much more readable, creates white space, makes it easier to actually just read, and we found that to be an excellent use case for chat GPT.
Speaker 2:Under percent. And that's the example of where you're using it like that calculator to just it's going to do the multiplication faster than me. You can do similar things against not the resume, but against the job description. Imagine you have a job description and you can ask it to. You just tell you what to think of the job description, what's coming across. In fact you can do this.
Speaker 2:I'm always a believer, even though I'm a CTO, that we sometimes overuse technology. I remember years ago someone asked me to create this process to track certain things that this one assistant of his was doing. So why don't you just get a whiteboard and just run the whiteboard, do these three things and he'll just check them off as he does it. Like, do we have to create software for this? So what I'm going to tell you. There's also an easier version of what I'm going to say, where you can just use word counters or those word cloud techniques.
Speaker 2:But imagine taking we've seen in sub job descriptions a whole page about the company, about the role, and if you take that and put into some type of analysis which could just be a word counter, cloud or it could be something a little more sophisticated, like one of these LLMs say what's the tone that's coming across?
Speaker 2:Because we've all seen companies like, hey, we like to have a lot of fun and yeah, you can bring your dog to work, and okay, you're telling me this is more of a casual fun place and when someone is, some other thing is talking about the mission. We believe the future is based on this and we can solve this problem and we can deliver this to all of our customers and we can make this change. Okay, that sounds like a very mission driven company and you want to know in your messaging whether that's in a cover letter or maybe in your resume or even just when you interview how to match the tone that they're projecting. Now, one caveat with this is that the person who wrote the about the company or even about the job might not be the person interviewing you. We know sometimes HR and the hiring manager can live on different continents, literally and figuratively, so you may have a disconnect there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So it's interesting that I was reaching over. I grabbed a highlighter because in our job search masterclass and we're updating this right now for this reason we instruct people like get the job description, get a highlighter out and just start looking for what are the themes that are emerging from this, and it's a very effective technique. Chatgpt can do that for you on the fly. Again to your point. This is not abdicating ownership or responsibility for the findings and doing a sanity test on stuff, but it is really good at saying hey, here's the three things that this job description and this company really seem to be focused on. You should make sure that in your interview prep or when you're customizing your resume, that these points are really coming across.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 1:Yeah so maybe that's a good place to pivot, which is there are tools today where you can drop in the job description here, drop in your 85% done resume here, and then basically it says it acts like the ATS, the applicant tracking system that the company has, except in reverse. So again for listeners, everybody's, I think, pretty familiar at this point with applicant tracking systems, which are just computer programs that are reading your resume and then comparing it to the job description, some other qualifications that they might have for the role, scoring your resume and then kind of figuring out on the fly if you're in the key pile or the discard pile.
Speaker 1:Well, you can if you know the game you can play it in reverse and say, okay, well, based on this job description and my resume, show me where there's gaps. So one of the programs is jobscanco. It's free and you can just do that and it goes. Oh, your resume scored a 45 out of 100. Job descriptions looking for all these key words, hard skills, soft skills. You don't have these. Or it said this eight times, you said it one time and say well, before I go to all the effort of applying, doing the cover letter like you said, mark, let me at least align my resume as closely as possible with what I know they're asking and looking for. Yeah, that's exactly it.
Speaker 2:And it's again. It's this you're automating the highlighter. It's things that you need to do, but it's okay to use the calculator to just do it faster.
Speaker 1:Exactly, exactly. So One of the things what are use cases? Mark in your opinion or experience that people may not intuitively be thinking of AI as a help for, as a calculator for that they could be using it for?
Speaker 2:Another example especially when applying to jobs, a lot of companies like to see you've done your research on us, on what's going on. We of course recommend to job seekers I'm sure you've done this many times look at, perhaps, their social media feeds, look at their recent posts, look at recent press releases. There's especially as you move into more senior positions, as you start to get into management positions, they're looking not just can you do the job, but do you buy into the company and do you align to us? Now that can be a lot of work reading through the website and reading through all their postings there. Again, you can take some of that text and drop it into an LOM and say summarize for me what's been going on.
Speaker 2:Where are some of the key things in the last? Here's the last 10 postings. What are the five key things? I should know that's going on. And now you can tie that into your conversations, whether it's the emails you're using when you're sending with a cover letter or just conversations you're having in phone screens or elsewhere to show I'm up to date. I've been paying attention to your company. But again, the calculator just helped you do that math faster.
Speaker 1:Well, here's a great. You should remind me of one Mark that I hadn't thought of before. But for anybody that's looking at a public company, you can listen to the 45 minutes of their earnings call. Or you could go to Seeking Alpha or another site, download the transcript from the earnings call, drop it into ChatGPT and say tell me what are the five things that are the most important to take from this earnings call, and again on the fly, it's going to do your research for you that any good interviewer is expecting that you've done your research. That's going to be, in some cases, a point of differentiation, in a lot of cases, table stakes. But did you not listen to our and just going up and through our investor presentation? How much do you really want this job?
Speaker 2:You can be more directed. So think about what you're trying to do when you're selling yourself and how you're going to deliver value. But you can go to obviously summarizing or what are the key takeaways? And go further and say what are the risks the company's facing. This is prestandard on earnings call.
Speaker 2:The analyst will ask well, you're projecting this revenue. What might cause that to go wrong? And they'll say things like recession or supply chain issues or whatever it happens to be for this industry and company. So you can ask what are the likely risks the company is facing? What are the big initiatives, what are the growth drivers? And you'll hear things like initiatives oh, we're opening a new factory, we're launching this. Or growth drivers we're seeing, we're expecting a lot of revenue coming from this line. And now, here again, as you're having this conversation with the company, whether an actual verbal conversation or through emails you can tie in to what's happening at the company and show how you will help them hit that revenue goal or help mitigate the risk from some of these things they're seeing. So you're aligning directly to their needs.
Speaker 1:That is such a great point, mark. Thank you, because a lot of times when we're a lot of times always, we're coaching our members. We're talking about, basically, there's three value drivers at a company. Did you help them make money, save money or mitigate risk? And so you can take that earnings call, drop it into chat GPT. You can say, hey, I'm interviewing for a digital marketing role or whatever it is. How could I apply my skills to help this company address their strategic issues or help them make money, save money or mitigate risk? It will do some heavy lifting for you. Again, we're not talking about outsourcing our thinking. We're using it to stimulate our thinking, to think of some creative, differentiated questions and or responses that we might provide to the company during the interview process.
Speaker 2:And you could even use it, for example, given this company, given this interview question, because we know what the interview questions are, there aren't surprises here you can say how might I try to answer this?
Speaker 2:Now, of course, any of these systems is not going to answer it as well as you can or should. But this goes back to the example of my writer friends who are saying don't write the essay for me, but what are some themes I should think of or some points I should include when I write this, so you can say, given this question, for this context of where the company is going or what's going on, what are some things I should emphasize in my answer? That might say you should emphasize that the company is talking about how they're going to be hiring 5,000 people over the next few quarters. You should emphasize you've hired before and now you might say, okay, great, I'll think about what I've done. You might say, oh well, I haven't hired before, okay, not helpful, and that's fine. But you can now start to think through some of your interview question answers with this context and have chat, gpt or another LLM, just be your interview partner, your interview trainer.
Speaker 1:So thank you, mark, and again, for people that are watching and listening to this, what Mark just shared, I think, is another one of the giant use cases for using these tools. So, taking the role, taking the responsibilities, taking your background, taking the company's background and asking it what are some interview questions I might expect and what would be based on my experience? Your strong, compelling answers to those questions and it is amazing what it comes back with. And again, it's not a script, but it's definitely the giving you a major head start to getting to a really clear, compelling answer that's going to resonate with the interviewer. It certainly won't be for lack of preparation, exactly.
Speaker 2:In fact, one of the things I have often recommended to people is, if you have never interviewed anyone yourself, it is so powerful to be on the other side of the interview process and watch other people and think about wow, that was such a good answer. Okay, now let me understand why, or no, that wasn't a good answer, okay, why? And so I recommend people do mock interviews, not only as the candidate, but either as the interviewer, or there's an interviewer or an interviewee and you're the fly on the wall who can watch. You can really learn a lot from this and I still recommend you do this with people. But you can now use these LOMs as part of it, where it can do that meta analysis.
Speaker 2:Again, given this question, here's my answer what's good or what's bad? I don't know how well they'll be able to do the analysis, but I suspect they can probably do something and start to give you some of that feedback. Now, it's never going to be as good as a human, and that's why we still rely on coaches like yourself and your team. But you're going to take that extra level, but as a starting step, this is something that can just help us down that path with the basics, and then we can really go to coaches like yourself for that higher order to really stand out.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So for some of your more technical or engineering colleagues and I don't know if you're familiar with this, mark have you seen Google's interview warm up tool?
Speaker 2:I haven't seen that one. It's cool.
Speaker 1:So it's free. Basically, you say well, I'm interviewing for a dating analytics role or software engineer role and it's prepped to ask you some very common questions you can verbalize. So you're not typing all this stuff in, because that's not natural. You don't type your answers in an interview. You say your answers in an interview and it's asking as you say. Sometimes there's no big surprises on what people are asking. It's the quality of the answer, and so it's asking some of the common questions that you would expect for somebody in a role like this. And then you press record on the keyboard and you verbalize the answer. It goes OK, let me. And then scores the quality of your answer and gives you recommendations on how you might have made that answer stronger.
Speaker 2:Perfect, looks like they're already doing this. There are tools out there that can do this for you already.
Speaker 1:And again, for people listening, if there's such power in actually saying the words, the way I talk to clients is you can't hum the answer. So if they ask me, then I go no, no, no, that's humming the answer. You're not saying the words and finding where do you get stuck, like all this transition phrase that I'm trying to come up with, or I have trouble saying this word, or whatever the issue might be. You have to say the words. And again, google is not a replacement for live practicing. Gosh, what a great simulator to start getting yourself more comfortable with your answers so that you can practice with real people and get real feedback.
Speaker 2:And to your point. You're absolutely right that speaking is very different than writing because we speak in interview and just our styles are a little different when we speak versus write. So, if you're not using this, what sounds like a great tool from Google which can let you record if you're doing this through other systems, you can record, obviously on your phone or laptop, their ways to record audio. There are more and more tools that can generate a transcription, whether you're using a paid tool, I believe. I haven't tried this myself. I'm pretty sure what you can do is record a YouTube video and YouTube has captioning, I think, in generated transcripts.
Speaker 2:That's right when you sell it If you set the video to private, so you're the only one who can see it. You don't have to worry about oh my God, everyone's going to see my answers but you can generate the transcript effectively for free. There's probably other, more efficient ways to do it, but you're right that when you're doing this, speak rather than write, because that's going to be more natural and more similar to what you'll actually do in a real interview.
Speaker 1:When you're coaching people, mark in teaching and training folks around interviewing and just sort of navigating the interview process which, as you say, is what nobody ever taught you. Where does this is related? Where does creating value projects proof of concept like let me give you a taste of a work product fit into how you might coach somebody?
Speaker 2:You mean during an interview showing work product. I give an example in my book. This is the most amazing employee I hired and she was 19 years old at the time. Not only did she take initiative and reach out to a job we had posted for a full-time position for someone in HR and she ruined, said look, I know you want full-time, I'm looking for an internship. Would you consider me just as an intern? Till you find this person, we thought, sure, this can't hurt and intern, of course, is low cost.
Speaker 2:We were hiring lots of engineers and we're looking for someone in HR to take over a lot of the sourcing candidates and doing the early screens. She showed up and we're interviewing her and probably about halfway through the interview she said can I show you what some things I've done about how I would do this job? We said sure, she pulled out a list. She said here's a list. I looked at your job description. Your hiring lots of these engineers. Here's a list of 20 people I've identified on LinkedIn who are the people I would target. Wow, she's spot on. She said here's an example of the outreach email I would use when pitching them. If you know anything about hiring and tech engineers get 10 emails a day. They're just overwhelmed. You need a really strong email to stand out from that.
Speaker 2:She took an email and she wrote it up. She clearly had read our website, read a little about us and incorporated things about here's why it's awesome to work at our company. Now, it wasn't perfect by any means, but what's happening is we're saying, well, we're hiring a son for the job. First, do they have the basic competency? We're hiring a finance person. Do they have an accounting degree or do they know that? Okay, she had the basic competency. Then the question is can they actually do the job? Anyone can get well in HR. Yeah, you've sourced candidates and you call them or email them. I get the mechanics. Are you good at or not? She just showed us why. Yes, she is. She could potentially be better.
Speaker 2:Again, that email wasn't perfect, but for someone who spent no time learning the company already, she set a very high floor. It showed us she took huge initiative. She blew me away like no other candidate I had seen in 20-some years of hiring. Always, if you can show, don't tell and say here's an example, whether it's here's something I've built on the past that's similar, or I did some thinking, in fact, something I often asked my candidates for senior level roles. If I'm asking you to run a department at some point, I'll say listen, you're going to have a budget of this, like I'll do this with marketing people. If I give you a million dollars next year, given what we've talked about, how would you spend that? Don't ask that for them on the spot, say go off and think and you don't have to do a big write-up. But I want to see how you would approach this to understand how you think. Absolutely, if you can show something, you will be in the top probably 0.05 percent of candidates.
Speaker 1:Awesome. I was hoping you would say that the reason that I bring it up is these tools can help you do that. I love what you said show, don't tell, which is massive. The thing about hiring that I don't think people really completely get is it's a risky proposition. That's why they've got these onerous interview process and you got to talk to seven people, do a personality test, do a case study, final interview with the CEO. Blah, blah, blah. They're so afraid of making the wrong decision. When you do what the shine lady did is, you are like completely minimizing the gap between them, getting to know you and projecting you in that role. You're already showing them what you would be like in that role.
Speaker 1:The connective tissue here to our topic on AI is you can use it for stuff like here's a role that I'm really interested in. Here's my background. Can you write a 90-day first 90 days plan for me? Or? We had mentioned Bard earlier. I put in a company the other day and I said writing a SWAT analysis with them and their top five competitors.
Speaker 1:Now, again, does it need to be fact? Check your legal case. Yeah, you don't want a hallucination and I'll say that's not even a real company or what they do or whatever, but use the tools to create a bespoke work product that is going to blow away the Mark Hirschberg, the company that you're interested in, and exactly what you said it is so differentiated from everybody else, is just pressing play. Here's my standard answer to the standard question versus. Well, actually, I took a little bit of time, thought about you guys, to come up with this. I think this is how I would approach what you guys are doing. My gosh, nobody does this, and these tools make it completely levels the playing field to be able to do something like that without spending 13 hours along the way trying to create it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's spot on that we can use these tools to help accelerate this prototype work because, again, the level we're expecting during the interview is not perfection. We're just seeing first if you're showing any initiative. Again, you are standing out and then you've done something. Importantly, you've spot checked it for any glaring errors, but we don't care if it's perfect, say, okay, I'm seeing how you're thinking. Even if that thinking started to come from AI because you signed off on it, you said, yes, this is what I would put my name behind.
Speaker 1:Yeah, last thing they're going to move on to Brain Bump, which is you kept saying how they're thinking. This is something that we really try and emphasize in the infreender by who's listening. Well, when they ask questions about, tell me about a time when you, the calculus in their head is what's their real problem that they're trying to solve for right now, and can they make the connection between your prior experience and what it is that they're actually trying to do? They don't completely care about what you did in the past, except for the fact that it might relate to what they're working on. What they're hiring is your brain. They want to know how you think, how you problem solve, and so in our example, we're actually projecting into the future. This is how I've solved your problem, not recalling from the past how I solved their problem. That ability to overlay your skills with their current problem is a highly competitive way to interview.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. We know that when you get a brain teaser and I have mixed feelings on brain teasers. Some are fine, others are just terrible questions that shouldn't be used what you should not do is sit there for two minutes and then say 42, you want to talk out loud, you want to show how you think and we're okay if you're going down the wrong path because we're looking at how are you approaching the problem. So to your point, when they're asking, tell me about a time when don't just say, well, I did x y, z or even the, if you use the star method, I did x y, z. And then here is the outcome.
Speaker 2:But talk about why you took that approach. Why did you think it was x y z and not x y q? What was the thinking going into that? Because their situation won't be exactly that, but they understand. Oh, you did z instead of q because of this. The fact that you're even considering that factor, okay, means you'll recognize we're more of that q answer, but you get that. This is what plays into it. So getting to that y, giving that context, makes your answer so much more powerful.
Speaker 1:Okay, so we're going to move off of AI. Is there anything, mark, that we haven't talked about, that you think would be really important before we move on?
Speaker 2:I'll say one last thing. Everyone is asking about what is AI going to do to my career? Here's the thing AI doesn't come in and say I'm replacing this job and not that job. It's not that holistic. It is changing parts of our jobs. So when you think about your career the job you're in now, the next one you want, the job you might want in five years break down what are the tasks.
Speaker 2:Now.
Speaker 2:There are things you do about generating reports, writing code, strategic analysis.
Speaker 2:There are things you do like sending a status report or scheduling a meeting, and so break down what are the tasks, what are the ones that add a lot of value, creating that strategic plan, the ones that may not add value but are necessary, scheduling meetings and then look at what AI can do for these different tasks, because recognize that the ones where AI is good, whether it's higher or low value, if AI is good, just automate that away and your competitive advantage won't be doing that.
Speaker 2:So focus on the other areas where AI isn't as good, particularly if it's a high value task, and that's where you're going to stand out from others in the future, because, just like anyone now can wear some power suit or you can use a power tool, you can turn a screw as fast as anyone else in the world, whether they're stronger or weaker. If you're using a power tool, we all turn screws equally, so there's no competitive advantage to you. I am strong and fast, and that's going to happen to our white collar office jobs. Certain things, where you have the power tool for certain tasks, focus on where you're adding more value.
Speaker 1:I think that is. I haven't heard anybody use that analogy before, mark. I think that's a really, really good one. Yeah, that used to matter before we had power tools. It doesn't matter anymore, so you need to find a new competitive advantage. So thank you for mentioning that. Let's move on, because I want to make sure that we focus on sort of your latest endeavor, because I think it's really interesting. It's called brain bump. Can you explain for us what it?
Speaker 2:is Brain Bump. It's an entirely free app for Android and iPhone. Now here's the problem. How often do we read a book like the Career Toolkit or other business or even self-help books and you say, wow, this is great. So many good things in here. Then, two weeks after you finish the book, how much do you actually remember? As you listen to this episode? We've had some great advice. How much will you remember a week from now? That's a problem.
Speaker 2:Now, I used to take notes on the books I would read, but even then I wouldn't go back, I wouldn't look at the notes. I'd still forget it. The only way you learn is by what's called spaced repetition, which is what we did in school, where I said test is coming up, I should look at the book again or use flashcards. But as adults, we don't do that. I said, okay, well, this is a problem. We're not remembering what we're reading and where you read. Information isn't where you need information. That's a problem. So what if we could take all this information and help you remember it? Or even if you can't remember it, you can access it in seconds when and where you need it. So that's a problem we're solving with BrainBump. Here's how it works. We are taking the key ideas from books, blogs, podcasts, classes, talks, different sources, and putting them into the app. So with my book, for example, all the tips for my book are free. In BrainBump, magi went through my book with a highlighter and he said oh, there's a good point, highlight that sentence. Oh, remember this, we already did that for you. It's all in the app. And then you can go into the app and say I need tips on a certain topic. So my favorite example I have networking tips in the book. Where did you read them? Sitting at home? Where do you need them At that conference or at that event a month from now? So imagine if, as you're walking into that conference, you pull the app out of your pocket, you open it up and everything's tagged by topic. So you hit that networking tag, there are the networking tips right on your phone. And as you're walking into the convention center, wherever you just go, okay, there's a tip. Oh, there's a tip. Okay, right, yep, do that. Okay, got it. And now it's all there, top of mind.
Speaker 2:Or let's say, you get a job because you have followed Bob's great advice and you've used the career club. Like, great, I got the job I wanted. Ooh, I'm a first time manager and I can't say, ooh, wait, I have a meeting quick. What do I need to do to manage? You wanna remember this stuff? So what we have is like a daily affirmation, it's like a daily reminder, but instead of just some generic. You'll be great. It's one of the tips that you've read from my book or something else in there. It's like I want a management tip at 9 am each day, or I have a strategy meeting Wednesday at 3 pm. I wanna get a strategy tip Wednesday at 2.55 pm. So you're getting contextually relevant information when and where you need it, and it's all free.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So it's one of the reasons that we wanted to, to make sure that we mentioned this, because we'll be putting our job search class, making your own weather, into brain bump, because where you read it and where you need it what a great expression are not the same place. That's awesome. But you're right, I mean I can read a great book and a week later I forgot, and it's not with me because I don't drag this around with me everywhere I go. So it's like, oh man, what did he say? And to be able to have that at your fingertips, that's amazing by itself. But then in the fact that it's tagged, so the data's attributed, and to be able to go find similar content or on a topic that I need to know something about right now, but then the kind of just the little reminders and, like you said, dog on it you're gonna make it and so that's not really what I needed to hear today.
Speaker 1:Versus two ears, one mouth, use them in that order. Just a prompt to listen, to be a good listener Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. I love that quote. I forgot it already and now there comes up. That's how we internalize and we need what you call it space repetition.
Speaker 2:Space repetition, or what we do is passive space repetition, because you don't even need to open the app to get those reminders.
Speaker 1:There you go, so I think we're gonna flash something up here a second, but so people can download the app. You said it's free on both Android and iOS.
Speaker 2:The app is free on both platforms. So you can go directly to the store or you can go to brainbumpappcom, and if you go to that website, we've got the QR code up brainbumpappcom and there you can download the app for free. We've got links to the stores. There's a 90 second video showing how it works. So you'll see. Okay, this is what I do. All the content on there is free. So the tips from my book? I don't check. Oh wait, did you buy the book? Nope, take the tips, use it. All the stuff on there is completely free and you've got it in your pocket anytime you need it.
Speaker 1:Well again, we live in a very information rich society and it's related to our AI conversation, To use your word from earlier. It's synthesizing all this great content and making it much more accessible and on demand, which is what people need. We don't need more information as much as we need access to the right information at the right time, and that's what I think is cool about brainbump.
Speaker 2:It's exactly right, because when you take a great course, like making your own weather, you've got it in there, and then you're saying, okay, wait, I'm trying to remember he said something. You don't want to spend hours redoing the whole thing, we don't have time for that. If you could just get what was that one piece? And whether you're searching because it's tagged by the topic you need or there's literally a search term. So, for example, in my book I use the parable of the blind man and the elephant. It was something about there was an elephant. You just type in the word elephant and okay, right, one of these three tips, yep, there's the one, and you're getting what you need. When because this is the important thing If you can't retrieve the information within seconds, you're not gonna spend the time trying to get it.
Speaker 1:So my can't believe we're gonna say this. My grandmother used to say waste not, want not, but she was also a massive collector of things. And my brother said but the corollary to waste not, want not, is find not, use not. So if I can't find it, that might as well have never had it Right. And so, again, this is just a great way for people to be the access, the information that you want and need in the moment when you want it or need it. So, again, it's great seeing your CTO and nerdy engineering skills coming out, and just for a lay person like me, in a super useful use case.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we can put it all together. I'm gonna steal that phrase from your brother and grandmother. And we know, with brain bump, if you can't get the information in less than 10 seconds and we try to do it even faster you're not gonna do it. So we try to make everything a quick retrieval, but really what it's doing is think about you've invested hours reading a book or taking a class. If your retention is 5% or less, how many hours did you just waste? How many hours are not being productive If using the app, if we even get that to 10%? But we can do much better because you've got all of it there, accessible when you need it, and you're moving closer to 80 or 90% effective retention. It might not be in your head, but it's kind of like the way we use our phones. I don't remember it, but that's okay, I can Google it. Okay, don't remember it, but I can find it in brain bump in less than 10 seconds. All of a sudden, you're getting a much better ROI on the time you spent listening or reading.
Speaker 1:No, it's a great, great point. Well, mark, we could keep going forever, but if we could just flash up those QR codes one more time for folks, and so either the book which is on the left-hand side of the screen here, or the brainbumpappcom QR code which is on the right, would really encourage folks to check both of those out. Mark, it is a pleasure, as always, if you're nice to me. Who knows, maybe there's a third appearance in the offering, but it's always just a real joy to talk to you. You're a super smart guy, but you're very connected to practical use cases for people, which is what I appreciate as much as anything about you. So, again, just thank you so much for coming on today.
Speaker 2:Thank you again for having me. Let's go for that three Pete next year.
Speaker 1:Come on, come on. So, everyone, thank you so much for taking a few minutes. If you're watching this on YouTube, please subscribe and comment and like it really does help. And if you happen to be listening to this on your favorite podcast platform, ratings and reviews help as well. And again, please make sure that you sign up for the Career Club newsletter, where we've got lots of great tips and previews of great guests like Mark coming on with our podcast. So with that, thank you everyone. And again, mark, thank you. I know you're gonna find it. You've got all you need, so just keep going.
