Good morning everyone. Good morning. Good morning. I'm Jerry Pat Gabbard and I'm proud to serve as the district five chair, we're thrilled to have so many people here for our first 2024 district five together. You might be wondering what a together is essentially it's a series of virtual get togethers and conversations about topics that affect our profession. Essentially, it's just an opportunity for us to meet and learn from our peers and so we're really excited that so many of you are interested in this topic today. If you have topics that you think that would be great for together that you would love to learn more from your peers about we encourage you to drop us a note or even put it in the chat here this morning. Just a little bit about our logistics will run about an hour we'll try to conclude right at 10 o'clock, just to keep everybody on time. The first 20 minutes 25 minutes or so we'll hear from our presenter, and then for the last few minutes we will jump into q amp a. So if you do have a question. As we move through the presentation, feel free to put that in the chat. Many thanks to Sue frost and Jeremy Mishler for their help and and putting all of this together today and all of our behind the scenes folks at case we're really grateful for you. And thanks to Sue and Jeremy for their willingness to help me monitor the chat. It's my pleasure to introduce today's speaker Alex brochures Alex serves as a senior talent acquisition consultant at the Ohio State University. Alex will be sharing more about accelerating our careers, how we can reflect on our current career and taking the next steps for the future. Alex, the floor is yours. My face right on the screen. That's so great. Hi, everyone. Like it was said, my name is Alex brushes. I'm going to try to share the screen as I talk to always fun to attempt to do. And of course, it's not showing up. There we go. Yeah, I'm the senior talent acquisition consultant here at Ohio State University. I also just as a funny little joke to myself, added on here, the owner of bro consulting because my joke has always been if you've been in higher ed for five years, you claim to be a consultant. So when you get to start your own consulting firm. So I have that on there as well. A little bit about me today. So first thing is I got my master's in student affairs and higher education from Miami University and to 2014 is when I graduated. I worked at Ohio State as a hall director for a few years before I started the Masters of Human Resources program here at Ohio State's and finally achieved my long term goal of becoming a buckeye. It just took a little longer than I wanted, about 30 years. And then I made that happen. At that time, I graduated into the pandemic. So 2020 and, you know, was like had all these ideas of grandeur of what I would do and, you know, had been doing all this really cool stuff. And then the pandemic happened and I could not find a job at all. And so I as my little fun fact that I like to tell people, I actually ended up in the final stages of the FBI special agent program. And so, you know, ended up almost becoming an FBI special agent until they talked to my partner and said, Hey, don't worry, if your partner dies, we'll take care of you. And my partner was like, OK, this was fun. But this Netflix dream is over. And so instead of the FBI special agent program, I became the lead teacher recruiter at Columbus City Schools. After that, I worked at Columbus State Community College as a talent acquisition coordinator and then worked at ExxonMobil in their talent acquisition area. Do more like data analytics kind of focused work. After that, I worked at Amazon corporate working as a scientist recruiter. So recruiting the folks that do the really fancy stuff who make more money than my family has ever seen. And so I got to do that work. Unfortunately, I was laid off in January of 2023. It would have been with 20,000 of my best friends in talent acquisition. And so I was lucky enough to get the opportunity at Ohio State to return to my alma mater and do some good work in our advancement shop. So that's why I, I guess, can speak about these things and talk about them. I also had to have a little side gig, as you would call it. I wouldn't call it consulting necessarily, but a side gig where I do assist like teachers, higher education folks with career consulting. And so I've helped everyone from graduate students all the way up to deans and VPs and stuff like that. And that's really what's going to kind of drive our conversation today, because 25 to 30 minutes is not a lot of time to talk about accelerating your career. And so when I was thinking about the different topics, I was like, OK, what can we talk about? What makes the most sense? What can I give you to utilize in your own career? So we'll actually, as we get to it, go through an activity that I use with pretty much all of my clients all the way from grad to deans and higher level individuals that I think will help you figure out what that next step is by looking at your previous experience and also just give you some tips along the way. And obviously with the Q&A, this presentation is much longer than what I'll show you and kind of goes over a lot of just different tips about job searching and career advice and things like that. So we can talk about, you know, whatever you'd like. And then just an important note before we get started. You'll notice on the screen here we have three very important individuals in my family. So on the left, your right, left, it's still the left, is Bernie, who is my miniature dachshund dog. He just turned nine. On the other side is Vincenzo, who is our cat. And then in the middle there, I don't know if you can see my mouse, but this is my friend's dog named Basil. And Lucille is on the right there of the screen, barely hiding her eyes to look at Basil. So that really describes Lucille the best way that I could. So that's a little bit about the importance of my pets in my life. So. All right. So we're talking a little bit about, you know, career advancing, career trajectory. And I do want to take a little quick moment just to talk about it from, I guess, really my personal professional standpoint is that career trajectory is whatever you want it to be. I think we often get wrapped up into what society or what TikTok or Instagram or the hustle culture and all those things kind of that influence on our lives. And what I want to encourage you to think about is that your career and your future career is what you want it to be. And so, you know, if you want to be the greatest pet parent there ever was and stay at home pet parent, that's great. That is a great career trajectory to focus on. If it's you want to become the next CEO of a big 10 organization. Also a great opportunity. Right. And so I want to encourage you to not be influenced by by other folks and really, you know, essentially run your own race in this process. And so when we think about the that idea, right, of career trajectory, there's two kind of extremes. Right. And the thought process being you're going to probably fall within these extremes somewhere. But I do want to provide you with those two extremes are just as you're thinking about kind of your next steps. So on one end, right, there's the I do what I want. You know, I kind of follow my own pathway. I encourage you to think about the words of Megan Thee Stallion, which I'm a huge Megan Thee Stallion fan who talks about, you know, counting my money ain't making you rich. And in one of her songs and really that idea of you have to do what's best for you and looking at what someone else has accomplished or what someone else is doing. Someone else's highlight reel essentially through social media should not impact your goals and your focus. Right. So my goal of, you know, hopefully one day being the lead of a global talent acquisition organization or department or division is not influenced by my fellow MHRM students. Right. That I graduate with my cohort and where they're at in their career. Right. I don't think, OK, well, I've noticed that Emily is really high up in this area. Maybe I should have made this pivot. No, I'd focus on what I'm doing at this time. The other end being that kind of extreme of like making your career and your life kind of your complete focus. I read a book called Think and Grow Rich. And if you haven't read it, I definitely encourage it. And in one of in that book, one of the stories it tells is about Thomas Edison's assistant, which hopefully, you know, Thomas Edison, if you don't, I encourage you to learn about him if you haven't already from high school. But Thomas Edison's assistant was a person from Europe who learned about Thomas Edison and was like, I know what I want to be. I want to be Thomas Edison's assistant. And so everything he did from then on went to becoming Thomas Edison's assistant. He sold his car. He did all these different things just to afford the trip over. He never met him. He never talked to him. But that was his main goal. And he actually did become Thomas Edison's assistant because he focused primarily his entire life on becoming that. And so when you're thinking about your career trajectory, thinking about how is the work I'm doing now, how is what I'm doing now impacting and going to influence and be strategically connected to what my future goals are? So those are kind of your extremes and thinking about where do you kind of fall in those extremes? Are you, hey, I just want to stay in my lane and do what I want to do and not worry about anybody else? Or is it I need to be strategically focused so that I reach my goal, whatever that goal happens to be? And just as a fun little note here, because I am a goofy guy at my heart, PowerPoint likes to suggest different screens for you to use. And because I use the term Megan the Stallion, it suggested that I put horses on the background of this. And so if anyone's really worried about the future of A.I. and taking our jobs, I think this is a great example of how I think we're going to be fine because, yeah. All right. So all of that is to say, let's do this kind of activity, this exercise, if you will, around your future trajectory and kind of future planning. And so the idea of this is that, you know, past experience is hopefully going to dictate future performance and future kind of enjoyment. Right. So what you've liked in the past, you're probably going to like in the future. Right. And so that's kind of what we're going to use as our framework for our activity for the day. And so if you have a piece of paper, if you just want to write on your computer or whatever, when we use the next like five, 10 minutes, I'm looking at the screen here to see what that time is. So here's the questions I want you to answer for yourself. What are the parts of your job you like? Right. What are the parts of your job you don't like? That is an important thing to think about. And then probably, in my opinion, most importantly, what are the parts of your job you tolerate? Because I think that is a very important distinction in our work, that there's always going to be a part of our jobs we like, we don't like. And then there's parts of the job we do because, like, we have to do it and we don't love it. Like, but it's OK. You know, they're like, I don't know if any of you have experienced the workday. I don't love going into workday every day and having to navigate that system because it's kind of a pain sometimes. But I tolerate it because I recognize it's part of my job and I got to do it. And I, you know, I'm not mad when I do it. I want you to take stock of your KSAs, which are knowledge, skills and ability, which are as a terminology. And when you're thinking about recruiters and hiring managers, that's essentially what we're looking for when we create candidate profiles. And so you're going to ask yourself the question, Alex, what is a skill versus an ability? And my response is even the researchers don't know, like they don't have a good explanation of the difference between the two. So define it for yourself and then write it out from there. I always ask candidates or clients to think about, are you a live to work? Are you a work to live kind of person? And that's not from like a financial standpoint. I'm talking from like an intrinsic motivation standpoint. Right. Like, are you working at your job so that, you know, it benefits your outside job? Is your goal of your work to just essentially make money and be able to fund the things outside of work that give you energy? Or is it your work itself gives you energy? And so that's kind of where you focus your extrinsic versus intrinsic energy from that. So I think it's important just to know and to think about maybe even just where you are currently. Do you get, you know, energy from your work or is that energy or the work that you do give you the ability to have the energy outside of work? And also, this is a good thing. Are you limited geographically? Right. Do you have family or children or whatever it happens to be located in a specific area? So you can't, you know, be more than a two hour flight from them or something like that. And recognizing things change. Right. Like I wanted to move to Florida when I was in college. That was my main goal. And that definitely didn't happen. I've only stayed in Ohio. So things change. Right. And so I want us to take the next like 10 minutes, maybe a little less, maybe a little more to answer these questions for yourself. And we'll talk about how we're then going to use the answers to those questions to kind of influence our next thing. And I wish I had music or something, but maybe we all individually turn on our own personal enjoyable music and go from there. All right, well, we will reconvene just due to time and everything. So yeah, I think this is just a great exercise, I think, to do in system, right? I think you'd be surprised when I do this activity or this kind of reflection piece with my clients who are higher level individuals, right? We're talking like 20, 25, 20 plus years experience, you know, leading a lot of different things, like how often they don't think about and don't take the time to reflect on what part of my, what do I actually like doing, right? And what don't I like doing? And I think we don't do a great job of that in general, of reflecting just on our professional experience. And so I would encourage you, you know, I try to do this every six months, which I know is a lot, but partly because I do this pretty frequently anyways, with clients, but I would encourage you to be constantly reflecting on your work, because like I said, things change, right? And what you like now and what you are knowledgeable of now may change, especially as, you know, advancement continues to change and donors continue to change. So definitely encourage that. All right, so we have all of these answers. What do we do with this, right? And so what I'm going to encourage you to do is you now know what you like, what you don't like, what you tolerate, you know, your kind of KSAs, you have some kind of a general idea of where you are professionally. You now kind of have an idea of what you like to do, right? And what that next job, right, or next role could look like. And so what I would encourage you to do then, now that you have all this information is then go out and start researching opportunities that align with the things you like doing, right? And so are the things you enjoy doing. This is how I found talent acquisition, right? When I was unemployed and during the pandemic and couldn't figure out what the next step would be, I just took a list of what I enjoyed doing. It aligned with talent acquisition work and here I am, right? And so even if you like just looking up random job postings of positions that you may enjoy or you may be interested in is kind of a great first step, right? And I'll kind of show you what that'll look like. You know, finding keywords, experiences, opportunities, qualifications that align, maybe just skillset, knowledge base. Find those things, align them with your likes, dislikes, all those things, and then you start to build what the next step is in your career, you know, if you're not sure. Or if you don't have, right, a very obvious next step, right? You can't go from director of development to senior director or something like that. You're like, yeah, I like this work. I love fundraising. Maybe I want to do more engagement pieces, right? Or maybe I want to do more events planning or whatever that happens to be, right? Thinking about that and then making that alignment is a great way to do it. I do want to make a quick caveat because I work with, like I said, I work with a lot of clients who are trying to transition out of teaching or whatever it happens to be. And they all think, or they all want to be project managers. And project management seems like a great job. It's kind of like the joke of like, what does a producer do on a movie? Like, I don't know, like it's the same idea with a project manager. Like, what does a project manager actually do? I don't know. I know what some project managers do, but there's a lot of them. And so what I would encourage you to do is if you're thinking about project management, know that it is a very broad term and what they're looking for is often very specific candidates. And so maybe, you know, get a good idea of what the role you're applying for is other than just project management. That's just a nice little caveat I like to give because I see it a lot from my candidates. And so, like I said, we have these job, you know, positions. We have these position descriptions. We have all of our work, and we're trying to combine the two. And like I said, I'll show you kind of what that looks like here in a second, but we can also use that to explore new careers, right? New opportunities, new positions we may have never considered before. When we see that alignment of, oh, wow, like there's a lot of work here that I had not considered before. Or the opposite of, I thought I wanted to do this job. I absolutely do not want to do this job because it is only talking about things that I do not like doing in my work. And so, just to add this because I feel like there's probably a lot of hiring managers that are out there like, Alex, please do not tell people to leave right now. I love my people. I want to keep my people. Don't tell them to look externally. If you're thinking internally, which I obviously encourage you to do as well, recognize that as an internal candidate, you have a lot of benefits in this process that I don't think people utilize or realize as often as they should. And so, you know, you have the connection to the hiring managers, to the internal workings of your organization that external candidates just don't know, right? External candidates don't know if a job is coming available when it comes available because they can't talk to the hiring manager, right? I would encourage you to go to hiring managers, go to, you know, supervisors or managers or leaders in the different areas that you may be interested in or interested in moving around, moving to or moving up in, and just having a conversation with them, right? Because we're all very busy, right, in our work, and a lot of times, you know, this idea of squeaky wheels or mind readers, right, they're like, you're, someone isn't going to know what you need until you tell them. And so I encourage you to tell your leaders, right, tell the supervisors, tell the managers in your organization what you're interested in, what you want to do, and I encourage our people internally at OSU to do that all the time because they'll say, hey, I'm really interested in this, and I'm really interested in this role, and I'm like, that's great, I'm glad that you told me, how have you told the hiring manager? And a lot of times they go, oh, no, I didn't think to, right, like, well, how are they going to know that you're interested in the role unless you talk to them? So I encourage you to do so. And when we're thinking about our own career trajectory overall, I think it's important we share that conversation with our own managers, right? Every like six months into this role, I went to my manager and I said, hey, here's my last six months, here's what I've accomplished, here's where I want to be in the next year, you know, here's the roles I see myself doing, here's the work I see myself doing, how do I get to that point from where I am currently? And my manager said that was the first time anyone had had that conversation with them, right? And so I encourage you to kind of think about that and bring that to your manager, bring that to your leaders, bring that to your mentors, whoever it happens to be, so they kind of see, okay, this is the path I see, you know, Alex sees for himself, here's how I help him get on that path. And recognizing it is a shared responsibility, right? We can't just be our own advocates around the table, right? We need mentors, we need leaders to assist us with that, and so we need to be having those conversations pretty frequently to make sure that we, you know, essentially get to where we would like to be in that process. So with all that, right, we were talking a little bit, let's kind of see what that looks like in action, right? This idea of taking everything that we like and then finding position descriptions and opportunities that align with that. So this is one of our position descriptions for one of our director of development positions, which we're always hiring for and looking for great individuals. But you'll notice what I did here was I just highlighted, right, as you're kind of looking through these position descriptions, opportunities, right, and roles and responsibilities that align, right, with some of the things you may have talked about in your own work. So if you're thinking about the fundraising or moving up in a specific position, right, you could look and say, all right, they're building relationships, you know, I have experience doing that. I've worked with donors, you know, I listen for opportunities, you know, managing a portfolio, building their interest, sustaining engagement. And what's interesting about this, right, is that these things aren't necessarily, like these are not specific only to fundraisers and directors of development, right? There's a lot of transferable experience that can relate to this, right? And I guarantee there's a lot of transferable experience that you have, right, that can relate to a whole bunch of different jobs and a whole bunch of different leadership positions or whatever it happens to be. The problem is we don't think that way, right, and we don't think of how to pull that like relevant experience out, right, of our own work to align with the jobs that are out there. And so what I would encourage you to do is think about, you know, what are those things in my work that are relevant to other things so I can highlight those so that as I'm applying for, you know, new opportunities or I'm accelerating my career as I'm pushing for the next role, how do I make sure those things are highlighted because they're in the position description or whatever it happens to be so that there's relevancy there and the connection is there and that hiring manager is actually going to be interested in me? Because the biggest mistake a lot of people make is they just talk about their job and their resume or their whatever it happens, cover letter, you know, talking with hiring managers, they don't think about the future job. They don't think about the next job and the relevancy and the connection between the two. And so using this kind of activity, I think that's the way, I know that's the way you can do it, right, is finding those relevant positions and connecting them from there. And so that's kind of the activity overall. Like I said, there wasn't a ton of time to do this. I'm actually already over time, but I do want to make a quick little shameless plug for my own kind of like side gig. Like I said, I do resume cover letter reviews, very inexpensively. I only charge 50 bucks for a resume because I've heard what other people are charging and I think it's highway robbery. And so I like to offer kind of a much cheaper alternative for people working in nonprofits, higher education, teachers. I do career coaching, counseling, get to give one on one stuff and then I do some presentations around, you know, utilizing LinkedIn recruiter, which is a big sticking point for me here in higher education, career trajectory, bias and recruiting, and then doing things like focus groups, advancing processes and stuff like that. What I also want to mention is I am presenting at Case 4 and 5 in Chicago coming up where I'll be talking about all the work that we, I and we have been doing in advancement here at OSU to work on kind of the talent acquisition problems that we have in higher education and advancement and things like that. So if you're interested in learning more about that, I definitely encourage you to go to that session because I think I have a lot of really good insights about what we've done, kind of concrete examples and the benefits that we've had from that. So yeah, I kind of rushed through that there at the end because like the timing was I want to make sure there's plenty of more than enough time for questions. And what I want to encourage as well is that this can be more than about just the stuff we talked about, right? Like I do a lot of consulting around or career advice in general. So any questions you may have, negotiation all the way to whatever it happens to be, I'm pretty knowledgeable in those areas. So I want to answer questions as they come. I believe yes, you will receive the recording for the folks consultation appointment for me is also it's 30 minutes for $50. So um, so like kind of like a hundred an hour, uh, kind of Break out there. So I also do like, uh interview mock interviews and stuff like that as well. Um, those are usually a little more expensive just got to do a lot to do a lot more work on them, but Yeah Questions about uh anything at all Hi alexia, i'll go ahead and uh get us started off here. Um, so another alex from ohio state. So this question Yeah, and nice to officially meet you. I was uh work under amber diglaw in college Yeah, yeah, i've seen your name on many spreadsheets. Sure. Yeah. Yeah, that sounds about right. Um, well nice to officially meet you Um, I know this is something that's very unique to ohio state But i'd imagine there's probably similar things going on in other institutions of higher education. Um, you know, we've got this career, um Roadmap project going on and everything. So it's um, you know One of the pieces of advice that i've always heard through my career is like go beyond like the scope of your job to get to advance and things like that and it seems that we're kind of dealing with a situation at least at the moment where Roles are getting more and more defined and more specified as far as that, you know Are you still would you still suggest that you should be finding those opportunities to expand the roles that you're doing? Or just really, you know think more about where you're going on further down the road and work on like more Transferable skills and things that are similar but not necessarily exactly what you might be wanting to do in the future Um, so for like a specific example, ultimately i'd like to move into you know More team management and leading teams and stuff. Um with my permanent current role I should say I'm an engagement officer. So working much more on the event side and things and so there's a little bit of that You know when you're leading a team at an event and things but not necessarily formalized roles or areas to really move into that exact space, um Based on my current job description. Yeah So I would say, you know, and i'll use your your example Um as my example, but I would say, you know in those cases, right? I I always think it's good to be as strategic as possible in your professional work, right? So, you know if you're thinking about adding leadership You know or management experience or wanting that experience to then make that kind of your next move that's always really hard right is that kind of that idea of like Entry-level positions that want five years experience, but you need the entry-level experience to get the five Like how do you manage people without managing people, right? Like it's that's just hard and so what I would encourage you to do is think strategically about kind of the two ways that managers or hiring managers and recruiters Aim for hiring managers essentially or that's hard to hiring manager hiring managers But a hiring manager would hire a leader right what they're looking for is they're looking for two things One is experience obviously so if you can find ways that you can lead things and it doesn't necessarily have to be people Right, but maybe it's initiatives. Maybe it's projects Maybe it's being on a committee where you get to lead some different things on that committee showing that you can essentially take something and be very confident in it and And present yourself out to leadership or constituents whatever it happens to be um is uh It's kind of one way to do it right like taking those opportunities as they come To show that you can lead a project you can lead things just from a conceptual idea I would say the other Right is this idea of just becoming really good at the work that you do right and the work of the individuals That you would be supervising right so that to show Hey, like I I may not have the experience of you know Leading but i'm an expert in this and I can teach people and I can lead people doing this work because I know it really Well, right and so thinking about those two areas of like how do you show yourself to your leadership to your to the hiring managers? Of either I have leadership experience Maybe not in traditional like managing managing an individual experience But leading projects leading initiatives leading whatever it happens to be essentially being a leader in my organization um, or I'm, really really good at my job Here's how i'm really good at my job making sure your supervisor is aware of that making sure the hiring manager is aware of that um and going from there I would also encourage you to start thinking strategically as well and being able to Articulate that right because if you're just a transactional employee of work comes in work goes out That might not be enough to be a manager, especially as you think higher and higher up thinking strategically and talking with your leadership and your managers about you know Here's here's a project I see from you know now for the next five years, right? We we you want to be thinking strategically thinking big picture as well So how can you kind of you know flex those muscles as an examiner, you know kind of to use a turn of phrase there Um to show that work. So those are the kind of the three strategic things. Um That I I would kind of have you encourage anyone to be thinking about um But just overall thinking strategically about your every step you do in your work like even me presenting here Right for me is a strategic move in my career for those next places right and for for the next step uh in what i'm doing, um Hopefully that answers what you're looking for. Alex. Yeah. No. Awesome. Thank you very much. Absolutely And let's uh, yeah feel free to reach out and we can talk more independently about yeah, we'll do Yeah, yeah, um Alex this is jerry pat. There's been a couple of questions in the chat Um, one is about micro credentialing. So what is your opinion on micro credentialing or other short-term training? How helpful are they as compared to a longer degree program or other continuing education? As a career advancement tool and of course they're asking does this just depend on the position or employer? So yeah Credentialing. Yeah, I mean, I guess if you're if you're thinking like um, and i'll use a random example, but I you know, I work with a lot of Educators who now want to you know work in tech or something like that. And so they're like, hey, I went and got did um uh, you know a certificate online for uh, Python or something right and my question then becomes okay. Well, what what does your portfolio for python look like right? Like what are your examples of that work? um Because if if the micro credential or whatever it is isn't related to the work you're currently doing and advancing your current career Of that pipeline if it's for a for like a move to something else That's great. A hiring manager is always going to want to see actual experience right actual work done And so if you're getting a micro credential in something have some sort of work either in your current job, right? If it's you know, I got my pmp my project manager um Thing and here's this project that I managed and i'm going to take on this project at work Or you know, here's like I got a coding uh Certificate and now here's a bunch of stuff that i've created that I can show like make sure there's concrete work examples of that now if it's just to kind of like Get a little extra on top of you know, add a little another little a couple letters to your title I'm, not against it I don't for me at least i'm kind of very new school and progressive and how I look at candidate profiles But I I don't really focus too much on you know That work, but obviously it's nice in an interview if you can talk about those things Um, so I would say from a like a resume get you in the door perspective I don't think it matters too much if you don't have the concrete work experience to back it up but um, I do think it can be nice as like a like a cherry on top of a Professional sundae if you will, uh during the interview process, um, so I would say approach with caution Um, especially if it's a lot of money, um, and you maybe don't have as much cash to spend on that so Thanks alex another question, this is jerry padigan and other questions come in via chat What are some of the resources and methodologies that you use to find talent? Yeah, so I would i'll I mean there's a lot that I use Um, there's two main ones and i'll talk about these in my presentation for four and five But i'll happily give a spoiler, uh here Uh, the two that have been probably most influential for us or most useful for us Uh, number one is linkedin recruiter. So we actually uh repurposed part of our ad budget Um that we're using on just kind of, you know, traditional board posting into linkedin recruiter Um, and it has been very successful so far. We've you know, we've had about four or five months now and our candidate pools have Took a like for our more difficult to fill positions. I mean something like admins stuff like that We have pretty good pools, but um those more difficult to find positions. We've definitely found a lot more Candidates in our those pools and essentially just give our hiring managers more choice In those pools than what they had before because research shows that you know I think it's like 85 percent of people will consider a job if they've been reached out to about it, right? And so um So I would say number one is linkedin recruiter has been massively helpful for us And we've made some hires from that as well or at least just gotten to good offers that we would of candidates We would have never Probably considered before or considered us Um, the second is that relevant experience that i've talked about so we we made a change that for our lower level dods Our directors of development fundraiser positions. We we now accept um, you know, uh sales and other kind of work, um into our Uh, you know that we hadn't considered before only considering like fundraising specific experience We now consider that relevant experience and that's been really helpful for us to find not only more candidates But also more diverse candidates like we just took on Our assistant director cohort that we bring in every year is actually probably one of our most diverse we've ever had Because we are allowing more relevant experience and we had actually one candidate I love talking about um had like 10 to 20 years of sales experience in pharmaceutical sales Uh and was like, you know what? I want to be the good guy now and I want to do good with my skill set and so Essentially is starting as a fundraiser for us and has already proven right to be very like adept and Confident in that work because a lot of that work is very similar to sales, right? And so Um, we us focusing on that relevant experience versus just saying you have to be a fundraiser for x amount of time In a non-profit or whatever it happens to be Um has been very successful for us as well Thanks again, alex, um, i've got another question in the chat, but before I go there I just want to see if there's anybody that wants to ask a question to alex Feel free to unmute or of course use the chat All right, i'll go ahead alex and just mention this question, um Which is a around remote working arrangements. There seems to be a lot of mixed messages surrounding remote jobs now How transparent do you think employers are regarding remote candidates? Is it possible that most if not all still overwhelmingly favor in-person candidates? Yeah, that's a that's a great question, um, so what I will say is so there's the the market answer that i'm going to give and then there's the Professional what what my my insight that i'm going to give so the market Response is a lot of organizations are pushing for in-person work Um and return to office and and honestly a lot of that work Or a lot of that push is from uh, essentially a hope that people will quit right because they need to trim And they don't want to continue doing layoffs, right? So if you look at the market, um, you know They were like hey go as far as you would like to go and we're remote only and blah blah blah blah to get Candidates to come to them when there was a war for talent And now that they're actually looking their books and trying to like tighten budgets and stuff like that The response is hey, we know we said you could move to you know, five states away and build a house We need you to come back. This is awkward, right? And and those people end up quitting, right? So they don't have to Then lay them off when the time comes and so I think that's a big part Of why we're seeing a huge return to office, right? um And there's also probably a part of it too of like old school versus new school of you know If I don't see you doing it, it doesn't exist right and all those things Um, so I think that's kind of the response of like why we're seeing This current trend of return to office, right that that's happening I think that's the the really what's is is it is what's happening to be honest um And then the other part the kind of professional response is I would definitely encourage you as an organization if you are doing fully in-person work to consider hybrid flexibility for your employees and the reason I say that is because especially As we're thinking about how are we getting candidates? How are we finding the best candidates? How are we figuring that out? um, you know, I talk to candidates every day and the response I get is Especially when I show them the salary, right? I think probably all of us deal with lower salaries than we would like to offer um overall Especially compared to our private, you know organization counterparts or competitors The response I get from candidates is hey, like I'll take less money the less I have to be in office. So if you're going to make me be in office five days a week, I'm going to expect more money to offset that. And so I would encourage you, even just one day of hybrid flexibility, you're going to see a much higher candidate pool, a much lower salary that you have to offer than those folks who don't offer that flexibility. You do have diminishing returns as you get lower and lower in salary pay. I would say your sweet spot's probably over 50, brand, at least in our experience here. Once you get under 50, people don't, it doesn't matter too much, at least in my experience. But over 50, if you're looking about or trying to get a great candidate for a lower amount of pay, you need to be considering hybrid flexibility. Alex, that's really interesting, the relationship between hybrid and pay and other opportunities for people. So good insight there. A couple more questions have come in via chat. Alex, what do you suggest that a person do as a next step if they're not selected for a promotion at their workplace? What should be their next step if not selected? Yeah, so I would say it would depend on how or why you weren't selected. So this idea of, did you just apply and weren't selected? And you got the dreaded, thank you for your application. Please consider applying for more. Or did you go through the entire interview process? What did that look like? What did the rejection look like? Because I think those are two very different answers. If it's an application, if I get rejected because I submitted an application, don't hear it, and just got the general response, I don't really take those to heart because who knows how many applications there were. There could have been hundreds. There could have been an internal candidate they already expected or another person they'd already have those conversations with. For a more lengthy process, what I would encourage you to do is then have a conversation with the hiring manager or your current supervisor and say, hey, I applied for this position. We went through the process. I didn't get it. Let's have an honest conversation of why. Where are the gaps? Where are we missing those opportunities? And I would encourage you to start those conversations early too. When you know a position's coming available, a manager position, a good example, I had a manager position in my work come available for a talent acquisition manager. And I'd only been here a short amount of time, but I went to my supervisor and I said, hey, I'm interested in this position, and here's where I see the alignment between my previous experience and this future role. Do we see this as a potential opportunity for me? And if it is, how do I make sure I put myself in the best spot to get that role? Or if it isn't, why not? And what can I work on so the next time an opportunity like this comes along, I can be well-positioned for it? And so that's what I would encourage you to do when those things happen. I would not encourage you to maybe do that conversation like the next day. You might be having some feelings, and that's OK. It's OK to feel unhappy or frustrated or whatever happens. It's our livelihood and all that stuff. But I would definitely encourage you to have that conversation with your supervisor, with your leadership, with that hiring manager after the fact. Thanks, Alex. I think that's really helpful advice. A couple of more questions relative to careers. This is about if you take a step back in your career for life reasons, how do you talk about that in the future? Do you talk about that gap in the future once they have the freedom or ready to refocus? So here's the question. How do you think about positioning yourself for the future when you've been in a senior leadership management role but took a step back to a lower-level individual contributor role at a new organization for life reasons? This person is a mid-career and not sure how to spin this as I look toward the future and the gap between my prior leadership experience and current experience once I'm ready to put more focus into my career path again. Any thoughts or advice there? Yeah, I think my initial response is that, and this is speaking and this sounds really conceited, but as a good recruiter. I think there are a lot of bad recruiters out there who will look at gaps or look at changes in career and stuff like that and put way too much weight into them. I think any good recruiter, especially after 2020 and the pandemic and all that stuff, gaps don't mean anything anymore. I've met with people who were like, I took X amount of years off because I wanted to be a stay-at-home parent, or I took X amount of years off, or I took a step back, or I took a part-time job or whatever for a variety of reasons. And my response is, OK, all I care about is the work that you've done in the past. And so what I would encourage you to do if you've done that and now you're looking for that next step up, that next level, and you've done that work before, make sure on your resume that work is highlighted. Make sure that that is what you're leading with, because what a lot of people fall into the trap of is that resume chronological order thing, which is great and we should do. But then that first position, which is not relevant, when going back to relevancy, is not relevant to that new position they want, is now the star of their show. And so if I'm a recruiter, a hiring manager who's never met you, I'm like, well, you're not ready for this role, because I'm maybe not taking the time, because we're all busy, taking the time to look at those next roles and those next positions that you have. So I would really encourage you to make sure those roles that are most relevant and maybe those not step back that you've done are highlighted and seen on your resume, in your documents, in your conversations with hiring managers or whoever it happens to be, that that is the focus, not necessarily the focus on that step back that you had to do for whatever reasons it happens to be. Because that experience is there and it's good. And if I'm a recruiter, a good recruiter, I don't necessarily care about this little step you've done, because we all have those reasons. I care that you have this relevant experience, especially at higher level positions. There's not always a ton of people with that experience. And so just make sure that's highlighted your resume and your documents and in your conversations. And you hopefully, at least in my experience, will have success with that. That's really great, Alex. I enjoyed hearing you talk a little bit about gaps. I know that's been a conversation for a long time and now that seems to be kind of minimizing itself with the help of COVID, if we can say it that way. And then just hearing on your resume to highlight and what do you want to be the star of the show? I really like that thinking. A couple more questions. We can take a few more here. Salary, let's talk a little bit about salaries. We've seen an increase in job postings that don't include salary information. So what's your recommendation for dealing with that when a job posting doesn't have a salary listed? I will say just to the 50 people that are in here, if your postings don't have the salary range on them in some way, you're doing it wrong and you should re-evaluate that. We have all of our salary ranges that are posted minus a few like executive level positions where the salary can range vastly. But we have our salary range posted on our positions. What I will say is our requirement is that those positions have to be to our minimum and then like a certain amount of money. That may not be what the actual budget is. And so to circumvent that in our phone screens with candidates, one of the first things we talk about is salary expectations and saying, here's what the actual budget is for this position. You're gonna fall somewhere within there, does that align? And so I would encourage you as the candidate to do the opposite, right? And so to add the start of the conversation, make sure you're talking about salary. And if a hiring manager or a person interviewing you isn't willing to talk about salary, that's probably a red flag. And so the best way to do that and to kind of know that is to know your market value, right? So make sure you're doing the research of, if I'm looking at a new position outside of what I'm doing or a leadership position in my own work, doing the research of what those individuals are being paid. And so if you're working for a state agency, if you're working for a state institution, you can actually go in and look and see what other people are making around that area. Keep in mind like cost of living, and there are some things happen and change based on what a person makes. And so it at least gives you an idea though of what they're making. You can use things like Glassdoor, even though they're not super reliable all the time, but at least gives you a starting point, right? Cause when I was doing my job search, I knew that based on the market, I was in a specific range of pay and I was able to then articulate that to the hiring managers and the folks that I talked to. I would also add to the caveat to that is make sure you know how much money you need to be successful, right? So if that's your mortgage, your rent, your pets that are very expensive all the time, whatever that happens to be, breaking that down for yourself so you have a number already that says, I need to have a job at, making up numbers here, $70,000, because if I don't, I can't stay for retirement, I can't do all that stuff. So when opportunities come along, we just immediately weed out all of those ones that can't even meet what our salary expectations are. And so when we have those conversations in interviews, whatever they happen to be early, early in the interview process, you should not know what the salary is gonna be in the offer. That is unacceptable in my opinion. In the early in the process, you should know at least the range that they are working on and they should know the range in which you are looking for. Thanks, very, very helpful. We only have a few minutes here before you wrap up. Alex, I'm gonna give you a test here. In one minute or less, can you give advice for someone that's looking to move from a supportive role in fundraising to being a frontline fundraiser? What's your 60 seconds or less advice there? I would say 60 seconds or less, I want you to take your resume that you have and I want you to pull it up and I want you to look for seven seconds and I want you to close it. And I want you to tell me if in those seven seconds you would hire yourself or consider yourself for a fundraising job. If you can't articulate in those seven seconds or if your resume can't articulate in those seven seconds that you are relevant for a fundraising job, then you need to revamp your resume to find the relevant work that a fundraiser does to make your resume read that. Because most hiring managers, most recruiters are gonna look at your resume for seven seconds and then they're gonna move on. And if your resume doesn't say that in seven seconds, then you got a problem. So take that to then build, right? Kind of what we're doing here, build the work that you're doing now to figure out what those relevant skills are to becoming a fundraiser, to make sure that they're shown in your resume. If you don't have those relevant skills right now in your work, take on opportunities, be strategic, figure out ways that you can find those relevant skills and highlight them in your work. Excellent, that's great advice for everyone, no matter what. Hopefully. Thank you, Alex, so much. Thanks to all of you for being here today. We really appreciate it. We hope you found this to be fruitful and worthwhile your time. I did drop in the link, as Alex mentioned, he will be presenting at the District Five and Six Conference that will be held in Chicago on April 14th through 16th. There is a link there for you to please join us and join Alex for his session as well. We're really looking forward to a really great conference with lots of great content with our District Six partners. If you wanna hear more about what's happening at that conference, we do have a virtual together, Know Before You Go, slated for Tuesday, April 2nd, 9 a.m. Central Time. Please look for registration information for that. It will be free to all. A couple of other future togethers that we have in the works that we hope that might interest you. We'll be hearing about AI and advancement from Christy Donsback from Lakeland Community College, along with her partner, Patrick Kelly from Marketing Services at Harper College. We're looking to get that scheduled and on the books before summer hits, and then looking to also do some round table conversation with small liberal arts colleges. You can always check out the CASE Learning Center located on the CASE website. There's micro courses and webinars that can be found there as a research tool for you. Again, thank you so much on behalf of District Five and our cabinet and all of our volunteers. We really appreciate Alex, you lending your time and expertise to us. And for everybody else, we appreciate your time here this morning. Of course, if we can be helpful to you in any way, as you think about professional development, we hope that you'll reach out to us. With that being said, thanks again to Jacob and my colleagues, Sue and Jeremy, and we'll see you again soon.

virtual event

Accelerating Our Careers

Alex

reflecting on past experience

career goals

resumes

salary expectations

work-life balance

self-advocacy