John G. Self works primarily with executives and middle managers seeking their next career opportunity. This experience has given him enormous insight into how Artificial Intelligence and social media are changing the post-pandemic application and interview process for job seekers.
Mike Landess: For UT Tyler Radio, I’m Mike Landess. Fans of the TV series “Monk” will remember the Randy Newman theme song, “It’s A Jungle Out There.” That would be a perfect description for the job market as a whole these days across the country and right here in East Texas. John G Self is a Tyler native who has spent nearly 30 years guiding supervisors, managers and executives through career transitions, and he’s our guest today. Welcome.
John Self: Mike, it’s great to be here with you.
Mike Landess: Now, your clients come from a broad range of industries ranging from health care to publishing, oil and gas, to leisure and hospitality, and a lot of these are six-figure jobs. Are these harder to fill?
John Self: It’s a totally different job market today. In the old days, it was all about who you knew and what you accomplished. And today, in an era that’s being dominated increasingly by artificial intelligence automation, it’s more your digital footprint. At the senior-most level in the C-suite, yes, it’s probably still who you know, but if you’re just a vice president someplace you can’t get by on thinking, “I’ve done a good job. I’m a good guy. I will be able to move up.” Now, you have to have a presence on LinkedIn and other sites because now candidate sourcing is being done by the same types of computers that are screening the resumes, can now review thousands of LinkedIn profiles in minutes. So it’s all different now. It’s so hard: It’s not person to person.
Mike Landess: To be clear, you’re not out there finding jobs for people, but you are helping and even coaching clients on how to land that next job that they’re seeking.
John Self: Absolutely. And when I was a recruiter for 27 years, and I worked off six countries and four continents, I would get a lot of questions from candidates saying, “What advice can you give me?”
Or they do an interview, and it really wouldn’t be that good because they didn’t sell their value. Now I take all of that experience from thousands and thousands of interviews across the world, and I try to teach people how to tell their story more effectively. How to market themselves, how to build their brand.
Mike Landess: It’s a different time. Now, you were saying earlier that it’s not person to person anymore. It is — you’re dealing with a lot of different things.
John Self: It depends on how your business is structured, but it’s moving that way. In the executive search business, it’s all about relationships. When I was in business development, I set up the first 13 programs in life flight all over the country, and it was all about relationships. Now that I am doing coaching with a hybrid model of online and live coaching, it’s all about digital. And so instead of all the skills I had as a relationship marketer, now don’t apply in this new digital world. And so now my message is on LinkedIn. It’s on YouTube. It’s on Instagram. It’s on Facebook, Twitter. And whatever else comes along.
Mike Landess: You’ve embraced all of these things after being in Dallas, in business for many years. You came back to Tyler, and certainly because of the technology, it allows you to do that from your own surroundings.
John Self: Absolutely. I lost a big search when I was based in the old Bryant Petroleum building downtown. And the guy said, “I just can’t justify hiring somebody from Tyler.” Six months later, he called me, didn’t remember who I was. I was based in Dallas at the time. I had a loft. And he said, “Do I know you? You sound familiar.” And then he said, “But where are you located?” And I said, “I’m in a hundred-year-old loft across the street from the corporate headquarters in the flagship store of Neiman Marcus.”
And he said, “Oh, great. I’ll send you the paperwork.” And then it hit me. My proximity to Neiman’s was more important than my skill as a recruiter. Because back then it mattered.
Mike Landess: Yeah. And those things aren’t as important anymore.
John Self: Oh, absolutely not. And I think that’s and certainly the pandemic was tragic and horrifying, but it has pushed business to a new dynamic and a new level. And we’ll never go back to complete in-the-office working. There will always be remote working, and the people who are struggling with it are usually the managers who don’t know how to lead and manage and inspire people digitally.
Mike Landess: You have actually gone, from my impression and looking at your product on LinkedIn as a for instance, it seems that you’ve gone more mainstream to posting today about “6 ways to prepare yourself for layoffs.” You said something about Fridays are layoff days.
John Self: Oh, absolutely. Across the globe today, thousands and thousands of people will be told, “This is your last day working for us.” And if you look at current indicators, it’s mixed. But the one that I watch are the Treasury curves, and they’re inverted and they have been most of the year. And the Treasury curve, meaning long-term interest rates are less than short-term interest rates for the last 50 years. That’s a hundred percent indicator of a recession. So it’s coming, and the people who will bounce back faster and do better are the people who are prepared in advance.
Mike Landess: When you put it like that, you can see why so many people just give up after a time because the process these days can be so daunting.
John Self: Going to find a job today is a thousand percent different than it was even 5 years ago. Now if 95% of the corporations in America use automatic applicant tracking systems, and so if your resume is not customized for that job, that ring the bells for that algorithm, you won’t be picked. Even though you may be a hundred percent qualified. If your resume doesn’t touch that button, address their issues, you won’t get picked. For every 10 resumes that are submitted in most companies, eight, seven to eight are never seen by a human. And so you have to understand that. And if you disagree, that’s fine, but you’re never gonna win an argument with a computer. And so you have to learn the rules, but you also have to understand your value. Why are you different? You know that one of the ubiquitous first questions is, “Tell me about yourself.” People get nervous, and they go in this 25-minute diatribe of all of their experience. They rattle through their resume. “We’ve got your resume. We don’t need to see, and we don’t need to hear that. Tell me why I should hire you. What makes you unique? What value are you gonna bring to the floor?”
That’s a question you know that’s coming. So you need to get prepared, and we’ve come up with a pioneering system called Core and Categorical questions, teaches you how to break down a job. Each job has four or five categories and each category, you’ve had some accomplishments, you’ve done some good things. You may have had some screw-ups. Have answers for that as well. So you’re confident. A lot of people are so afraid they’re gonna be asked certain questions that they’re getting distracted and blow the interview. If you’ve got something in your background, and a lot of us do, you can’t go through life without stepping in it. Don’t be afraid of that. Just put together before you go a really good answer, and you’d be surprised. You won’t be asked and your confidence will be a thousand percent. It’s all about being prepared.
There’s no crime in rehearsing for an interview. Matter of fact, you should. People who do, do a better job, but it’s about your confidence. It’s about being prepared. It’s about going in and telling your story effectively. People don’t like to talk about themselves. That’s not how we were brought up. But you know what? Your mom or dad who were your, probably your biggest cheerleaders in life, they can’t be in the room with you. So you have to learn to do it. And that is more important today than ever before. Companies are not hiring resumes. They’re not hiring necessarily where you went to school. They’re hiring value.
“What can you do for us? What have you done in the past? Relate that to our needs.” That’s where they are; that’s how they’re making decisions.
Mike Landess: Our guest has been John G. Self, a Tyler native and successful online executive career coach. To hear this interview again, or to share it, go to KVUT. I’m Mike Landess for UT Tyler Radio.
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