One Zoom call made my day

One Zoom call made my day. Thank you John!

I’ve been working with John for a few months now and I’m always happy to make time for a call, so when he booked a time for us to speak yesterday, I was just happy to have an end-of-year catch up. In the end that call absolutely made my day. In these times of doom and gloom, with the Omicron variant threatening further disruption to our social and economic lives, one good conversation can make all the difference.

By the time we met John was starting to get desperate. He was definitely not enjoying his job, he wasn’t getting as many calls from recruiters as he had expected (despite his great track record), and when he did get interviews for jobs he wanted, he wasn’t getting past the interview. Something was obviously not working. He couldn’t put his finger on what exactly the problem was. Nor could he really articulate what it was that he did.

In short, John is cloud technology evangelist who loves fixing customer problems. When we first started working together, however, it took us quite a while and a series of interactive sessions to really distil John’s skills, interests and experience down to a simple statement. (Even though I have been recruiting technology people for over 30 years, I was really struggling to work out how to sum up John’s experience.) We were lost in all the fluffy language of John’s LinkedIn profile and a CV that talked about “Innovation Manager”, “passionately strategizing new technologies”, and “business models to enrich major IT business transformation”.  We were drowning in the quicksand of the dreaded buzzwords!

When we did eventually find the right language, John was able to develop a concise, simplified personal narrative that was more accessible to any recruiter or potential employer. We used that same language to craft a much-simplified LinkedIn profile. The personal narrative that we developed (what I think of as the career story) was something John could relate to. He was more confident in articulating that story, clearer about what he was and what he wanted to do in future.

John has just been hired by one of the best-known companies in his industry. The language on his LinkedIn profile must have worked this time! What also worked this time was the language that John used during the interview. The whole process was a breeze.

John starts his new job in March and he’s excited that he will at last be doing something that he knows he can do and that he knows he loves. He was full of praise for the work that we had done together. I was just over the moon to see someone who has successfully made the career transition that was fundamental to his professional success and happiness. So, thank you John for that call yesterday. You absolutely made my day.

Anthony Harling

Managing Partner, Archer Mann

linkedin.com/in/anthony-harling-executive-careers