Day 2: What Employers Want

Today you will learn what employers are actually looking for in job candidates, why the approach you're taking to getting hired is wrong, how to approach the job search in way that ACTUALLY gets you hired.

Summary

What do Employers Actually Care About?

Let's understand how businesses work.

• A business exists to make money for its owners as quickly, efficiently and reliably as possible.
• The way they make money is by selling a product or service, and they prosper by becoming better and more efficient at selling that product or service.
• When a company saves time, it saves money and then has more time to make more money. And this is essentially what productivity is.
• If a company can make money without employees, it would do so, because that means more money for the owners.
• Unfortunately, a company requires a complex machinery to deliver those products and services that bring in revenue.

Based on how a business works, there are two reasons that jobs exist:

• First, every job is a small but important cog in the corporation's complex money making machine. It exists to help the company make money.
• Second, the company hasn't been able to automate that job out of existence or outsource it yet because in your area of technical expertise, problems arise, and this becomes the opportunity for you, the employee.

Companies hire someone that has the technical skills to solve the problems that typically occur within an area of specific expertise. So it doesn't matter what your job title is. You're always hired to be a problem solve.

So put very simply what an employer actually cares about is you have skills that can solve their problems.

What Skills are Employers Looking For?

Each job is different but in a broad sense, you have technical skills and transferable skills.

• Technical skills are gonna be the how to of many things. For example, if you're a programmer, it's you actually knowing how to code it's a technical skill. It's those skills needed for a task and the know how to use them productively and efficiently.
• Transferable skills are skills that underlie your ability to execute the technical skills of your job effectively. These are the skills that are going to help you solve problems including critical thinking, creative thinking, communication, collaboration, and character building.

Why the Approach You're Taking for Job Hunting is Wrong

As a job hunter, you are approaching the search for a job in a completely different way than the employer is going about looking for an employee.

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How to Approach Finding a Job

Instead of taking the typical approach, which we can see doesn't work, we will follow this process:

• Self Inventory: Understanding your skills, traits, passions, core values, career drivers, career vision, and your most valuable contribution to employers.
• Career Plan: Creating a Plan A, Plan B, and Plan Z for hitting our career goals.
• Research: Understanding the key needs of businesses we apply to and if we have the skills to fulfill those needs.
• Ladder of Tests: Trying out careers before we commit to much time, money, or energy pursuing them
• Personal Brand: Creating personal branding assets like a positioning statement, online profiles, portfolio, and resume.
• Networking: During this entire process we will try to skip the application by networking with people in the field we are applying to.
• Application Process: Step by step from initial application to negotiating our final offer of employment
• Long Term Career Management: Developing habits to manage our career in case we ever need to find a job again.

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Activity

First, download the course roadmap and familiarize yourself with the process.

Then, download today's worksheet and complete the exercises inside of the worksheet.

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Skill Lesson Mastered

Demonstrate mastery of the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson by applying it to the above activity. If, and only if, you have a full understanding and have mastered the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson, select the next lesson in the navigation.