Speaking and Communicating Podcast

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating podcast. I am your host Roberta. If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning into. And by the end of this episode, please remember to subscribe, give a rating and a review. There have been so many layoffs recently and the job market has become more and more competitive.
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Now the question is, how do you make yourself stand out? How do you communicate and sell yourself in a way that is effective and makes you more memorable and increases your chances of landing your dream job? My guest today, Fatemah Mirza, is here to help you with all the phases that go into that process. And before I go any further, please help me welcome her to the show. Hi, Fatima.
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Hi, thank you so much for having me. Thank you for being on our show today. Welcome and please introduce yourself. Absolutely, so my name is Fatemah and I am the owner of Career Tuners. It's a small company that helps people who want to feel more fulfilled at their jobs. So we help people find better jobs, find higher paying jobs, market themselves for those jobs and negotiate their pay once they get an offer.
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How did you get started on this? Did you go straight from college to doing what you're doing with career tuners? No, I do some recruiting work as well. Originally started with graduate admissions applications. I found that a lot of people that were applying to graduate school, some of my friends, they were getting rejected and they were like, I'm not sure what I did wrong. And when I assessed their applications, I was able to find that they were having a hard time communicating their story.
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in a way that really clicked with the admissions committee. So from there, it kind of just snowballed. I started helping people with their resumes. And over the course of the years, I have been able to identify what people are struggling with and how I can help them communicate their worth better. That's my journey of how I started in this space. Right, and where were you in college? Oh, I went to UCLA. During that time, would you say that...
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Talking about your aspirations is different in person than it is if you have a Zoom interview, for instance, for graduate school. I think if you familiarize yourself with Zoom and with speaking to a screen, it does become more and more natural the more you do it. So eventually I think it starts being automatic. However, there are things you can do to cheat a little when you're on a Zoom interview. Like what I like to do is if I'm having a Zoom interview is I take notes.
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and I put them on sticky notes and I put them on my computer screen so that if I forget anything, it's there for me to look at. That's one of the interview tips that I like to share with people is when you look at the job description you're applying for, make a list of like the key stories you have to tell. And if you're not able to get to those stories by the end of the interview, you can always say something like, hey, I noticed that, you know, partnership marketing is a big portion of this job. And if you have a minute, I'd like to speak to that if that's okay.
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And that allows you to make sure you're checking off all their boxes because not everyone is a great interviewer. A lot of interviewers are maybe good managers or maybe they're new to their job and you have to help them and you can direct them and manage them by doing stuff like this. So back then, did you say hello when you were helping your friends? What did you find if they came to you and they said, you know, I don't understand why. What did you find was missing in them?
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convincing the admissions committee that they belong there? It honestly depended a lot on the program, but what I found was that the applications that typically didn't do well were highly generic and very copy paste. All the engineers would start their applications like, oh, when I was young, I like to take apart my toys and my room was filled with broken toys.
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Every engineer starts their essay like that, and it's boring. Like no one wants to read that story anymore. And as much as it might be like your big reason for being an engineer, knowing what makes you different and what makes you stand out is really important, at least in that part of the process. In the job search space, it's a little different. It's okay to be a little bit generic because in the job search space.
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you are trying to check off all of the hiring manager's boxes. So speaking a little bit more generally is okay. So it really depends on your audience and what they're looking for. When you're applying to a graduate program, you have these professors or these admissions people that are looking at essay after essay after essay and they're getting tired and bleary-eyed and you're just a piece of paper at that point, right? So if you're writing the same story that everyone else is writing,
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it's not going to stand out versus in the resume world, you're not going to be a piece of paper, you're just a little blurb in the applicant tracking system. So your resume is condensed into this little snippet and they'll look at that and say, oh, this person has all the right skills I'm looking for and they'll decide if they want to read your resume. So it's definitely a different journey for the reader and understanding what that journey is, is really critical to being able to market yourself. And so when it comes to resumes,
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It's a small snippet. Always hear about keywords. Mm-hmm. Talk to us about that, please. Well, let's say if I wanted to buy a watch, I would Google watch, ladies watch, brown strap, leather strap or whatever to find the watch that would suit my needs. And I don't see the entire webpage in the beginning. Google presents a little tiny snippet of what's on that page and it shows me, you know, what's relevant to my search criteria. So if I'm searching for
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ladies small brown leather strap watch, if those keywords are present in that page, it'll bold it and it'll show it in that Google search. That's very similar to how an applicant tracking system works. Like you are not actually seen completely until you make it past that screening stage. So the first person or tool rather that's reading your resume is that applicant tracking system.
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It's parsing through your resume to make sure that you are in line with the job that they're looking for. So if you're not applying online, if someone is just finding you on LinkedIn, which happens often, like if I wanted to find someone on LinkedIn for, let's say, my email marketing strategy, I would probably put email marketing consultant and the name of the tool, ActiveCampaign, that I'm using. And then LinkedIn would show me all the professionals that have the word ActiveCampaign in their experience. Now, if you have the word ActiveCampaign,
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campaign in your job title, that's going to dramatically improve your search. Obviously, the active campaign is not a typical job title, but let's say I was looking for email marketing consultant and that was in your job title, that'll really help you get found. So there is an issue with trying to game this because a lot of people now are non-traditional candidates. Back in the day, you would find one job and you would do it forever and you would keep getting promoted in that space. That doesn't happen anymore.
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People have diverse interests and they want to change fields. And it's very good to do that because you bring your experience and create more innovations now rather than just having the same exact career all your life. So when you are transitioning and you are trying to get a job in a different field, you're up against all those people that their LinkedIn's look like. I have been doing this all my life.
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So how do you compete then? Well, first you have to make sure that you are hitting those technical keywords. If for example, ActiveCampaign is something you'd like to use in your next career, maybe you take a course on it so that you're including that name on your resume, or maybe you take some seminars on it or something, or maybe you use it as a consultant for like a small project for a nonprofit in your area.
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This will allow you to beef up your profile with those keywords. Second, for job titles, it's a lot trickier. Like you cannot falsify your job title. If you are not a marketing consultant, you cannot put that you're a marketing consultant in your resume, which you can do instead is let's say you had some marketing duties, let's say you were a sales manager and you did work a little bit with the marketing team and you did advise on some campaigns and you did, let's say, write some emails.
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and create the email marketing strategy. Next to your job title, on your resume and in LinkedIn, you can put sales manager in parentheses marketing duties. Now you're not lying, you're being honest, but you're helping the applicant tracking system also recognize that just because my job title isn't marketing, it doesn't mean that you should be screening me out. I do have some experience in this space. So it allows you to be transparent, but also strategic. So you really have to see how these applicant trackings
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systems work, and then you have to see how people are going to be looking at your resume. So after your resume or your LinkedIn gets parsed by the applicant tracking system or the applicant tracking algorithm, then there's going to be a person looking at your resume. Most cases, it's not going to be the decision maker. It's going to be someone who's just kind of screening through, making sure that there's nothing irrelevant in there. They don't want to waste the decision maker's time.
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Because they're scanning, they're not actually reading. They don't care if you can do the job or whatever. They're just like, okay, are you hitting the criteria that we're hiring for? So they're just looking at it for a couple seconds, making sure you have the appropriate job titles, that you don't have like, you know, giant employment gaps. There's ways to address all of these things if you have them. If you've been laid off, if you've had an employment gap, if you had to take sick leave, all of those cases, you know, there are solutions to how to communicate that, that doesn't...
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flag their triggers. And then finally, your resume is read by a decision maker who is probably going to look at your resume a little bit more closely to see like, can you do the job better than the other people that I'm also considering? So if we look at that email marketing example, they're probably going to look at, okay, how many people were in your list? You know, what were some of your open rates and all of the other things that are important to someone trying to hire an email marketing professional.
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Your keywords are important to all of those three readers, but in different ways. You know how some people usually graduate and then go straight to the job market. But most jobs will say, what about work experience? How can you communicate that you have some form of work experience, even though you just went straight to school, college, job? Absolutely. So if you have done any projects in school or if you've
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done any work for a nonprofit or if you have done anything like freelancing, you can communicate that as professional experience. Even if the work that you did was unpaid, it doesn't mean that you have to disclose that it was unpaid. You can put it in your professional experience. And if you keep finding yourself getting rejected because you don't have the required professional experience, really strongly consider freelancing a little bit. There's lots of freelancing websites that'll help you beef up your professional experience.
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and get those keywords in to show that you have that experience and you'll be considered more seriously than someone who doesn't have anything. And I know this is really challenging for a lot of people who come from underprivileged backgrounds. When you're going to college, you don't have the luxury of taking on internships because those costs money indirectly or even directly. Or, you know, you don't have the luxury of taking on a bunch of research work for your professors because maybe you already have a family and you have some responsibilities.
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you do have this extra hurdle if you are, let's say a first-generation college student or you're coming from an underprivileged background. So in those cases, it is really important to find paid opportunities that can help you kind of stay afloat but also build up your resume. So going around and trying to network with nonprofits, probably not going to be a realistic strategy and it's probably gonna cause a lot of frustration. However, you can find hourly gigs on websites like Upwork, Fiverr, et cetera,
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You might be charging less than you would be at a job, but doing a little bit of stuff for like, just say like a month can really help you build up your resume and take that next step into getting a job that pays you really well. It's about being strategic, as you say. Right. You don't have to completely dismiss your full time. Like if you're going to college and you are working, you know, let's say as a customer service representative or you're like the parking attendant for your university, you're just doing something to have a little bit of money.
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That doesn't mean that that experience is invalid or that you shouldn't put it on your resume. However, you can summarize the components of that job description that aren't a hundred percent related to what you'd like to do. If let's say you are a server at a restaurant, you can talk about if you help troubleshoot the point of sale system. That's a very interesting technical skill. You can talk about if you made ordering and everything a little bit more seamless. That's really interesting. And if you're transitioning to the supply chain space, you can talk about
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if you figured out a way to make the menu a little bit tighter and neater and cleaner so that customers had an easier time. That's really interesting for if you're interested in the marketing space. So really think about what skills did you use in those jobs that could make sense to someone hiring in the next phase of your life and speak to that. That's really important. And it does take a little bit of mental gymnastics to
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Think about that. Sometimes it does help to have a conversation with someone who can help you navigate through your experience. So talk to a friend that you find is really articulate. Talk to your spouse, talk to your parents. They can help you look at your experience objectively because I think a lot of times what we do is we get so lost in what we've been doing and the daily grind that we forget the bigger picture. We forget all of those amazing transferable skills we've been building. So it's really important to just talk to somebody, articulate what you did, and they can help you close some of those gaps.
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Look at the job description on one page and look at your experience on the next. See what overlaps and put those topics down on your resume and your LinkedIn. The transferable skills. Right. And then what about having gaps on your resume? We're speaking earlier. How can you explain those without putting yourself at a disadvantage to the interview panel?
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Sure, so the only thing that the employer cares about is that you're not going to be distracted at their next job. So if you've had an employment gap, and this is illegal and unethical, but it does happen, but if you've had an employment gap because let's say you were recovering from cancer and you beat cancer, at the back of the employer's mind they're going to be thinking, what if this person goes into remission and they're not going to be able to do the work? This is extremely unethical way of thinking and it's unfair and it's really cruel.
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But this is what the reality is. This is what you're going to be up against when you've had an employment gap. So communicating that really well is important to alleviate some of those concerns. As nice as the interviewer might seem, they are on that defensive. And as sweet and kind as they might seem, they are secretly looking for, oh, is Roberta gonna turn over in the next year? Is this going to be an issue? Is there going to be an interruption in her work? So how you communicate this,
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to show that you're completely free of whatever caused that employment gap is really important. So if let's say you were on a paternity leave, you can indicate that you were on a paternity leave. You can talk about some of the organizations you volunteered at, you can talk about some of the projects that you worked on, and you can indicate my children are now in school, like in the interviews and on your resume as well. How you articulate this does depend from industry to industry. Like if you are applying to a startup or a very...
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new kind of organization, you can get away with being a little bit more transparent. But if you're applying to a very bureaucratic and old-fashioned and traditional kind of organization, you do have to kind of speak a little more professionally. And I know that's not like a very politically correct thing to say, that you have to take your potentially very painful experience and make it marketable. But that is the unfortunate reality of the world we live in. In order to get ahead, we do have to tell a story that's marketable, as non-PC as that sounds.
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But we can do that and we can get ahead and hopefully everything will be good. Because that's very different from saying I took a sabbatical for two years to go backpacking in Europe. That's not something you actually chose. Yeah, and I think that would give an employer pause as well to say like, I took a long vacation because the most cynical employer would see something like that and they would think, oh, maybe you don't have what it takes to handle a stressful situation.
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These are some of the cynical things that someone is thinking when they look at your resume. So filling those gaps with something to show, hey, look, I'm worth the investment and I didn't let my skills deteriorate in this time. Those are the two things you have to do. As long as you can do that, you're fine. So let's say you took an employment gap because you were going through a very nasty divorce and you were battling for child custody issues. These things happen.
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manage family assets, that's enough. Right? How you communicate it. Exactly. You know, so like a backpacking in Europe one sounds like you just want to have fun. So obviously, not going to stay in the jobs. That's what they would assume. But how can you package that to say, while backpacking or while traveling in Europe for two years, I was still going to YouTube and keeping up with the latest on my skillset.
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put your education at the top of your resume rather than your professional experience and in the education section you can have like a continued learning section where you talk about some of the topics that you've been working on. Additionally if you've been backpacking in Europe you've probably picked up some European languages which is really cool. I think that is a marketable skill so rather than saying took a trip to backpack through Europe you can say something like took a break to learn Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian.
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Traveling with your backpack gives this vibe like, oh, this person hasn't been showering versus I've been learning Portuguese, Spanish and Italian. That's like, oh, how sophisticated. Sounds very different for sure. Let's talk about networking, which is something that a lot of people have a challenge with. What would you say are the do's and don'ts of networking? I think the biggest don't is, don't make things difficult for whoever you're networking with. And when I say difficult, I mean,
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you have to make it easy for them to act on the request that you're sending. So if I randomly cold email Roberta my resume and I'm like, Hey, are you hiring anyone? The amount of work she has to do to say yes. And I would like to hire you is enormous. She has to ignore the rest of the emails in her inbox. She has to open up my resume and she has to read through it. She has to think about, Hmm, do I have something that fits this person's profile?
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That's a lot of obstacles that you're making that recipient jump through. And even if you know, Rebecca is really nice and she really wants to help me. It's a huge assumption that she's going to be having that time. And what if she's not hiring and what if she doesn't have the capability to hire someone with my skills or the pay that I'm asking for, you have just closed that door instead to make it easy for the person to help you, the email has to not take any.
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brain power to answer. It can be something like, hey, Roberta, I'm interested in transitioning into the podcasting space. I love the work that you're doing. I especially liked this episode that you did on resume writing. I think that I would like to speak on interviewing and I wanted to ask what resources can help me become a better presenter? Are there any books you recommend? You know, something like that, because you don't have to think about that. Roberta has to be like, oh yeah, a book that I would recommend on
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public speaking is blah, blah, blah. That's her knowledge area. Like she doesn't have to think about it. There's no mental effort. Or, Roberta, I saw on your LinkedIn that you are doing this podcast and I was interested in doing the same to help me with my business. And I just wanted to ask, has this experience had a tangible impact on your business? Has it helped increase sales for you? Roberta just has to think, yes, no, that's it. Just answer the question. But what that does is,
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that mental investment that Roberta is making by answering my question, it's forcing her to justify why am I giving this person the time of my day. It's tricking her into liking me. I am helping Fatima because I like her and I want to see her succeed. So the next time when you email her, thank you so much, it's a really good advice, I really like that book. I probably want to do this. I probably want to start a podcast. Do you know of any resources that I can use that would help me find guest speakers?
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That's a slightly harder question, but you can kind of continue this conversation. And that's how networking works naturally, right? Like you don't go up to random people in the street and be like, hey, please give me a job or please marry me or please, you know, sell me your car. You have to work up to it. You have to get to know each other. You have to show, look, I am not going to waste your time. I am someone who's worthy of having a conversation with. I am someone who's worthy of sharing your knowledge and your...
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networking resources with and you cannot do that if you're just going for that big ask initially. So that's how you make it easy for your contacts and you help them help you. The other thing I said, you know, what if Roberta is not hiring right now? What if she literally can't help you? Having this kind of more conversational approach allows you to handle objections as well. So you can say, oh, no problem. Who do you know maybe that could use someone like me? Now suddenly I have a referral and I can say, hey, Roberta.
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recommended that I reach out to you. And I have that social proof. I come in with that intro. It's a much better approach to networking if you really try to make it natural and not so robotic. Yeah. So at the actual interview, one question that a lot of people struggle with, because in the way they usually answer it, and a lot of them sound generic, you know how they say, tell us about your strengths and weaknesses. Obviously a lot of people know their strengths, but they will take a weakness
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and make it sound like a strength because if they make it sound like a weakness, it's going to make them look bad. What do you think of that? I think it depends on the answer. Like if you are saying, well, one weakness that I always had been told by my teachers when I was in grade school is that I talk too much. So I decided to make a career out of it by becoming a public speaker. Like that's okay, I feel. That's a good one.
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That's okay, but if it's just a way for you to fluff your ego, like I haven't told them too much of a perfectionist. What they're looking for when they ask that question is, first of all, are you self-aware? Like, are you able to understand when you're struggling with something? Second thing they're looking for is, are you willing to look at your mistakes and grow from them? If you are a perfectionist and it's really, it is a weakness and you know, it's a weakness, you can make it more authentic by saying something like, I'm a perfectionist.
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to the point that there have been times that I've missed deadlines because I wanted to have something perfect or not have it at all, end up on my boss's table. This is a weakness. And then what you say is you have a moment of reflection. So this is a weakness because there are things in the corporate world that don't have to be perfect. They just have to get the job done. And that deadline adherence is more important in those situations than having something perfect.
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Now you have that awareness that like, okay, I know this was causing some kind of harm. And then you talk about how you're working on it. You can do something like, I still consider myself a perfectionist, but I have, you know, signed up for coaching to identify that this perfectionism is coming from a desire to please. And reframing that by telling myself, I'm going to please my boss more if I get this done on time, has helped me minimize.
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consequences of being a perfectionist. So then you're showing that this is a weakness that I'm actually working on. I'm not saying that I'm perfect, but it's not going to impact your work. That's the important thing. Yes. Because no one wants to work with someone that's like perfect anyway. And if they think they're that perfect, imagine how judgmental they are. I know. You know what I mean? Nobody wants that. So when it comes to storytelling, you just...
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Give an example of how you tell a story, say, you know, why I was perfect and missed the deadline for my boss. That's every answer you give at the interview have to include the story of how you handle the situation. Yeah, I think a good balance is OK. If you're like, OK, I've been talking too much about this topic. It's OK to just give like a shorter answer. You don't want your answer to be too long either. I think a good length of an answer is about one to two minutes.
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And if you want to know how long that is, that's about five to 10 sentences. So you can discreetly count that on your fingers, right? Make sure you're not rambling. But there are some questions that are going to require longer answers. If for example, the interviewer is asking, Hey, we have this big problem. Here's the premise of the problem. Here's why it's a problem. How would you create a roadmap to solve this problem? They are looking to understand how you solve problems and your thought process. And.
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whether you have the technical capability to handle such an issue. So for that, it's okay to give a longer answer. But if they're asking you like more lighthearted question, like, what do you like to do outside of work? It's okay to keep your answer to like 30 seconds as well. And speaking of selling yourself during the interview, you have introverts, smooth talkers, you have
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people who can, as my brother say, bulldust their way into the job, even if it means that they don't necessarily have those skills, it's just that they know how to talk a good game. When you think of all those, is the interview panel looking for somebody who knows how to sell themselves? Or are they worried that person won't deliver? Or is the introvert still okay as long as they can communicate their skill set and how they're going to fit into the team?
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how do they navigate that? I think it really depends on the job. Like I had this client who wanted to become a program director at Facebook, this was a few years ago, and this guy was so soft-spoken, like literally had the sweetest voice ever and we were like, you're not going to be taken seriously as a director if you are this soft-spoken, like you have to have some strength in what you're communicating. On the other hand, if you're
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interviewing for like, let's say an administrative assistant position where your job is to organize things and kind of project manage some of the things that are going around in the office, going on and on about how awesome you are and what a great leader you are, that's not going to make much sense either. So you really have to see what are the soft skills that are critical for this job. If you're looking for a director level job, you know, I have to be very strategic. I have to be able to lead large teams with conflicting priorities.
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I have to be able to motivate people when they're really burnt out. So you do need to have a stronger presence versus if you're looking at like an engineering job that doesn't require that much leadership, it just requires collaborating closely with the rest of your team, talking about how you make sure everyone is heard and you try to make sure your solutions are collaborative. That's what you want to be conveying. So it really, really depends on the job. In any case.
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No matter if you talk a lot, talk little, if you're shy, if you're introverted, if you're extroverted, you can be successful at any job. Like we know this. Right. You don't have to be a specific type of person to succeed at a job. You just have to communicate that I'm not going to make your life difficult as my boss, you know? Yes, yes. If you're given a job, yes, I'm here to contribute at value. Yes, I'm not going to make your life difficult.
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And therefore, are you saying that if somebody just talks a good game, but doesn't have anything to back it up, as we say, can they see through that? A hundred percent, because nowadays in interviews, they are asking you questions to test your capability to do the job. Some of them might ask you to do like a small paid assignment. They might ask you to do like a small test. They might ask you to present like a case study of something that you worked on before.
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they might ask you a very theoretical question of something you might run into at the job to assess how you would potentially solve that issue. So I think it's possible. With that being said, history has shown that if you're a smooth talker, you can get really far without being caught for a long time, right? Hello, catch me if you can movie. What was the guy's name? You're not a
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Because what I'm thinking, we were talking earlier about the sales guy example, how thinking that you project that I'm too outspoken, I talk a lot. And so therefore I'm going to make a lot of sales and customers buy into my personality. What's the problem with that? I think the issue with having an exaggerated sense of confidence, like, oh, I'm a great public speaker. I'm really good at convincing people. I have an answer to every question.
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It doesn't necessarily mean you're going to get a job. It doesn't necessarily mean you're going to do well in interviews because you have to slow down and think about who you're speaking to. You have to prepare. You have to do research on the company, on who is interviewing you on their products and all of that. And I think when you have this sense of confidence, like I can sell anything, I can talk about anything. It does hinder your ability to.
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prepare a little bit because you tend to over inflate how well you're going to do just based on your charm. Even if you are extremely charismatic, it is so so important to take at least half an hour to prepare for your interview, if not at least a couple hours. So I would recommend that if you feel you're going to be great at interviews, it doesn't mean that you shouldn't prepare because you never know who's going to be on the other side of the table. I might be someone who's really like authoritarian and rigid.
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or it might be someone who's super charming and fun, but they're secretly looking for like flaws in your answers. So you have to really have a proper defense that you're going to surmount. Right. We say the same thing on public speaking as well when we coach people, we say, you can never be overly prepared. You must have a superior speech, no matter how well you've done in the past, don't take anything for granted. Exactly.
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What about salary negotiations? So they say, okay, the job is 60 to $75,000 a year. So how do you negotiate and try to sort of push that to the upper end of it? Well, it starts from the very first impression with your resume. Like if your resume really shows that you bring that ROI, it's much easier to have a smoother interview. And in that interview, you have to show that you are...
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more than capable of doing the job, it becomes easier to justify a raise or a bump in the offer. If you have a weak first impression, if you're just indicating, look, I can get the job done, there's not really much more to your marketing strategy than that, then they're just going to give you the offer. They're not going to be willing to negotiate. What you have to show in your interviews is that whatever big problem they have, they
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are experiencing or whatever big opportunity they're really interested in capitalizing on, that's something you have experience with. So the big, big question you have to ask during the interview is, what would I have to achieve in order for you to say that I'm a successful hire here? Or what's something really critical I need to achieve within my first six months here? What are some of the reasons that you have this position open? What are some of the big projects you'd like me to work on?
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Once you know the answer to that question, you know their pain points. You have to frame the rest of your interview answers to speak to that. So if for example, they are saying, look, we're trying to hire an email marketing strategy because the last one resigned and she was such a great writer, I didn't really even have to manage her. Our email open rates were great. Everyone loved, you know, the work that we were doing. Now you have to show interview answers that you don't require editing. You don't require.
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fact checking, you are very familiar with the tools that are being used, you don't have to be really well managed, that the emails that you write are delightful, they get a lot of replies, etc. In each of your answers, you can kind of speak to that a little bit to really show this picture that I'm going to get the job done and you're not even going to miss that girl that left. Then when you get an offer and it's like $60,000 and you have done research that shows that fair pay for that job is $70,000.
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You can say, well, you know, my research indicates that the market rate for this is a bit higher. Additionally, I feel that the strengths that I bring to your company are something that, you know, could really benefit you guys. You know, is this the best that you can do? And I like to do this via email. I think it's really hard to do this while talking because such an icky topic. Like you're saying I am worth more money and I feel like that's so difficult to say and such a...
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high pressure situation. Like I'm kind of stumbling talking about it right now, right? Because I'm thinking a lot of people, even though they've checked Indeed and whatnot and they know the rate is much higher, you sometimes have a situation where, you know, I was laid off by Amazon, I need the job, I need a mortgage, my kids. Do I take the 60 they're offering? Or the fear is if I try to negotiate higher, they're going to say, you know what, we're going to give someone else the job who was willing to take the 60. Well, you don't have to.
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be very aggressive about it either. You don't have to be like 60, well, I was anticipating at least 80, because then they have that number that they're gonna be like, no, we cannot do 80, so you're rejected. You can have a softer approach to this. You can say, thank you so much, I'm so excited to begin. Like I loved interviewing with you and hearing about the projects you're working on. I just had a quick question. My understanding is that the market rate is a bit higher. Is this the best you can do? And if they say yes,
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And then you have to think about what's important to you. Like, is it important to you to be employed this week or is it important to you to have a high salary by the end of the year? So you can prioritize that with your family and understand what's important and decide how you'd like to proceed. But I think just pushing back at least once is okay. I actually recommend pushing back twice, but no more than that. I think if you push back three or more times, what you're doing is you're prolonging the negotiation space and they probably want you to get started sooner rather than later.
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there's a higher chance for you to get your negotiation offer rejected. Here's the thing about negotiation and mindset. If you see yourself as an asset and that you bring in value to this place, negotiate differently from someone who just thinks I need the job. I need the job. Is that your thought process on it as well? Well, I mean, I do think people can smell that desperation.
35:45
I think carrying yourself with a little bit of, look, you guys need my help is important. But that's difficult to do if the job you're interviewing for is easily replaceable. Let's be honest about it. So like a CEO would have more leverage in the salary negotiation than let's say a clerical worker. So if you can really show, look, I'm not like other clerical workers that actually digitize and automate things. So you're going to be able to speed up a lot of your processes, then great.
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but like a server at a fast food restaurant and it's a very standard job and there's not much room for creativity then that's going to be a little bit more difficult. Any last words of wisdom before you go? Yes, absolutely. I love talking about all of the things that are presented. I actually have a few free resources for your listeners if you guys go to my website careertuners.com
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That's C-A-R-E-E-R-T-U-N-E-R-S.com slash podcast. You can grab my two minute resume cheat sheet, my two minute LinkedIn cheat sheet. Both of these are going to help you get out of the job application black hole. I also have a cover letter template. That's just one page. It's just gonna take you half an hour to fill out. I have what I like to call the only networking template you'll need. Some of the things that I talked about.
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when networking some of the questions that I was asking, I have a long list of questions that you can pick and choose that sound like you, that are gonna help you with your job search. And lastly, I have what I like to call the seven interview questions that everyone messes up and how you should be answering. So you can check that out. You can grab all of that at careertuners.com slash podcasts.
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careertuners.com/podcast. Thank you so much, Fatemah Mirza, for being such a wonderful resource, especially during these times when people are being laid off. Of course, it's my pleasure. We really appreciate your insights and they're gonna be very helpful. Don't forget to subscribe, give a rating and a review, and we'll be with you next time.