Overcoming Any Obstacle In Your International Job Hunt
This week I want to talk about you realizing your career goals – and also in the bigger context of you achieving your “goals behind the goals.” Those goals for happiness, love, and contentment that we know we all want.
In this post, I want to look at what the path of someone who's successful looks like, and the path of someone who's not successful, looks like.
And I want to compare those two – with reference to the job hunt – and show you how no matter where you are on that path, you can put your finger on where you are and then make a shift if you need to or move straight ahead.
So I want to actually jump into one of my LinkedIn messages and share the story of one job hunt with you because what this individual is writing about is universal, and we all experience it, and you can learn immediately from it.
And if you're not interacting with me, one-on-one through chat, I recommend you do, because you can get some really helpful advice on your career prospects and resolve even the most issues in your life.
Obstacle One: Resume
Here is the message:
Yes, get hired into a large global firm is my goal, and I believe it is almost every international student's goal. I feel so appreciative that you said you were happy to help me with job hunting during this hard time! Unfortunately and honestly I didn't have a 2021 summer internship, so I'm focusing on looking for fall co-op opportunities and a 2022 full-time position. I have applied to some large/global companies based in the US, but you know it's like a big competition, unfortunately, my resume and my experiences didn't stand out during this competition. Then I was trying to look for referring, but I do not have a strong network. I'm really lost right now... so recently I was focusing on edit my resume...
A universal situation: there is that dream or that experience that we want to go for. We can all dream, right? People who are successful, dream. People who are not successful, dream. That's easy to do. The question is: are we going to take steps to achieve that dream?
Here is where I think the paths might diverge: we're going to have the people who are successful and the people who are not successful.
Both the successful and unsuccessful people universal are going to become aware of what their challenges are or their difficulties, but then they're going to do two very different things.
The unsuccessful people are going to see those challenges such as, “My resume is not competitive, experience as not competitive or my networks are not strong enough,” and, therefore, I'm confused and I'm just going to go back to revising my resume. They are going to get stuck!
If you go back to revising your resume, you're stuck, right? You don't know what else to do with the resume to tweak it.
The successful person in this situation will go to take stock of what their challenges are. They’re going to maybe their resume isn't getting the response that they want or their experience might not be the most competitive out there or that they don't have a network.
Instead of getting stuck, they're going to put that on their list of things that they're going to learn, to master. They're going to learn how to solve those problems. The issue with my resume, the issue with my experience, and the issue with my network: I am going to do things in such a way, such that my resume is not an issue.
I'm going to do things in such a way, such that my experience is not an issue. And I'm going to do things in such a way that I get that network I'm going to put those things on my calendar, and then I'm going to go out and I'm going to find resources. I'm going to engage in discussions. I'm going to research.
I might even want to find a coach and have that coachwork with me and take things step by step so that I can master each one of those and get that job at the level I want and in the timeframe I need.
It's easy for the successful and the unsuccessful person to dream.
We're all going to dream. I'm going to dream. You're going to dream, but then what happens when we hit those obstacles, what are we going to do?
The unsuccessful person will just stop. They're going to see the resume is not getting responses. They're going to stop eventually. They're going to burn out. They're going to go into a depression spiral. They're maybe going to blame their experience or their lack of a network, and they're going to stop. They're not going to make progress.
The successful person on the other hand is going to see those issues as the starting point for action. So let's just take a look at some of how the successful path can be realized here, and we'll just make it through that same set of issues that my friend was talking to me about her challenges.
And so what does that path through look like? Well, first of all, obstacle number one: the resume is not strong enough, not very competitive.
Do you know what I say? Don't compete based on the resume!
Don’t play that game of waiting in line after applying online. See that the job that you want is a matter of not your resume getting hired, but you as a person getting hired - the whole person.
People hire people, not resumes or GPAs or your legal status.
See that there's a path beyond the obstacle which is “my resume is not good enough” because well, to begin with, no one hires you ever just for your resume. That's why you have interviews and interviews are nothing more than networking meetings.
Obstacle Two: Experience
“My experience is not strong enough,” we may conclude.
The successful person would say, “what can I do now to move beyond this obstacle of a lack of experience?”
In any kind of area of expertise, or area of excellence: how do you move into that excellence? Is it always by having expertise? Well, every hiring manager that you're going to speak with started with no experience.
There is a path which is, “Hey, I've done this before and I'm a great candidate for this role.”
Then there's the path, which is leading to success, which is “I'm going to research, and thorough research, I'm going to learn what it is that this role calls for and brand myself as the person who is a great fit. I'm going to have lots of conversations with people. And I'm going to become so informed on this topic and speak with enough people that I'm going to emerge as the expert.”
You become hirable through research and branding and not through prior experience.
The unsuccessful person, whereas they would have stopped and said, “okay, my experience is not good enough. – these are the internal dialogues that are just us beating ourselves up - the successful person is going to say, “okay, how do I move beyond a lack of experience?”
1) Not only is the experience one path to getting hired but 2) research and developing relationships through talking with people is another path - especially talking with people who can hire you.
Obstacle Three: Lack of Networking
So, what do we do when we have a lack of a network? Well, let me just tell you that the unsuccessful person sees the lack of network and they give up, they stop. And the successful person sees the lack of network and then they go build the network.
Now I'm going to reveal something here that has never been revealed before, and I think it's going to be helpful for you to hear this now.
Executives, American, Asian, South American, from wherever... even executives don't have sufficient networks at the time when they need them most. When do they need the most? It’s often when they lose their jobs.
What do they have to do? They have to go out and experience that lack. Most of the time they have so much pressure behind them, like a family or a mortgage that they have to figure it out. They have that necessity.
So what do they do? They go build their network.
The same thing applies to us when we're in that early stage of our careers. We go and build that network. We see that we lack a network. We see that our referrals are not getting us to where we want to go.
We make a change. We learn what we need to know.
Your network can be composed of two kinds of people. We can have the people who are the juniors. Right. The recent grads - the ones that you'd probably know most familiar and comfortable speaking to.
And then we're going to have the hiring managers. Those are the people that have the authority to hire you – and which you probably don't feel comfortable communicating with, and you have not done much of that.
And so when it comes down to networking and having a network, you're either going to decide.
- I'm going to give up or
- I'm going to go build my network.
And then you're going to decide further as follows:
- I'm going to build my network of not only junior people - which are very nice to speak with and easy to access - but
- I'm also going to speak with the executives that the decision-makers in these firms who have the authority to hire me.
Both types of networking are valuable. With one, you can get information, and with the second, you can get those strong referrals that lead to offers.
Referrals are more akin to trust in you.
So a strong referral – it means there is somebody internally, with authority, who has trust in you.
If you are facing a lack of a network, what are you going to do? Just roll over and give up…? Or are we going to go out and build that network? Are we going to systematically develop a method of speaking with strangers who are older and maybe more experienced than us and develop those relationships?
The reason why this is something to master now: Your future boss is currently likely a stranger. You're most likely not yet in contact with the hiring manager who will ultimately hire you. They are a stranger to you as you are to them at this moment.
But at some point, you hope that changes: they come to KNOW YOU.
Now, what would precipitate or cause that change? It would be you coming into contact with that senior executive, with that hiring manager. Ask yourself, do I want that event to be something that I control and have influence over or not?
Frankly, most of us out there give up that control or we fail to take control. In other words, we apply online and wait for things to happen in our lives and they….never do.
The alternative is to systematically develop our network among the people we know we eventually want to be talking to every day: I'm going to pick who I reach out to, and I'm going to get to know them, and the point here is just get started.
Now, if you want tips and the step-by-step exact way to do that, I'm here for you. My program, The Career Accelerator Program is a masterclass in how to ACE networking and get hired.
I'm not going to tell you that as soon as you jump into the program, boom, you're going to be instantly brilliant at it. You’ll have to put in the work – and I will be with you every step of the way.
Before you know it, not only have you mastered networking for life, you also have this amazing job. And the amazing thing about networking is that executives, too, don't know how to do it. People that you will be networking with, most definitely don't understand networking themselves, but they know when things feel right and when they don’t.
It's up to us to define it so you deliver a good networking experience.
The most awkward aspect of networking is everyone's walking around saying “networking is important” but no one is defining exactly what that is. Within the Career Accelerator program, we define that, and we define it from the perspective of the hiring managers so that they love the experience of having met you.
The Right Path
We have these two paths that people travel:
- One is the successful path.
- One is the unsuccessful path.
We're all going to run into the same challenges. We're all going to run into situations where we don't have this or we lack this or our “something” is not good enough.
Those that are unsuccessful, we're going to see those and give up, going to stop and that's going to lead to depression. That's going to lead to getting into another graduate program or whatever people do to avoid the pain that they feel.
Ultimately that means that they don't - at least at this stage - realize their potential. Now, maybe in the future, this plants a seed that five or 10 years from now, will grow, but what about figuring this out today…In this lifetime..in this month…In the next couple of weeks or days?
We can do this!
The successful person will come across those same obstacles, and they will systematically lay them out, and then work through them, put them on their calendar to solve.
They will find resources, find a coach, and work through them and build mastery in those same areas where they felt they were weak. And as a result, they will achieve their dreams. They will achieve their goals.
Not only this time but in all those future times when they feel stuck or have a goal that’s not easily attainable. You know they're going to be many times in your life when you're going to come across something that you haven't encountered before, and it's going to be a matter of do I:
1) Stop, get stuck, and stop
2) Or see these as opportunities?
The Obstacle Is The Way
One of the great books that I've been reading now is called The Obstacle is The Way by Ryan holiday. I recommend you check that out.
It is this concept from a philosophy called stoicism that began in ancient Greece whereby we see obstacles as opportunities. We don't get thrown off our course when something comes in our way.
We don't stop. We find ways to move forward, ad we don't identify too strongly with the situation.
You know, if we experience rejection, we have the option to conclude one of two things:
“Oh, this is me. This is my rejection. I'm terrible.”
Or we have this other approach, which is
There was this event of a rejection. What can I learn from this event?
There is just a little bit less attachment involved in that second approach – and I recommend that to you.
That's more relating to the mindset of the job hunt which we very much care about in The Career Accelerator program. For now, I just wanted to discuss these two paths, the successful path, the unsuccessful path. What is the path leading to success?
I wanted to share my friend’s LinkedIn message with you because her path is everyone's path.
Her challenge is the universal challenge and it specifically relates to the job hunt for international students.
