121 How to Get Your Next Ideal CF Job (using LinkedIn, Resume, GitHub), with Doug McCaughan- Transcript

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Michaela Light 0:02
Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Doug. Cannon if I'm saying your name right, Doug. He's

Doug McCaughan 0:09
very close to makan. makan. All right on it, Tim CO and I throw in a lot of letters to confuse people. There you go, lots of C's in there. But we're going to be talking about how to get your next ideal ColdFusion job. And I'll tell you in a moment what happened with Doug, it's a bit of a shocking story. But what we're going to be focusing on in the episode is what are the modern ways now to get your ideal ColdFusion job because it really sending out resumes and all the things that people used to do. Don't work as well on there are better ways you can use and we'll talk about those in the episode.

Michaela Light 0:46
And then, for those of you don't know, Doug, he's been doing cold fusion for over 20 years. He's also a juggler and a Boy Scout troop leader, I think is how you get the scout master. And yeah, and he also not only non easy a juggler with juggling balls, but he does a lot of different it and programming languages, as many coffees developers do. I know. So

Doug McCaughan 1:11
man with many, whatever you call it, Swiss Army Knife skills. So Annie lives currently in Tennessee, oh, he's told me he's willing to relocate pretty much anywhere I think in the universe. Outside of that they do cold fusion. And he has five kids, a fantastic wife. And he's also a radio operator, I don't understand these acronyms you shared in your bio, but maybe other people are in radio operation more.

But those are my names on the on the on the radio.

Oh, okay. That's what it is. And he also likes adventuring in the mountains and wildernesses of country. So welcome, Doug. It's good to be here. Yeah. And just to summarize your situation, you've been working at a university in their IT department doing cold fusion for I think, maybe 12 years is that roughly?

Right? Around 12 years, I was just under 12 years, began January 2010. And

I'll go ahead, and then then you got a new CIO, right? I think, and we better leave the university nameless, though, the name will become apparent later, I guess, but we won't mention it right now. And the new CIO, as often happens, they they had a whole new strategy, and they wanted to get rid of cold fusion and switch to 100% Microsoft software, which, unfortunately, cold fusion is not made by Microsoft. Well, unfortunately, for this CIO. And so the whole ColdFusion development team, I think, eight people, if I remember, right,

it was a small team, it was three of us, really, it was just

three. But all we had let go, darling

45. It was, it was a six week project at the beginning of 2010. That lasted 12 years.

Anyway, the point is from no fault of your own, it's not like you didn't anything bad. But the company pivoted organization pivoted away from confusion. And suddenly, after 12 years, you're like, Oh, dear, I need to get a job. And you posted in the ColdFusion programmers group and facebook saying something to this effect. And I said, Well, maybe I can help you make over your LinkedIn and you know, some other things will help you get a job in the modern world versus, you know, sending out resumes or whatever people used to do in the last century. Right. And you kindly offered to come on the podcast, because you're not the only ColdFusion developer who has this issue of having trouble finding a job. In fact, in our state annual State of the ColdFusion, union, state of the CF union surveys, if I can say that, right. One of the number one pains that developers have with cold fusion is finding jobs, right? Ironically enough, the pain on the flip side with CIOs is hiring people who have cold fusion skills, who fit in the thing. So there's some kind of mismatch there because it doesn't make sense that both sides would have the same issue. But that's actually

it's funny. I hear that as a reason to not use cold fusion, as they say, we can't find cold fusion developers.

Okay. Well, anyone who's saying that right now, he has someone right here on the shows who's great at Cold Fusion willing to travel, relocate anywhere in the country, if not the universe to help you out. So obviously, that isn't 100% true that it's impossible to hire people. So anyway, that's a whole different discussion. Let's talk about how if you're looking for either a coffee job because you no longer have your job, or if maybe you're just looking for a better job because you've kind of you've got a pointy haired boss that Dilbert you're fed up with working for the works, not saying factory for you and you'd like to get a new job, what are the ways to do that? You know now, because you know how people used to do it, they'd see job ads, they send in their resume, maybe they wrote a cover letter, they pray that their resume would make it through the HR hiring screen, looking for acronyms in your resume. And you might get an interview. And if you get an interview, you get a second interview, and eventually you get an offer. And that's basically the old fashioned progress. But I have to tell you, that's not how hiring works these days. I mean, yes, that still goes on, people do still sending resumes, some of them still do get jobs, but it's like a one in 100, if not more probability, in that.

I've been on the other side of the table where I've had to evaluate the resumes where you actually look for reasons to get rid of the resumes.

Oh, yes. And the reason you do that, just to be fair to people listening have never done hiring is when you post a job, you may get 300 or 500 applicants, right. And a lot of them don't apply thoughtfully, they don't check them, I'm a good fit for this job. They just kind of spray and pray, they spray out their resume to hundreds of different jobs, some of which might be offense, some of which aren't. And on the receiving end, it can get overwhelming. And so people get ruthless, unfortunately, it's not very, you know, friendly, but they really are doing that. And then in addition to any larger organization, you know, at a smaller organization, it might be the president or the hiring manager, who's doing that, you know, screening process, and, but a larger organization that may be an HR department involved. And I have to tell you, in my experience, most HR departments do not understand programming. And they have, and so they have a kind of, you know, they have acronyms they look for they look for ColdFusion, or they look for HTML, or SQL or whatever, and they screen. And if you don't have the right acronyms, you don't even make it through the inbox, the hiring manager,

don't we have a eyes automatically. So they have a

there are AI and machine learning things that do the same thing, but they still suck, because they can't tell. They can read the acronyms in your resume. Or, and they can read some other things. But you know, no offense, HR people have a lot of great skills. But understanding the software development, and who might be a good software developer is not one of the things they really bring to the table. So

seems to emerge as disingenuous resumes to

there's a lot of resume inflation and lying that goes on. I have to I'm sorry to say, which I don't recommend anyone does. I mean, for sure. list everything you have be generous in what you put in because you don't want to get screened out. Right? I wouldn't even play that game. I wouldn't play the resume game in this modern age of hiring, because that's not how most hiring happens. And how does it happen? Most successful? First of all, most jobs are not advertised. If you're only applying about 70% of jobs that are filled, were never advertised there isn't even a job ad to apply to. So percent. Yeah, most jobs are not advertised. Because most people go through their network, they ask their development team, hey, we need another CF developer or we need a DBA. Do you guys know anyone, maybe they have a hiring bonus, you know, or whatever. This is less likely in government organizations or universities or other big companies, they may have more of a formal process, but in smaller to medium organizations is incredibly common. That the hiring manager goes to that Rolodex, they know some developers, they think, hey, so and so seem impressive. Let me see if they're available. Or maybe they post it on their social media. And there's no formal, you know, job put out there. So it's kind of like the dark matter of the hiring universe that it's done through who you know, and who's visible.

So it's really important to maintain those networks.

Absolutely. You can't you cannot leave your network neglected for 12 or 20 years. I don't know how many years you've obviously got a network Doug, you've got a nice LinkedIn profile. We'll come in and do a screen share on that for those who are watching on video, and we'll talk through it for those listening on audio. But even your LinkedIn profiles, a little dated in places, which you didn't realize until we sat down, looked at it together. You're like, oh,

you know, on all honesty, I've been ignoring my LinkedIn too much to my detriment.

Well, I would say LinkedIn is one of the number one places that most hiring people go to look for candidates or become aware of people. I'm seeing that now. Yeah. And we'll talk about why that is and some of the tools that people use on both sides for how to hire people and to get hired. And then also, a lot of this is around visibility, you probably know people in the ColdFusion community whose names are like known by everyone like Ray Camden and Charlie Earhart and Mikayla light. Lewis Mahan, oh, and you know, Brad wood, various other names, okay, you're probably not going to get to that level of being known. But if you share regularly on LinkedIn, and you share regularly in Facebook groups, people will know your name, they'll know you're a helpful guy, they'll know you're not an asshole. Because that's one of the other things people are trying to eliminate. They don't want an idiot working for them who's you know, critical and mean, and what have you.

So would you say contributing in the social in the open source and the forums is important?

Absolutely. contributing an open source is great, a lot of more technical hiring managers are going to check to see if you've made any open source contributions. So they'll look for your GitHub, and that's good to include your GitHub URL on your LinkedIn profile. And then in your resume. You know, you people can tell it's far more transparent, right? You can't lie on a one, what you've done on GitHub, you've either contributed, or you haven't. And if you have contributed, they were either useful, and you were respectful of other people, or it was not useful. And you were a dickhead, yeah, to be using French.

Now, I will say that in the past, I've had a desire to work in open source, but I haven't had the bandwidth, it we've really got to carve out that space, whether whether we have the bandwidth to do it or not. But in the past, I had worked days and nights and weekends, and I couldn't figure out how to squeeze in that extra GitHub time.

Yes, well, you know, if you're, if you're working two or three jobs, it might be impossible. But I think every I noticed on I looked at your GitHub profile, thanks for sharing it. And we'll put it in the show notes for this episode for people curious, but I noticed you'd start some projects, how long? How long does it take to start a project? Which is basically that's a like, one second? Yeah, so everyone could do that. If you if you use, you know, coldbox, or you use some, you know, package inside forge box or whatever, why not show some love and store it. I was talking to Brad wood the other day, he writes a lot of open source. And he said, you know, how is it that some other languages have 10,000 stars on the framework, and ColdFusion has 300, you know, right, guys, it takes a second stick a star on something, it's like putting a light on a Facebook post, there's no comeback to doing that. It helps you find it later. So you can see the things you've liked. And it's showing a little appreciation, a very low level of effort to people, the next level of thing people can do on GitHub is to you know, help out with the documentation or report bugs or whatever, that's not as higher level thing. And the next level up is to do a learn how to do a pull request, there are articles on how to do that for ColdFusion projects, if you've never done it before, and make you know, make some fixes or help things out. So but there's kind of a spectrum of of levels of effort. And at the lowest level, I think everyone can have a GitHub profile, right, where you have your contact info and have something about you. And you can like some projects, and next level up, you can help improve the docs or you can report issues. So third level, you can actually do some programming changes obviously takes more work.

Absolutely. But But that's a very good point. Because in my mind, it had always been jumped straight into providing the changes the Bug, bug fixes, and there's so much more to it than that politico pointed out.

Yeah, there's a lot and same with LinkedIn. Right? A lot of people you fortunately, I, you know, one of the, we'll come into exactly what if you actually post in LinkedIn, I have to tell you 95% on people on LinkedIn, or maybe 99% Do not post regularly. Wow, nada, nothing. It's crickets. Yeah, yeah, I noticed something LinkedIn, you posted every three few days, which is fabulous. But not everyone is comfortable doing that, because they're afraid they'll be criticized or they're unsure what to say. Or they feel it all the time. But everyone has time to put some likes onto ColdFusion related things. That, you know, they like, yeah. And you might say, Well, why bother? Well, here's the reason. Okay, when you like LinkedIn, because very few people post LinkedIn has a shortage of content. And so you'll notice when you go on LinkedIn, they don't just show other people's posts from your connections, right? But they show that one of your friends liked an article because you might like it too. And they want to show it to you and they're shorter content in your in their feed and Same thing with comments, you know, they'll say so and so commented on this article, and they'll show you it. So when you like, or comment, it shows up in other people's feeds, it's showing up in your connections view, but it also shows up in those other people be influenced as soon as article you commented on all the other friends, you have you commented on their feed as well,

creating visibility for you in the process, even even though you didn't have to go to the extent of creating a comment.

Yeah, if you do a like, it'll show up somewhere. And yeah, this is like, I know, most developers think marketing is a dark, evil arc, that it should never be used. But when you're trying to find yourself a new job, you really are effectively marketing and selling yourself. So you need to learn something around it and be okay doing something.

And that was the router realized, no, go ahead. I'm sorry.

Realize that it's putting your name out there. If people don't know your name, how are they going to hire you? How are you going to stand out from the pack of 500 resumes you came in? You're not.

So we have to treat ourselves as a client, and give ourselves time each week for that marketing for that promotion. And that's what I've neglected in myself.

Yeah, I you know, it doesn't have to be long, it could be five minutes a week would be better than most people do. If you have more time, that's fabulous. If you can make it a game, you can do a lot of this stuff on your phone. You know, if you're waiting for a bus or you're waiting from your early for a meeting, get your phone out and just do a few likes or quick comments on some posts. You know, it's, it doesn't have to be sit down for three hours solid, you know, you can take one minute and put a few likes in on some posts. That's, you know, achieving something. Plus, you might find something interesting. You never know.

Oh, every time I do it, I learned something.

Absolutely. And it supports the people who are taking the time to write content, you know, whatever it is. Or another way to go about it. You know, when you've advanced from doing likes and comments on other people's stuff, when you're writing your own stuff. It may be some small tip you learned in ColdFusion or, or new tool, you saw those new release a forge box made last week and you want to write about it. Or maybe read a blog post related to cold fusion, and you write a few sentences on it and then give the link to it. Yeah, it doesn't have to be like an essay. You know, it could take you five minutes. If you're if you're already thinking about talking to your cube mate about whatever the thing is, or your ColdFusion friend or whatever. Why not spend the time to write a few sentences about it. Share it with others.

I just did. I just did this one. I have been reading this book and Oh, but one one on on that. Because this exciting.

What's the book Doug for those listening at home?

This book is modern cold fusion CFML in 100 minutes by Louise. I'm gonna butcher his name Madonna.

Mahalo. Mahalo Mahalo. That's okay, you get one free butchering because I butcher your name a little bit. So, yeah, you could, I mean, there's many ways and you, you can look at what other people do to get ideas. But for those listening, who are afraid to post, just start liking and commenting, because that's doing something and I suppose and then also connecting to people, you know, is the other thing to do there.

Now, would you say in the LinkedIn environment to keep it business like, this is not an environment to post our political commentary or, or that we're playing in our gardens. That's more for Facebook.

You know, I people take different views on this. And I think this has shifted since 2020, when we had that little COVID thing, start, and people have been a bit more transparent on LinkedIn. But LinkedIn is a professional, you know, job finding, network. And you've got some companies will look at what you write there. So they used to say, many years ago, if you're in polite company, you don't talk about three things, politics, religion, or sex. And I think that's probably a wise thing to follow on LinkedIn. Unless your job is directly to do with politics, or religion, or sex. That makes interesting job if they intersect with ColdFusion. But there you go. But that will be my personal advice. But if you're going on a kayaking trip, or you're climbing a mountain, or you know you've reached a new milestone with your boy scout troop, or whatever, sure, share something personal about yourself. On occasion, not every post. It's not Facebook, right? I think there is room to bring a better personality in

and to show that you're a well rounded person and let them see. Learn more about who you are.

Yeah, and exactly and because those kinds of things are not typically diverse. If no one's gonna get upset that you planted a new row of lettuce in your garden to write have healthier food or you climbed a mountain in You know, sandals or whatever you did, you know, I don't think that's an often you can you can, you can often pivot it back to programming somehow. Right? Correct always. But often it's possible to say, well, you know,

Well, it's interesting that the stuff I have done in scouts, the leadership, and what we teach those scouts has directly influenced how I work with my clients and my jobs. So

yeah, you can say that. And I think LinkedIn in for people to looking for a job. LinkedIn is the place to be, because that's where hiring managers will look for people. Yes, you can use Facebook, there's a Facebook ColdFusion programs group, how many hiring managers are looking in that group? I don't know. It's more developers. Same with ColdFusion, Slack channel. Again, it's probably mostly developers, so they might be able to link you up to a job, but they're not going to hire you themselves.

So um, what about all the old job sites? I know, decades ago, you monster. I'm not sure if I should throw out names [email protected]. He's thrown out

names, there's a bunch of job sites? Are they still gonna have a I'm not saying it's impossible to get a job. But I'm just telling you most jobs happen through networking and most networks these days happens through LinkedIn. So

because those job sites tie back to what you said in the beginning, about job postings and where jobs 70% of them come through networking?

Yeah. So yes, you can put a profile up on there, yes, you can look at job ads there. But at the end of the day, you're effectively, you know, among hundreds of other people, and then how do you stand out? You know, it's tricky. And yes, there are tricks you can do with your resume. And with your cover letter, and, you know, reaching behind the system, you know, if the system is funneling your resume into an application tracking system, which is typically what happens, right? It's not like your resume, goes straight to the hiring managers box, it goes into some software, where they suck out the keywords and try and rank it and what have you, and probably, you know, the HR department and the assistant to the hiring manager, you know, throw out a bunch of people, and you don't want to be thrown out. So it's really not an ideal way. Now, what some people do is they try and go do an end run around that. And they try and figure out who is the hiring manager? Or who are the people influencing science and then connect to them directly without saying I want the job. But like, Hey, you, did you have a cool initiative going on? You know, can we, you know, congrats on that, or

one of the other social engineering? Yeah, do some

social engineering to get them. But this is something again, to cultivate over time to get to know people who you might want to work for in the future, and have what I call an informational interview with them. In other words, it's not a job interview, just want to get to this coffee chat, you just want to get to know each other. Right? And then it gets their defenses down. Because as soon as you say I want a job, how are they going to react? It's sort of like when you go into a car showroom. And the PERT salesperson comes up to you like, Oh, would you like to buy a car today, sir? And you look at what happens? Yeah, you go defensive. And the same with hiring managers, they get overwhelmed. And, but if you're just like, hey, I always wanted you know, you're doing cool stuff in your company, I'd like to learn more about it. You know, and, you know, I understand you don't have any jobs open right now. But I'd like to learn more about it. A lot of people will accept that. Or maybe you want to be mentored by them. You know, a lot of people are flattered that they have expertise to share. So there's a lot of ways to connect with people. You may have friends who will give you mock interviews, that's another thing you can do in this. Oh, that's brilliant. Yeah. So

certainly after 12 years of not interviewing, that would be a nice exercise.

Yeah. Because, you know, if they're a good interviewer, they'll try and put you at ease. Because they want to get to the truth, right? They don't want you to be nervous. They don't want to play PAC games with you. You know, they're just trying to get to who you really are. And is there a good cultural fit between you and their company? Is there a good team fit? You know, do you have the right attitude? And then fine, in my case, finally, do you have the skills because, for me, you can always learn skills, you don't know how to use this particular ColdFusion tag or you haven't used ColdFusion Adobe ColdFusion 2021 or you haven't played with leis version of Lucy or whatever. I'm sure with a bit of googling or little you know, watching videos or reading books, you can figure it out pretty pronto if you're a good developer, what you cannot change is your attitude and whether you're a cultural fit those are very hard to impossible to change in my experience of having tried to help people change those things. That makes so if if you know, those what I look for as a hiring manager, do you fit I mean, Intertek We have a coach, it's pretty open. You know, I like people, either they use their intuition when they're programming, or at least they're open to that concept. Right. And either they are spiritual or they're open to being spiritual around things and seeing the bigger picture here. We have a theme word this year in TourTech of love, which is divine love, not romantic love. And it's around being kind to our clients being kind to each other, you know, making things easy for people having a little humor in meetings being patient. You know, sounds like yeah, it isn't wonderful environment, but it means whoever is doing the hiring needs to be a bit of a gatekeeper to keep the assholes out who either don't get that concept, or actively work against it.

Do you source? Do you use personality tests, I just had to take one called the caliper test. And, and it was, it was a multiple choice tests that had really weird questions. It was like, What is your favorite color blue, green, Maserati, or an airplane? And

I have used personality tests. I've used the disc test. I've got I know people who are fans of the Colby test. They have they give you some insights, but they're not a be all end all. There's just some indication that here's something to ask people about. Right? It's the same with code. I like to see people's code, you know, when I'm hiring developers, because I like to see, can they write easy to read code? You know? Because that, to me is key in, you know, in a software agency, I mean, another nother thing, consider it, what kind of software job do you want, because I see there being three typical clients that you can work in an IT department or company that doesn't do software, like you work at the University. Universities are not there for software, they're there to educate students or to do research, the software is to assist the university in performing that main job function. The same with most software jobs, you're working in the IT department of a company that is there for another reason, right? That's the first kind of job, I call that align it job. And then you do

integrations, you do SAS services, where you your main job is just working between the customer and the third party providing the software.

Yeah, could be doing that. Or you could be maintaining the same system for years on end. Yeah, typically, in that kind of job. There's not too much unpredictability, it's, you know, you've got the same kind of systems, maybe there's new initiative, every now and again, maybe there's upgrades, latest versions. But, you know, it's it's fairly low stress compared to other options. The other two options are agency slash freelancer, where you're doing different projects for different clients all the time. And you're coming in more as an expert, and then that there's a lot more learning curve there, maybe more stress, but there's a lot more variety. And then the third kind of job is where you're working for one of those big tech companies like Facebook, or Google or whatever. And they're not doing cold fusion. So I don't think we have that. But, you know, they have potentially a lot more learning curve, potentially a lot more stress, potentially a lot more wacky, stuff that goes on, in how they organize things. You know, like, just like, for example, Amazon have their managers rank every one every year and they kick they fire, the bottom 10% or thereabout. So they were doing that a few years ago, and they're still doing Wow. So it didn't matter how good you were, if you didn't, you know, meet that performance test. And the managers were told you must fire the bottom 10%. It didn't matter if your team was full of geniuses. Wow. Some of them have to be got rid of.

And throat. You're just a cog in the machine at that point. Yeah.

All right. I think there's a bit of that. I'm not saying that these big tech things can't be wonderful. They pay really well, you might get stock options. You're going to may probably be working with really clever people. But on the flip side, they may also be somewhat ruthless, or have bizarre ways of doing things that might not be fun. And right. Also, I'm going to say this publicly, Google used to have a tagline called, don't be evil. And if you remember that, when they first absolutely came in business, they got rid of that. And I would say at this point, some aspects of what Google Facebook, whatever the Twitter, they do some evil things. I won't dig into what exactly evil things they've done. But if anyone interested in that, feel free to email me and tell you, you can do your own research to find out there's people have written, you know, whistleblower books on what Google was getting up to. Wow, that was not good. And I think we all know this at some level. As programmers, we know that a lot of these companies invade privacy. You know, they they take data Then they resell it and do all kinds of naughty things. But, you know, anyway, I won't go down that rabbit hole, just to say, sometimes in companies, whether they're big tech or even lying companies, you know, sometimes you can be working. I mean, I think universities are generally moderately harmless. But there are other companies who do evil things in the world. And you have to ask, okay, I might, am I comfortable doing software for this company or not? Maybe you're fine with it. Maybe you figure the software you do is actually making them other employees life's better. Right? Even though the company itself maybe is doing things that are a bit dubious? Yes, anyway, I think we should flip over to your LinkedIn profile and talk through that, because we already sure, you know, slipping through it. So let me see how to do and, um, for those listening, I'm going to talk through what we're doing. So let's have a look at your LinkedIn profile. Doug, hopefully you can see the screenshare. So for those listening, Oh, I feel like I'm narrating one of those baseball games on the radio. Have you ever listened to baseball or cricket on the radio. So here are at the top of everyone's list, and I'm looking at this on desktop. But I do want to point out 50% of LinkedIn users come through mobile. So yeah, 50% come through mobile, because they're busy executives, or whatever, and they're on the go, and they just flip through it. You know, when they're on the go waiting between meetings, or traveling or whatever. Anyway, so you do want to check it your own profile on mobile, as well as desktop, make sure it works both ways. But let's look at it. Let's look at the first key part of everyone's profile, which is your profile photo. Okay, because human beings are attracted to other human beings. So you need a profile photo, you've got a profile photo here. You know, looks pretty good. You've got a little tag on it open to work, which is great. Now, so points to having this half of ColdFusion developers don't have a profile photo. It's ridiculous. Yeah, number one thing that people will see and I'll show you in a minute, why that's important. You could improve this photo by by if you can afford to having a professional photographer take your photo. Yeah, okay. Smiling in it looking, looking into the eyes of the camera. You know, being friendly, good things don't this, you've got a big headshot. So it stands out. Things I would get rid of this all you've got like a, I think this is a window behind you. But it's kind of if you're a graphic designer, aesthetic person, this is cutting into your head.

It's noise. It's noisy, it's distracting. Yeah, so

it's unnecessary. So either Photoshop it out, or with a professional photographer, they will photograph you without that kind of right. So that's good. Okay, so that's number one. Second thing, while your name, you're probably not going to be able to change and you probably shouldn't change your name. Or you will see people on LinkedIn who put stars and things that's actually against the terms of service to stick that into your name. So I don't recommend you do that. But the next most important thing is your tagline, right? And yours is it software developer for University of Texas. Pretty boring, doesn't say the word ColdFusion. It assuming you want to call fusion job might be an idea to get the word cold fusion into there. Somewhere, if you don't want to cold fusion job, you need to get the technology or your differentiator in there.

And that's not just pulling from your most recent job. That is that is something I typed in.

That's something you typed in if you're on your own, this is your I'm looking at your profile, not my own, but on your own profile, you can add it, there's a little pencil icon, you can edit that. So I would get ColdFusion in there. Maybe you want some other word that stands out, right? Because you know, there's probably not probably I know, there are hundreds of 1000s of ColdFusion developers out there. So maybe you want something that differentiates you. And what I would typically do is front load the tag line you get up to I think 240 characters these days, but the current first few characters are what matters. Because they

discourage says I solve problems. That's probably isn't what goes there. Well, we'll need the keywords.

Yeah, you want some keywords and you want to stand out. So typically, I'd have something like, you know, cold fusion. I don't know developer, you're an analyst as well, I think so. You might want to get that in there.

extraordinaire.

Yeah, you can add extraordinaire, you could and then you could add something about yourself at the end like expert juggler. And that's not because anyone's gonna hire you because you do juggling as a hobby is because it stands out and they're like, Oh, that's interesting. It's like an icebreaker. Yeah, so that was what I put in there. And then the third most important part of your profile is having this background image that appears at the top of the thing and it's great, you're most people do not have a background image, leave it blank. Okay, so hats off having a background image. But this background image for those listening at home or not watching the video, dogs background image, it's this really clever thing where he's touching a mirror, but he's looking in the same direction on the mirror, if you must have photoshopped on some other clever tech trick to achieve, but what the heck is it got to do with cold fusion. Now, nothing

less you can put it there because it was blank. And I thought it was good. I thought I thought it was something somebody might go, how do you do that?

Exactly. But if you can either pivot the image by adding some text into the image that relates to what you're looking for in a job, or how what differentiates you or make an image that's related to it. So if you've attended a conference, you have a photo, some photos from a conference, those are ideal, because they show you networking, or they show you speaking, gotcha. You're you and you could change your image every month, if you want to every week. So that photo you shared with you with that ColdFusion book might be an idea for an image. Oh, nice. So yeah, because anyway, you can play with the images to do that. But the reason it's important is because it takes up a lot of real estate. And it's an opportunity for you to say some of your top skills or how you're different. I will point out that your profile photo kind of overlays the image and overlays it differently between desktop and mobile. So you got to be careful where you stick text and where you stick your face.

How do you feel about that header image having some sort of word cloud that is full of No, not too much, but full of the full of the key words for the font, you know, that sort of

thing? That would be great, but get a huge get your human face in there to human beings, like monkeys react to other faces of their species. So word clouds are cute. Definitely, you could have a word cloud in there as long as it's got your face in there as well. Because this is your profile, not Adobe ColdFusion profile. Right? Now, those were the top three things, you get those things, right, you're ahead of the game. And let me just bring up the results of a search. So here's a search. So I did did a search. And here here's what happens when someone's looking for someone in LinkedIn. Right? Maybe they're looking for their next ColdFusion developer. And I blanked out the people's names to hide the names of the valley and all they guilty here. But you can see when you do a search, all they see is your photo if you have one now you can see these first two people have photos. Third one doesn't. Who's who you're going to who has the most trust here, this third one doesn't. Because they don't have a photo. You can see it tells you where they are on, you know, how close are they in, you know, second level connection or first level or whatever. It gives that tagline and you get in here you get about I think I forget the exact number characters, but let's say it's 60 characters. So that's why it's important you front load your tagline with the important keywords. Right. Then it says where you're from, and it says connections in common. That's all people get to see this is all information they have to decide should they click further to investigate Doug to see if Doug is of interest to them for hiring.

So this is your elevator pitch your your 30 seconds to impress.

And you'll fold a profile photo is part of part of that. And a good profile photo will stand out some people put cute things in their photo that can sometimes work. Like if you're into motor bicycling, maybe you have your motorbike in the background. You know, if you're into juggling, maybe you're juggling, I'm not saying you should do that. But some people will catch up. And definitely you want to be smiling. And definitely it's great to have a photo, you see these ones that heads kind of small, right? It's not a headshot, headshots work better, because you can see how teeny tiny this image is, I can't even see the person, right. Whereas when there are people I can see, you know, it works out better. Oops, I didn't mean to flip to that got two browsers running doesn't matter. It's just the show notes. So those are those are the key points in LinkedIn. Now let's talk about some other things you can do on your LinkedIn. Here, it's this is the company you work at. Notice right here, it says no company, because you've left a blank for the company you're currently at. If we went down, I'm going to scroll down to your experience section. And because you no longer work at University of Tennessee, right? You're working freelance computer, that's fine. But make up a company name for yourself make up a company logo, right? Because you can see right at the top here and a there's no name, which people are gonna be like, what's that mean? Right? And secondly, there's no logo, which is a trust signal. Yeah. So branding thing, so you know, give yourself a logo. And I'm just gonna skip down to the experience section because you can see some of the older jobs you have because either you misspelled the company name or they didn't have a LinkedIn page when you have created this, you know, entry, LinkedIn profile. Or they don't have a logo themselves. So either you can search for them and find that, you know, this one says internet billing systems, but maybe in LinkedIn, they call themselves IBS, or maybe they call it more, probably they wouldn't, because that's an acronym for something else. Not that tasty, but maybe their internet billing systems LLC, or internet billing systems international or some other name. And if you search for it, you can find it and then their local, ergo, if they have one, while Bob, sometimes you'll have old job, I've had this issue myself, on my own profile, you'll have old jobs, where the company no longer exists. And in which case, I'm gonna say something slightly naughty, which just create the company page for them, and put a logo in so it has a logo, because it looks more trustworthy to have logos there. Alright, just going to scroll back up. Now the big red flag on your, your profile, you've got 349 connections. Not a lot of connections, Docker, LinkedIn, all that you have up to 30,000 connections, you should at least have over 500. Wow. Because it will say 500 Plus, it doesn't care. It doesn't show the count to other people, once it gets over 500. And how do you like, should you have more connections? Because every time you like, comment or post is shown out to your connections when they come into LinkedIn. So you're expanding your reach? Not maybe those people you're connected to aren't directly going to hire to you. But maybe they have a friend who or a manager who could, you know, maybe they hear about a position I like, oh, Doug's looking for a job, let me help them out, you know?

So do you recommend borrowing those connections? Because I, I've always approached it organically, a request comes up and I look at it and I say, Oh, I don't know this person. So I'm not going to create the connection, or it's a recruiter that I that I didn't think I'd be working with.

Okay, we should all be the official LinkedIn answer. If the official LinkedIn answer is only connect to people, you know, whether you know them online or in person, I'll give you a more practical answer, which is, do they have a pulse? Could they be theoretically helpful to you in expanding your reach? So my general rule of thumb is if they look like a real human being, and they might be helpful, I mean, for you, as a ColdFusion developer, anyone who does ColdFusion, or any other programming language, to me, is a reasonable person to connect to makes sense to accept a connect request, and there's two sides to this, okay, there's accepting other people's connect requests, and there's making your own. Okay, so, for accepting other people's connect requests, if in doubt, accept, you can always reject them later. Yeah, they don't, I don't think they get notified when you unconnect from them. I personally, though, I, some recruiters are wonderful human beings, others are the idiots. I would personally connect to them for two for for this reason. They know a lot of people and they're connected to a lot of people. And so when people are searching, going back to the search screen, you see these people. So second level, you don't know who the first bullet does say, here are the people, right? But suppose you were trying to find the hiring manager. And it said, you know, it said Doug is a second level connection, when they're searching, they're more likely to check you out because they have more trust. And even if that second level connection is a recruiter or a marketing person or some other internet, Bimbo, sorry, recruiters, I do love some of you. But it doesn't matter because it creates the perception that you have a connection in common. Yeah, right. Correct. So you oops, I keep flipping to the wrong browser. Sorry about that. I use the brave browser, but it doesn't work on all the websites I have, which kind of sucks but it is more private. And doesn't in particular work for LinkedIn, which I'm irritated about, but not as another, whatever. So I would wrack your brain and your email, I think you can upload all your email address book in LinkedIn or, you know, like, Yes, I think so. But even if it doesn't, you can go through your email, the emails you've sent, and you can go through your address book, you can wrack your brain for people you've met at conferences, and just send them a connect request and always personalize the request right you have an option in the browser on on mobile, sometimes it just will send a connect request, which is fine. If you have a photo and you have a good tagline and you have connections in common people will generally accept that but it's better if you're cold outreaching to people you may not know personally that you add in a little note like Hey, I wrote Luis I really admired your book on cold fusion. been following you for years. Let's connect. Chances are you flattered him a bit you've heard he realizes you're not an internet bimbo or bimbo bimbo II or whatever the male equivalent is. And you know you're you'd like you makes sense to connect and don't pitch, please don't pitch people when you connect. I mean, I get this a lot from people who are on LinkedIn and they want to meet, you know, they connect and they immediately want to sell me on something whether that's hire me for a job or you know, hire my company, it's a bit of a turn off. So you know, send someone if you want to send him a message, send something useful to them, or interest to them. Hey, saw this article on Luis, I saw this article on codebox. Or I saw this review of your new book or whatever the thing is, you know, something that's more about them and not about you.

Follow Dale Carnegie's advice. There you go

win friends and influence people make it about them. So anyway, yeah, expand your connections by racking your brain and your address book, and you will and your Facebook, right, you probably have friends on Facebook, you don't have LinkedIn, right? Probably there are probably people in the Facebook programs group where you've interacted with them, but you didn't connect with them on LinkedIn. Now, in the future, when you interact with someone, you immediately can go to LinkedIn and say, Hey, loving the discussion about, you know, the new VS code editor for cold fusion I'm having with you, in Facebook group love to connect you on LinkedIn.

And there's your blurb. Easy, and that makes sense.

Yeah, so get get more connections. I believe there's a throttle limit on LinkedIn of maybe 50 connections a day. So don't go too crazy. And in addition, LinkedIn, there's an option, when you send a connect request to someone, they can mark it as spam. You don't want that to happen. And that's why you want to connect people that either really know you. Or alternatively, you can write something in the note that's flattering. And that's why you want a profile photo and you want a real good tagline. And you want connections in common with the people you're trying to cold connect to. So that's connections. Good stuff. Yeah, then we'd go to your about section. Now this tells me about what you've done. But do I really care about that? If I'm trying to hire you? Not really. So now this section here, goals, I think you could probably could update that based on something else you told me. But that would be you know, here's how you can help this person who's going to hire you. Great you. So I would lead with that. So so no

less, less like a resume more like a more personal,

more personal more like more like you're trying to sell yourself, which is what you're doing, but you're doing it in a friendly way. And I just think wishing yourself from other people. Now, no harm in having some buzzwords in here. And in fact, they'll have there's a search algorithm in LinkedIn, when you do the search up here. You can put ColdFusion in or sequel or whatever. And it will bring this up. And there's also, you know, I noticed, let me just come back here and know some other good things here. You've got this LinkedIn in Mail icon, which means anyone can message you even if they're not connected for free. Okay, so because if you don't have that turned on, we'll talk about how you get that turned on in a moment. Then people have like, people like me who have a paid LinkedIn account gets to send 30 messages a month or something to people they don't know, do you think I'm going to send that message to someone if I'm not particularly certain, you know, they're an important been sent to probably not, but if they have, anyone can send me a message. While of course, I'm going to message them. Yeah. So how you get that is you get LinkedIn premium, which I want to say is about 80 bucks a month, and they give you a month free I believe, and sometimes you can persuade them to give you extra months for free by canceling and re signing up. But I think it's worth the 80 bucks a month, particularly when you're searching for a job. And it also lets your it makes your search better you can find more people once you have it. And it also gives you LinkedIn Sales Navigator, which is this little link up at the top right, that you may not have noticed. And that's an even better search it has much more fine you know, you can search for job titles and geography and age your company and position in the company and all kinds of stuff. So you might check that out after the podcast interview. Fantastic. Yeah, it's a whole new level it's it's a totally different interface. It works a bit different it has different setup. I will say LinkedIn is a little buggy sometimes I wish Microsoft would get there actually and they're always changing features. But Sales Navigator and regular LinkedIn are actually seems like two different apps. And they are really Yeah, really. So anyway, check check it out and play with it lets you do much more search. It lets you reach more people because in regular LinkedIn, you can only get so like your first and second level connections. Maybe a third but with a Sales Navigator you can get to more people who you aren't connected to and they even have more levels. They have a sales version of Have a recruiting version that are even more whatever powerful, I guess the word but even more expensive, so. But by getting LinkedIn premium, you get the Sales Navigator and it lets you extend your search. Let me just skip to that. I don't know if you've seen this, there's a menu up here home, my network jobs, messaging notifications, and me. So usually people that start on the homepage, because that's where LinkedIn throws you. And you might check messages, but you may not be aware of my network. Okay, so let's look at that this will be my network, not yours. And this says things that have happened to people I'm connected to, and it gives me an opportunity to, you know, comment on things, you know, all kinds of and give me suggestions from people to follow or connect to. So worth looking at. And if someone in your network has done something, you know, they maybe they made a post, or maybe they changed their jobs or something, you could comment on that. And it creates a connection. Yeah.

Fantastic. So you said before it becomes visible to all of their network, yeah, comes

visible to their connections. And because your tagline is probably, because you're looking for a job, probably going to work that into your tagline, right? Expert, ColdFusion developer? Looking for mine, you know, I don't know how you're gonna phrase it, I can't quite come up with a phrase

available immediately. Yeah, there you go.

Exactly. Okay, so here under the jobs menu, you can post jobs if you are hiring. But you can also set up a job alert for things you're interested in. So interesting ColdFusion jobs or database jobs, or whatever. And you can fill out several other thing. So in particular, if you do a search, I can see that here under ColdFusion, developer the 698 new positions within LinkedIn, and there's probably a bunch of old ones.

So those are the positions that's not people looking for the jobs. Those are the corrections.

Yeah, so you could go in there and investigate, Hey, have any of these ones listed? Do I have any connection to those companies? Maybe I already know someone that maybe I'm really interested to work for that company, because they're doing cool stuff that I'm interested in, you know, so may, I mean, you could apply through this. But again, you're then going into a resume mail. Correct. So it's sending your LinkedIn profile, not your resume. So anyway, that that's good, too. And then notifications, that's more around your posts. So Right. And then if you go into the May pro one, will the settings and privacy I won't dig into that. But inside there, you can say Can people see when I update my profile? Well, some people want to be sneaky and not, you know, have people know they're changing jobs or whatever. But in your case, you probably don't want to be covering that up. Now, when you change your tagline, you want your whole network to know you've changed your tagline or when you change your profile photo, you'd like to know that. So make sure you haven't cranked up the privacy so so high that no one can see what you're doing. And then any companies like your own company for your freelance stuff would appear here. And then what I want to do is oops, not setting the privacy. I was one I wasn't going to try and go to the back. Nevermind, doesn't matter. It's not that secret. I generally keep most things open on this thing. I mean, just go back to this, I wanted to go to posts and activity. So here if you haven't seen it, you can see all your activities. There's all your likes, all your comments, all your posts, right? Then you can see any articles you've written, you might be articles, what's an article, that's like a longer form posts, like a blog post, but within LinkedIn platform, so Wow. Yeah, that's the thing. And then you have regular posts, which can either be short or up to 2000 dish characters. So the reason I'm showing this, it shows how many people have looked at it. You can view analytics, okay.

So this is where you can give back to the community through LinkedIn. This is

where by posting Yeah, but I'm showing demonstrate your knowledge I'm sharing. I'm showing you this because you can see the analytics on this. And you can see how many reactions were there? Oh, wow, who looks at it? Was it other engineers, software engineers was the developers? Was it here CEOs solution or you know, who is looking at your stuff?

That's the paid version? Right?

I think that may be I've had the paid version for so long. I'm sorry, I can't remember. And then you also can upload documents like presentations or you know, Word or Google Docs. So you know, I've sometimes like I wrote this guide to ColdFusion hosting, and I made it a LinkedIn Doc. So if you have any blog posts related to ColdFusion, you could repurpose them here. interest. So those are some different things. Anyway, let me come back to your profile.

Yeah, I logged into the mobile app this morning, and it said, Turn on creator mode,

get the pseudonym turn on creative mode, please. Okay, I

was gonna, I was going to ask you what it is that relate to what you were just saying?

No. What that means is it makes it harder for people to connect to you. Really? Yes, because if you look at people who have creative mode turned on, you see, well, I'm already connected to you. But imagine I wasn't going to do one of these options here will be connected, Doug. Yeah. When you turn on create a mode, it's like you've suddenly become, I don't know, name, some famous journalist to you, board or whatever. Okay. Right. And now you just want people to follow you. So they put the Follow button, you know, highlight, and then you have to click on the More menu if we connect, and it'll kind of warn you, you really want to connect to Mr. Boyd, would you really know him in real life? When I asked, you're searching for a job, you don't want to send on features, it gives you a not that useful? So I would not, I'm glad you asked that. All right, we talked about that you've got a feature piece of content, that's great. You definitely want that. Here's where you can highlight extra cool stuff. I don't know what SlideShare is, but it's not showing a slide.

This is this is anti content that I had originally thought for every project I did, I would do a one page project brief, kind of a marketing page showing what what was done, because so much of what I've done in the past has been proprietary that you so really should

come up with come up with something relevant here. You know, maybe it's three things I love about cold fusion and have a graphic that yells cold fusion, if that's the kind of job you're looking for, or I don't know what you might write here, but it's got to be some you've got to think creatively. What would stand out to people who might hire me or I want to connect to that's like this, this, this post you did here, let's just come into this post this great post you did. Here, you took a photo of yourself with a somewhat excited I think that is what how describe that together with a book on ColdFusion. And then you you wrote three sentences about it, and you've got the keyword confusion. By the way, if you put a pound sign in front of the keyword like ColdFusion, it'll put it in bold, and it'll show up in the there are tags that show up in No, I didn't tag it at the very end. Oh, I'll tell you did cold fusion. So you see that comes out in bold. So that's great post you mentioned, get some likes out of it. I'll give you like, Oh, excellent. So thank you. Yeah. And I'll write a comment. So you don't comment is a three word comment. I'm adding racy mmf or cmaf CFML. Book. More my followers will see I wrote that comment. It has the word CFML. in it. They know I'm something to do with ColdFusion.

And it's up did not? Did that take you 10 minutes to write that. So

took me about five seconds to write it. Yeah, yeah, it's just easy. We

should all be doing that.

Yeah, now. So this is your activity, you definitely want activity there. I mean, I would say post at least once a week, or once, if you having difficulty once a month, you know. And like it if you you can start off with likes and comments, if you're afraid to post I understand a lot of people posting on social media is somewhat analogous to speaking in public and a lot of people are nervous about it. And I understand that so but you ain't gonna get in trouble by liking stuff. And you're probably not gonna get into trouble by commenting on stuff as long as you're respectful. And say something appropriate. All right experience section. missing some logos mentioned earlier missing some company names. Otherwise looks pretty good. Now that this is another place you can showcase how you are different from other people. Right?

So that was a question I was going to ask on this was I tried to keep it resume short, but it sounds like what you're saying space, use the space. Okay?

Because LinkedIn does keyword searching and these might be some of the keywords people look for. And in addition, you can make it more human and more like cool stuff, right? Don't make it all techie whatever. You This isn't a one page

resume this can be this can be verbose,

and you you know how in modern resumes people try and sell here's the business benefit I did in this application. Right You know, we help save 20,000 hours of man work by having creating an app that did blardy blardy blar and we developed it in ColdFusion 2016 and SQL Server or whatever you did, but you lead with the business benefit usually if you can Alright, so same for all these old job try and make them stand out a bit. Right Gotcha. You know, these read a bit boring to be honest, because they read like old school resume stuff,

but that's that's exactly where it came from. Yeah. Now,

education, if you've been to, to university and personally, I'll hire me, I don't care if a developer has been to university or not, but I know some companies do. Right? So great. You have this in here and you've got a paragraph. But why not lead with something related to your ColdFusion thing? Or you did some computer science at university? Isn't that doesn't that make you stand out from you? Why not say I loved the course on whatever numeric computation or on Boolean logic because it helped me it helps me now write better ColdFusion programs or whatever you do, I wouldn't start off. Now, it's great to say you're president of a society, but I wouldn't lead with that. Right? Right. Because that shows leadership ability, but I don't think that makes sense to leave with and I try and make this more human. You know, maybe you started juggling in university, why not work that into it, you know? And then you've got another university you went to doesn't say what course you did doesn't have a blurb about it. And other agents you could fill in? On if you get,

so I was gonna ask him that when it was just one class for the summer while I was home for that summer. Should that even be in there?

It's up to you. Can you say something interesting about it was the course relevant for what you're looking for? Is this university name really exclusive and exciting? Okay, so like, if you did a course at Harvard University, even if it's on, you know, learning how to bind books better, it probably looks good,

right? Makes sense.

Or if you did a CT, you did this at the University of Memphis as if it's on like Agile software development that sounds relevant to what you're trying to find. I mean, if in doubt, I'd look I'd added in right, it looks like you're more educated. Okay. I don't know if you can add blurbs into these. See if you can, I have a feeling you can't but you can add it and see what it says. And volunteering is great. You're an assistant Scoutmaster. See if you can pump it up more towards, you know, I've been a leader for 20 years or I've learned, you know, lots about encouraging and leading teams by being a Scoutmaster, blah, blah, blah. Or I really enjoyed doing this because I enjoy inspiring young people.

And it absolutely the stuff that I've learned in that organization has absolutely benefited me in my professional life.

Right, so you need to say that, so great. You've got a logo against that one. Skill sets great. You've got people have endorsed you for skills, wondering where ColdFusion is in this list of endorsements? That's a good question. Maybe you need to ask a few buddies to endorse you for ColdFusion. Then recommendations, this is where people can write about how wonderful you are to work with or to, or to be working for them. If they're a boss, you can request these you can give them I noticed you've received three, you've given two, which is good. You've got a kind of balance there. So give some and then you can request people you've worked with or you worked for in the past or currently to do those. Or no, you're the way you got a patent. Okay, this is amazing how many other developers have patents? Not many? Why are you mentioning this Neubau page? I got a patent. Let me show you a genius. It's ancient. I don't care. I don't know if it has to have this boring uppercase stuff or not. If not try and make it look a little more whatever. Because this reads really boring. New say why it's exciting.

Yeah, I think that was limited in the form. But I'll have to look at that.

And then you've listed some costs. I'm sorry, I'm going fast. Because we're, we're we're doing we've gone a bit over on time, but I probably talked to him, right? Leave? No, no with me, he was talking a lot, don't worry. And this is all good material, you've listed courses you've done, that's great. You've list spoken languages. That's great. All ads, whatever. You've got a few influences, or how about you follow some ColdFusion influences or boyscout influences or, you know, other things that might be relevant, it just creates a talking point Gacho makes sense to you in the site. Anyway. The other thing I don't have this up here, it lets you there's a thing I can't see because this is your profile, not mine. But there's a little section that says add you know, edit your sections that display and you'll probably find that or sections you've not even used, you could add in and out add them in. Because the more you can put in here, the better in general long as it's related to what you're trying to find.

So there's that old thing about keep your resume to one or two pages. When it comes to LinkedIn. It sounds like we can just fill it up.

Yeah, go nuts. You know, as long as it's relevant as long as it relates to the what you're trying to find relates to you as an interesting human being. Yeah, or add some other some other differentiator or color to how you're different from all the other candidates and helps you stand out then Good to do, make sure to say and avoid politics, religion and sex. Unless you work for a political organization or religious organization or a sexual organization, then it's okay to talk about that particular topic. Otherwise, personally, I would leave it out of your LinkedIn. So I'm going to stop the screenshare there.

And it was fantastic.

I think we covered all the LinkedIn things there. I would encourage you to be authentic and be yourself. Some people write really stilted when they write in their profile, or they look, yeah, you don't do that. But other people do, be yourself be natural. And so that's good. Let's sum. I just want to briefly bring up your GitHub profile. We talked about that before. I hope everyone listening to this has a GitHub profile, and they're utilizing it. So let me reshare this briefly, I'm not going to go into as much detail on this, but have a GitHub profile. This is a way you contribute to open source. Here you can see Doug has a photo great, you're gonna get a better photo here that doesn't have the windows behind you and looks a bit happier. Absolutely. And you accidentally have all your contact info here it says self employed. And I think really, you probably want to be saying, I don't know what you want to say there. I'm not sure self regulate it. Then you can see you've done lots of contributions, compared to most other people who make no contributions to open source projects. And I can see that you've worked on these following repositories. And if I drill down, I can see what you've done. And I see you've given 345 stars out to various project, which is amazing. Brad wood will be fair, fantastically excited. I can filter this, however by confusion to see them i Oh my Yeah, you didn't know that, did you? Yeah. And we can now see that, oh, well, maybe you there aren't so many ColdFusion opens. And so maybe you want to do a bit more storing of ColdFusion stuff you've actually used? Yep. Which I'm sure you can come up with some more things actually,

actually contributed to CF wheels? No, that's great.

So great, great job on that. I encourage everyone listening to have a GitHub profile and to start storing stuff and eventually start contributing. Because it's a way that a lot of potential employers will look at you they'll see have you contributed and what kind of contributions you make, and what kind of person were you when you interact with people? Because some of the people I will tell you, when they do a pull request, or they complain about a bug, they're not very respectful or friendly or helpful. Yeah, and this is public info. So you want to do that. Now, let me just quickly flip, you've got a cover letter here that you can share you it's a

bit of a mess.

Okay, your cover letter is probably no more mess than anyone else's. So first of all, it's a PDF, you want a cover letter to be a cover email, or if you have, you know, you sending printed some physical stuff in the post. I guess you could do it that way. Doug has kindly blanked out who he sent this to. But criticism number one is, it's generic. Yeah, it really doesn't talk about their company and why you really want to work to them. And from that, what was that book you mentioned? By Win Friends and Influence People? Oh, yeah. Dale Carnegie's. When, when Dale Carnegie. What's the most important thing to someone else?

themselves,

themselves, their name their company name? what they're about? What are you starting off here? Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Does it ever get to them? Oh. Yeah, good point. And how about you personalize it to their first name? How about you? You know, this is a bit long for a cover letter. To be honest, I do a cover email, and I try and personally Hey, great meeting at CF summit in 2019. Love what you're doing with XYZ technology at ABC Company. You know, please find attached my resume. You know, whatever else I'm going to say.

So in the emails, I've been doing a short couple of paragraphs then attaching this but you're saying don't attach this just do it in the email,

do it in the email who wants to read a PDF right? Then let's look at Quick Look your resume. Traditional resume. Okay. Doesn't say what you're looking for. What's the job you're looking for dark doesn't say here it says says all your keywords but I'm looking for a blardy blar you know, I'm looking to do a software team working in virtual reality with you know, web development stack using cold fusion or other technologies or whatever it is you want to So and then again, just like in your LinkedIn, you don't you, you want to say what business problems or what tech problems you use, you know, what was the big picture and business thing you solve for? What was the big piece of technical debt? You got rid of, you know, if you were, I don't know who you're trying to be hired by if it's a CIO, you know, what's important to them? Right? Okay, probably not how you started this with how your history of how you got hired. Yeah. And the those notices that memo,

and again, I was approaching this from the challenge of keeping it to one or two pages,

and that's fine for a resume. Yes, that's correct. You only want one or two pages. But you want to talk about achievements. And you mentioned that book, what color's your parachute, and I think they have a whole chapter on writing better resumes. So that would be good. Some of these things are good. Some of these sections could be better if you had your company name here, if that's what you worked under, and kind of self employed. People look for gaps. I don't really care too much about gaps, but some hiring people look out for gaps. So try and fill gaps creatively, if you can catch up without lying, you know. And then you have to ask, do some of the ask, Are these older jobs still relevant? Is it for what you're trying to get? Now? You really want to list this stuff? Right? Do I don't know if it's an impressive company do something really cool? were great. If not, maybe it's not worth listing?

Well, and that the last one, I actually created a division of a company, I went from zero employees to 60, which is why I put them in, say that.

Michaela Light 1:11:38
And then did you say that?

Doug McCaughan 1:11:40
It gets down in the bottom? It's, it's a zero to six. Okay.

Michaela Light 1:11:44
Well, were you a manager? Yes, you will. Yeah. So that's good. And then you were quite young when you did that. So that's impressive.

Doug McCaughan 1:11:52
And then the other one was running my own business. So I kind of felt they were still relevant, but they are old. So maybe they don't belong on the resume. And then

you've got your email, you've got your phone number, that's great. You might want to add in your LinkedIn perhaps. Okay. And you might want to say, well, you know, what's your availability to talk? Right? I'm available to talk, you know, Monday through Friday, between these ads, or whatever. So those are some ideas. I'm not a resume expert, or more, or a cold fusion expert who likes LinkedIn. Let me leave that up. Let me stop sharing. Let's forget to do that. So those are some things there. I'll mention something else. Yeah, hopefully, this helps you getting you a new job. I'm not going to talk about this in detail, because we don't have enough time. But I asked you to do an exercise to figure out your ideal job, because you want to color your LinkedIn and your resume with what you're trying to get not where you've been. Right? Obviously, you're you have to tell the truth about where you've been, you try and phrase it in as positive of framework as you can, to relate to show what great things you've done from the perspective of a manager who's going to hire you not from a tax perspective, necessarily, not that you don't want to mention that tech staff, but achievements that would make that kind of person excited to want to hire. Anyway, if you can get to what you want, you could color your resume in your LinkedIn, with, here's where I want to be, here's what I'm excited about becoming? Yeah, you've got to have that vision, you've got to have that vision. And that's good for two reasons. One is when you're rewriting your LinkedIn, your resume and you're looking for jobs to apply to you can say, hey, is this a fit for what I want to be and you might not get to your ideal dream job in one step, maybe you have to go through stepping stones, right, maybe you have to get something that has some of the pieces you want, and not all of them. Or maybe you work for a company you want to work for. But in a role, it's not your ideal role. And then you work your way towards the ideal role, right? If you don't know where you're going, you're not going to get there. So now the advice I gave Doug, and you were very brave to do this talk was first of all, you got to get to it, you've got to get to a positive state of mind, you've got to be connected to your whatever you want to call it your Higher Self, your intuition to your angels to God or whatever. And so I recommended exercise workout. Go in nature, you went and helped a friend move. Do something that puts you in pause for a minute because often when we lose a job, we a get afraid, am I ever going to get another job again? And B we may be really angry at our boss for doing whatever they did. Yeah, and neither of those emotions are going to let you get in contact with what you really wanted to do. Right? So you've got to get into that positive love, space of mind. So do whatever you need to do. Whether you meditate or you have a good night's sleep, we have amazing sex with your partner or whatever it is you do. Do that first. There Then contemplate what you do. Now, some people can just write down this stuff, you know, they have a direct connection from their intuition to the computer keyboard, other people, it helps to go on a walk and talk into their phone. Yeah, other people helps to chat with a friend saying this is what I'm looking for. Yeah. Other people like to write, you know, if you're right handed, you write with your left hand, you draw a diagram, and it comes out looking like a little kid. Because my belief is all human beings come into this world as children, full of innocence and light and love and creativity and playfulness. And then they get it. I was gonna say they get it beaten out of them. But hopefully not all kids get beaten these days. But we go through traumas. And in particular, in work, we have what I would call work traumas, you know, you have a co worker who's an idiot, or you have a boss who doesn't treat you well, or you had that project that was disaster zone. And we end up with scars, their psychic scars, not physical scars. And then they affect how we behave in the world and the kind of jobs we're, we're going for, and we're a bit nervous about applying for stuff, and you want to get rid of that. So any healing you can do in that regard, before you write out what your ideal job is, is helpful, and I'd encourage you do the healing. Anyway, if your own future benefit, right? Anyway, come at it from several angles and work on it and sit on it bit and come on seems like what you're looking

for those scars can can introduce self doubt and influence, make us doubt going into certain applying for certain jobs.

Absolutely. And they can make you interact badly with you know, coworkers or other boss, you know, if you have a boss scar, because you have a previous boss who did nasty things, you know, they micromanaged or they, you know, didn't praise you, when you do something useful, you're going to be reluctant to behave in certain ways that will be helpful to you and the organization. Right, you know, same choice, this isn't just about work, people have relationship scars, which means they don't date or they don't have as good a relationship, people have health scars, where they don't look after their own health as well as they might, for various reasons, you know, happens in all areas of life, but we're talking about getting a job. So, you know, putting the health guards to one side while you figure out what you really want is helpful, because otherwise you're going to limit yourself. And also, once you're getting, you know, attracting this job, because I do believe in the law of attraction that we do attract what we vibrate, right? You know, if you're vibrating negative vibes, that you're fearful or you're angry, it's going to make it harder to get a good job. Does that make sense? So because people will pick up on it subconsciously, and have something off about this candidate, you know, and they met. For me, I pick up on that when I look at people's LinkedIn profiles, I can pick up really something awful, yes. Wow, absolutely. We're looking at resumes, anyone who's looked through 1000s of resumes, or in my case, 10s of 1000s, you can kind of smell something off around someone and I have to tell you, as a hiring manager, the the the cons of hiring someone who's a bad fit, who's a bad cultural fit, who will upset other members of the team who will do bad work, lost opportunity cost could be 10s of 1000s of dollars, if not hundreds of 1000s, right? Because you spent six months with someone who wasn't a good fit. Now you've got to spend more time hiring someone else, it adds up to a lot of time and money. So the downsides of hiring someone who's bad are a lot higher than the upsides of hiring someone good. And so the, for people who are good at hiring, the tendency is this. There's any red flag any doubt whatsoever? There are no, just get them out. Yeah. And that's why people are so ruthless when it comes to, you know, the rest of my game. It's why you don't want to play the resume game, if

you can avoid it, you know, well, make sense. So

anyway,

I know talking about the you're talking about the exercise, did you go over the steps of the exercise?

Yeah, I think I did. I mean, I think I put them in the show notes, the people are interested. So anyways, it's good to get clear on what you really want. And then you can use it as you're doing your job search. And and in crafting your LinkedIn and resume and and what open source projects you work on. Right? I think you figured out you'd like to do some virtual reality stuff, or open source projects to do with virtual reality, almost certainly hundreds of them, could you contribute in some way. Maybe you can't code on them, but maybe you can, you know, like them, maybe you can help them with their documentation, you know,

visualize the direction they could go, yeah, there's that you've opened my eyes to, to that you can contribute to more than just code.

Absolutely. So the other thing you know if you can Networking person, if there are ColdFusion conferences you can make it to. You know, right now we're recording this episode into the box is coming up in a week or so it's time after Labor Day, CF Summit is coming up in Las Vegas in about a month. Sounds fantastic. It is, it's a great opportunity to learn a lot of ColdFusion. And also to meet people in person. And when you've met someone in person, it's a lot easier to connect with them online, it's a lot easier for them to refer you to some job or whatever. So highly recommend going to an in person thing when if you do have a cold fusion user group in your local vicinity is worth going to those for similar reasons. I know there are a lot less those around now if you have the time and inclination, start one up if there are enough people in your town that do cold fusion. If there isn't, why not just search? You can search on LinkedIn, you're in Tennessee, right? Correct. Why not search for all the code, you go into LinkedIn Sales Navigator, putting ColdFusion in the search keyword put in Tennessee for the geographic area. Find everyone in Tennessee, maybe some of them are near enough to you could get together

and say I had a meetup group does that there's we might as well do that with ColdFusion. That makes sense. Yeah.

Michaela Light 1:21:17
But be proactive and take some action, you know,

Doug McCaughan 1:21:21
into the box. Sounds fantastic. I had in my mind, I thought because I'm unemployed, I can't go to I can't justify going to these. But based on what you were saying it sounds like because I'm unemployed, I need to go to these things.

Yes. And many conferences, if not all of them. If you find the right person in the conference and explain, look, I'm I am I just lost my job. I really love your conference, is there any way I can help you guys out and volunteer? You know how they have volunteers, these conferences, your seminar courses have a little named barter volunteer, and they help out hand out the materials, all the stuff all the flyers in the packets or they do other things to help the organizer out. And if you're genuine and helpful. And you know, a lot of times you can go and volunteer at a conference, even if you can't afford to attend a conference, let's grow. If you can't convince someone to let you do that. This is something a little naughty. But a lot of conferences, you can fly, you can go to the town, you can not have a ticket, but you kind of hang out around the edges. And you Yap with people. Now you can't get into the sessions because they'll check your badge. But you sure as heck can. And in person. In addition, if you didn't get any luck volunteering to help out, when you're actually there, and you walk up to someone you say I love your conference, um, you know, I can't afford the ticket. But can I help? You know, can I help you guys out with stuffing these flyers or, you know, registering people for, you know, totally free? I just want to be here in the vibe. You know, it's a lot harder for them to say no. That makes sense. You've shown courage by actually showing up so and if you have in the case of a coffee conference, you have an old ColdFusion t shirt from some conference where it

I haven't Alera t shirt.

Michaela Light 1:23:12
Oh, well. Yeah, you could wear that. All right, I think we've covered enough time here. If people want to find you online dark. What are the best ways to do that?

Doug McCaughan 1:23:22
Well, obviously LinkedIn is going to be the best way.

Michaela Light 1:23:25
And what's your LinkedIn profile name?

Doug McCaughan 1:23:27
It's actually juggler. So if you go to if you go to LinkedIn, trying to remember the format length, don't worry

Michaela Light 1:23:37
about lashing. My name is Georgia. Your name is Doug Gowen.

Doug McCaughan 1:23:44
Don't close Doug makan. makan Sargon. There's only seven people in my life who have ever said it correctly. It's hard. And but if you look for Doug makan, juggler, in LinkedIn, you'll find me. I am redoing my websites. So if you go to CF ninja.com, it's going to be a blank website right now. But in the next couple of weeks, hopefully that will have all my contact information and ways to find me on the on the internet.

Michaela Light 1:24:12
Well, by the time this episode comes out, that will be updated so

Doug McCaughan 1:24:16
so so I would give you would give you Doug makan.com. But nobody can spell that. So cf ninja.com is probably the best.

There you go. Excellent. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show and bearing your job searching soul here. And may you find your ideal ColdFusion job real soon. And

will thank you and, and thank you for your time and your knowledge. This was a pleasure. And you've really, really excited me about a job search.

Michaela Light 1:24:45
Excellent. Well, that's the important thing there. All right. Thanks so much. Bye, guys. Thank you very much.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai