Navigating the Job Search in a Changing World of Work with Wyatt Carr

Today's job search is considerably different from the busy, fast-paced job hunts of the past. Nowadays, it goes beyond having the ideal CV or applying as soon as possible. Finding a career that aligns with your values, demonstrating your abilities, and establishing genuine relationships are now important. In light of significant shifts like remote work and new hiring practices, how are you preparing to thrive? In this episode, I chat with Wyatt Carr, a partner at The Page Group and a seasoned recruiter. Wyatt talks about the struggles of finding a job and hiring the right people in today’s fast-changing world. We discuss simple ways to stand out when job hunting, how automation is changing the workplace, and what businesses are doing differently when hiring. Tune in now! --- Listen to the podcast here: Navigating the Job Search in a Changing World of Work with Wyatt Carr Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about a topic, something that I find one of the most frustrating aspects of the world we’re in today, and that is the process of finding a job or the process of connecting people with jobs. I know a lot of people and I also personally have been in situations where it just seems to just take a long time to find a job and there’s all these things about getting noticed, getting your resume out there, when all it is that you really want is to just find a job that fits what you studied in school, what your background is, what you think you’d be good at and also be interested in, do a good job at it. The process does not seem to be that much better, per se, from the employer side too because they’re just looking for talent and I know that there’s mismatches all around. So, to talk about where we are in the process of job finding, talent acquisition, all that, I would like to introduce my guest today, Wyatt Carr, who is a partner with The Page Group and an experienced recruiter. --- Wyatt, welcome to the program. Thank you so much, Stephen. Happy to be here. Happy to have you. I just see the frustration so many people express to me, whether it be in person or even over LinkedIn, about people really looking for jobs. If anyone out there listening is in that situation where they’re looking for a job, they just need to find something, what do you think people need to be doing? So I think the number one thing to understand when you’re looking for a job is to realize that you are an investment if someone offers you a job. They expect to make more money than you cost to employ and that’s the current challenge with the current market is companies are seeming to do more with less and that is a huge concern about AI and how it will impact the workforce and how it will target or potentially take opportunity from a lot of white collar professions. Everyone thought automation would come for blue collar and it’s come to white collar, everyone’s probably heard that already. You need to understand what value you bring to a business and then find the businesses that need your services, find the businesses that would value from what you can bring to the table.Share on X I think we were very spoiled the last 10 years, literally, in my career, I’ve been in staffing and talent management, the economy has just continued to boom. I think during COVID, white collar workers did better. Blue collar and essential workers, they absolutely were devastated. So much money shifted to the laptop class and the billionaire class. Corporations weren’t hurt. Very few corporations were hurt from the pandemic. The small person was, the blue collar worker, the essential worker, and a lot of people did lose their jobs, but it was somewhat short lived on the white collar side, the skilled labor, laptop class, they call it or college degree educated class, and for the last 10 years with that exception where some people were impacted by COVID but most weren’t, it’s been an incredibly positive market and it’s been a candidates market, and you can kind of choose the opportunity, lots of opportunities coming to you, companies are hiring like crazy, and a lot of that was due to government policies. Well, you could talk a lot about all these things, about funding, inflation, and government just printing money, and so that obviously stimulates kind of a fake positive boom, but I think when you’re looking at what type of opportunity you want, you have to be able to see from the manager’s perspective on why they would want you, and I think people do need to reexamine their expectations about the opportunities that they might be a fit for or might be the best fit for because there’s a lot of competition right now, and there’s small businesses that have never worked with someone as skilled as you in your specific skill set that you can probably bring a lot of value to but you’re going to make a lot of less. Startups, where you could jump into a more broad role, but you’re probably going to make a lot less, and so I think people’s expectations are at what the market has provided the last four or five years, but that needs to change, and I’m feeling it as much as you. I’m trying to place people with companies that don’t want to hire people. The staffing market is, I think, contracted last year for the first time in a long time. Think it remained flat or maybe it was 1 or 2 percent growth in 2020 and then it had a huge resurgence in ’21 and ‘22 and ’23, continued to grow and I think ’24, almost every staffing company took a cut back and that doesn’t really happen. Staffing was fairly insulated from the dot-com crash, it’s been fairly insulated from the ’08 crash. It was fairly insulated from COVID. It’s kind of been a recession proof industry but it’s struggling right now. Reset expectations, see where you can provide value and be very, very specific, intentional with each of these applications. Become essentially a salesperson and you’re selling yourself. You’re selling your ability to make this company more money than you cost and kind of shift the mindset to not where a company would be lucky to have you but it’s an employer market. It’s something that we have to just come to terms with. So you’re saying that anyone out there that’s looking for a job needs to start from this approach where you’re saying, “What am I valuing the company?” because I think a lot of us kind of grow with this idea that, okay, you go to college, you get this degree, and this degree gives you the qualifications for the job, and so now, all of a sudden, it’s almost like maybe requiring a different way of thinking because if someone got a degree in a certain field that’s, say, not related to marketing or sales or anything like that, you don’t really learn anything about sales, you don’t really learn anything about selling yourself, you’re just like, “Okay, I have this specialty skill set,” whether it be kind of going back to the, I guess, pre-information days when people would kind of learn a trade or even people in the trades now, okay, you’re a plumber, you don’t really need to sell you have this plumbing license and people are going to find people with that license or that certification the same way if you’re, say, a coder, front end developer, say, then think, okay, have this, you’re not really necessarily thinking how am I giving this company value, you’re just thinking, I know these skills, I can code in these languages, I can build these types of things. So, are you saying the first thing someone needs to do now is to change that mindset away from, “These are my qualifications, this is why I should be here,” and more and just thinking directly about, “Okay, what kind of companies am I really going to provide value in and how am I going to communicate that value?” Again, this is my personal opinion. Yes, I think so. I think we are unfortunately competing with the world in the United States, every single country competes for United States business, and there’s so much outsourcing, there’s so much competitive environments in every single industry. So, the blue collar work, which was supposed to be the one that got automated, seems to be the safest. Thinking about yourself as a salesperson for your skills is a tough pill to swallow but if you don’t, you’re just going to be frustrated with how things are. You see posts on LinkedIn all the time, nine months, ten months out of work, 300 applications, only two callbacks, and that’s very tough to see. Nobody wants to see that, nobody wants to be in that situation. But if you look into how sales processes are structured, there’s often a very structured approach to approaching a customer and it starts the word –– typically use a sequence where you have an email and then you have a call, then you have an email, and then you have a call, and then you have a call, and then you have a LinkedIn message, and then you have a short video then you call during these certain business hours and so it’s a very structured approach in sales, it’s not just banging the phones all day and just hoping someone answers and then off to the races, hope you do as good as you can. Aspects of that are true, the Glengarry Glen Ross-type environments, but for the most part, it's based on repetition and relationships. And I think finding a job would be the same thing. First, people need to know you’re looking for a job. You should have agents out there basically looking for a job for you, and those are your closest connections. And you should have a community of people that are also looking for a job and you’re growing together, you’re learning things together, you’re learning lessons from each other so you don’t have to make the same mistakes. I just did a short seminar with a group of six individuals, all different skill sets but all looking for work, and they’re basically are going at it together....