McLean Robins: Coming in.

McLean Robins: Hi, everybody. You have you not, have you started it? So we are now live, in the room. Thanks. I see the numbers ticking up here. We see people coming into the Webinar. So just give everybody a few minutes to get in. But welcome today to stand out from the crowd, the fourth in our wonderful series of expert recruiter insights for independent contractors.

McLean Robins: The numbers are ticking up pretty quickly, so thank you, Veronica. Nice to have you here. All right, guys, just we're working on we're actually holding pretty steady now, so high. Philip, good to have you. Let's go ahead and dive right in. So let's move to the next slide and we are going to go ahead and get started today.

McLean Robins: So thank you guys so much for joining us. Just a quick recap. My name is Mclean Robbins, the Vice president of Enterprise Marketing here and our partners. I'm joined by my two wonderful counterparts, Amy and Vince, whom I will introduce in more detail in just a minute. If you guys want to weigh in, that would be fantastic. Want to give you guys a quick recap. We have been doing this series since the summer, so this is the fourth of a four-part series. If you're interested in getting the first three parts, there'll be a poll at the end. We can push them to you. But the first parts covered, establishing your online presence, learning how to sell, and some additional tips from Vince at KPMG. And so you can find all of those, as well as other prior webinars for talent on mbopartners.com/independent-professionals. We also have a fairly robust series of virtual events. We do this even in non-covid time. So I encourage you to always go to mbopartners.com/events. We have only one additional event this year, but it's really, really exciting. It's our new open innovation platform MindSumo, which we encourage you to join, completely free to join. And Keaton, the founder of MindSumo and now one of our Vice Presidents of product, will be talking about it with Linda Mann and our Chief Experience Officer on December 3rd. If we can move to the next slide. Now, I want to just cover a couple of brief housekeeping items as I see things flooding into the chat. I would prefer, if at all possible, you guys use the Q&A function instead of the chat, but you certainly can chat if you're having a technical issue. But the questions will be answered both throughout the webinar and as often as we can. What's pertinent during the webinar and we'll also ask questions at the end. In order to do so, you should see two buttons towards the bottom of your screen. You'll see both the chat functionality and the Q&A functionality and feel free to use those liberally. We are very excited to take your questions and the session is best if it is interactive. Yes, we will be providing a copy of the recording after the webinar. And yes, if you're interested, we are more than happy to provide you the first three webinars and a dedicated email, although of course, you can go to mbopartners.com/independent-professionals. So hopefully I've covered all the basic housekeeping items here and we're going to move on to introductions and get into the meat of it because you don't want to hear me talk about housekeeping. You want to hear Amy and Vince talk. So give a warm welcome to Amy O'Donnell, our Chief Talent Officer and Vincent Valle, the Associate Director of Independent Contractor Recruiting at KPMG. First, I'm going to kick it over to you, Vince. Could you give me just a brief intro to yourself and say hi to everybody on the line?

Vincent Valle: Sure, sure. Hi, everyone. Welcome. I'm humbled that we have so many folks on here already. I am, as McLean said, Associate Director of Independent Recruiting, Independent Contractor Recruiting at KPMG. Actually, I have been with the firm. It'll be fourteen years in January and I started out supporting our advisory practice, our advisory consulting practice and in twenty seventeen raise my hand to be part of a contingent staffing sort of service line or support line within our experience, our recruiting team. And since then we have stood up a successful direct sourcing talent pool for KPMG.

Amy O'Donnell: And you guys do a great job, Vince. Hi, Amy O'Donnell. I'm our Chief Talent Officer at MBO Partners. I am happy to say, I guess I've been with MBO pretty much from what I consider the beginning of being really focused on independent talent and helping them do the type of work they love to do. Today, I'm focused on our direct sourcing programs utilizing MBO's marketplace, and I have the pleasure of working with clients like Vince on helping to make sure these programs are successful, but also working with the talent to make sure that all of what we're offering and the skills that we're kind of bringing into the marketplace match what our clients are looking for. So excited to meet all of you today. It's quite a friendly crowd. I can see the chat, so thanks for that.

McLean Robins: I love that.

McLean Robins: And I also love that both of you look exactly like your profile pictures, I have to say, nobody's using their 24-year-old profile pictures gorgeous.

Amy O'Donnell: Freeze that time.

McLean Robins: So perfect.

McLean Robins: We can pop those slides down for a few minutes thanks to the lovely Zach behind the scenes, who's running our tech for us today. So I just want to give you guys a brief summary of what you will take away from today's webinar and then we'll get into the meat of it. We're really pulling back the curtain and looking at recruiting technologies today. I think it's really important to not just understand how to market yourself, but understand what the person on the other side of the computer sees when they're trying to find you. So we're going to cover how recruiting tools work using LinkedIn as a proxy and how recruiters like Vince and Amy use them to select top candidates for outreach. We're going to talk a little bit about boolean searches, which you guys may remember from your library, science days in college and how you can leverage them to your advantage, as well as how you can align your resume and profile to the types of recruiting tools and ATS systems that are out there, as well as how to use some additional tips to boost your profile success and to hopefully get that contract for 2021 and beyond and then build that contract on the MBO platform, of course. So let's dive in. We're going to talk first about how recruiting tools work and how people utilize them for top candidates. So I'm going to just open up the floor with a lot of resume databases out there. And are they really all the same? And which ones do you use?

Vincent Valle: Amy, I could start with that, you know, there are quite a few out there. You all know you've all seen them in your job searches early on. The ones that stand out. I mean, from my team's perspective, the ones that stand out for us are indeed we use LinkedIn a lot. We post on LinkedIn and also our internal database. Believe it or not, that's what we rely on as folks reach out to us or as we reach out to people and they show interest, we rely on that first. That's where we always go. First we go to our marketplace database, our CRM database, and then for reaching audiences. It's it's indeed. And LinkedIn. LinkedIn, yeah.

Amy O'Donnell: And I think pretty much the same for us. We are focused on a professional workforce. So I think because of that, LinkedIn for us is, you know, we're pulling people into the marketplace.

Amy O'Donnell: We're going there first. Indeed, certainly depending on the types of roles. But I think, McLean, you would ask, are they all pretty much the same, a lot of the search criteria, and what we look for across these databases? I think they might look like a different flavor, but they're basically doing the same searches across these, wouldn't you say Vince?

Vincent Valle: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And it really is where the team is seeing the most positive results, you know, where, you know, when they you know, when we search indeed. Or when we search in LinkedIn, we're finding quite a few qualified candidates, contractors.

McLean Robins: So when you're searching, what are you searching for in these systems?

McLean Robins: What types of information are you most likely to search for? I know we'll get into the nitty-gritty in a minute, but Vince do you want to give me that? The highest of high? Like, what types of things are you looking for in these systems?

Vincent Valle: Honestly, it's keywords and skill sets. Key skill sets are keywords specific to that assignment or to that to that role. OK, we're not looking for something that everyone's going to have in their profile. So if it's, for example, Oracle, Human Capital Management or HCM, I know that if I do a search and I search on Oracle and HCM and put in a few other key terms, I'm going to pull up the profiles that I want to find. So it's specific, specific keywords.

Amy O'Donnell: I would say that's the majority of it, and sometimes locations, if that is dependent, if the roles are dependent on location, location, do you want to look at we have a. Let's put that up for you guys of the LinkedIn recruiter. We're going to just kind of use LinkedIn because I think most recruiters are on LinkedIn, Vince. And I want to give you some input as to our experience, but we also want to help everyone understand what other recruiters might look for as well, even if they are maybe not as experienced, because you want to make sure that you're showing up on the list regardless. This is actually a screenshot from the LinkedIn recruiter. So Vince and I are probably on here every day when we log in. This is what we see to do what is called an advanced search. And this is kind of from the other side of the curtain if you will. So, Vince, why don't we walk through some of this? I know that you use the spotlight stuff quite a bit. Why don't you explain what that is?

Vincent Valle: Yes, absolutely. We use these filters more than others. There are a few that I use all the time. Spotlight is what's good about. A lot of you may have already discovered this, but what you can do is, is mark your profile in a way that shows that you're interested in certain types of work, that you are interested in opportunities. So when I'm doing a search, for example, and I search for a dev-ops person or a developer, the folks that are readily available that most meet my search criteria are going to pop up, and there is going to be a dropdown that says currently looking. And then when I click on that dropdown, it's going to tell me what you're interested in. Are you interested in full-time? Are you interested in a contract or are you interested in part-time? And I'm always looking to reach out or my team is always going to reach out to folks that list that first and foremost, because we know that you're available.

Amy O'Donnell: And the way to show up on that list is to click that you're open to opportunities.

Vincent Valle: Yeah,

Amy O'Donnell: I think what we're trying to let you guys know is that even if you're on a project, if you leave yourself open to opportunities, you might be open to a conversation that could turn into an opportunity two months from now or next year. If you don't have that box clicked, chances are other people are going to show up on that list ahead of you because of that.

Amy O'Donnell: Because let's just face it, recruiters want to talk to people that might be available.

McLean Robins: It takes a long time to get through the process to write like 90 days. So you really kind of want to be always, always hustling, getting that next squirreled.

Amy O'Donnell: Yeah. And, you know, McLean, a lot of what Vince and I both do that is, I think changed a bit over the year is pipelining, which is we know we're going to need data scientists, you know, in the marketplace, let's say, for our clients. So we want to start to have conversations with people so that we can get them into some of those pools that Vince and his team do the same thing. So, you know, just showing up at the beginning of that list, you have more of a chance of a recruiter reaching out to you.

Amy O'Donnell: I think McLean, you were talking to me about this like Google search for when you're shopping for something and yet you don't know page three because you found what you wanted on page one? Recruiting is very similar.

Amy O'Donnell: Yeah, I really want to thank our luck, but for the most part, I don't. So that's I think that's absolutely great. So the spotlight is perfect. And then you were telling me also, Amy, that before the pandemic spotlight turned off after a little while now, it stays on. So turn it on. Leave it on. It would be.

Amy O'Donnell: In the past, that's one thing I would encourage candidates to keep up with, unlike and they are changing things very quickly. I mean, I went on there yesterday and found other videos that people can record like that was a new feature that I didn't even know about the day before. So one of the things that have changed was a spotlight that used to turn off when you said you were a. Open to opportunities every 60 days, it would automatically shut off and the candidate had to go back in and turn it, turn it on, you should get an email if that happens. Did that is they didn't want everybody just forgetting that, like you got a new job or you got a new project and you forgot to turn it off.

McLean Robins: But now this year, since the job market is what it is and there are so many people looking, at least for this year, they've just left it on. So it's not automatically turning off that 60 day mark.

Vincent Valle: And something to point to. What you had said earlier, Amy, about, you know, you might be on an assignment, but I know, for example, we have an assignment or an engagement that's not going to start until maybe mid-December. Well, we had to find somebody that was available for that time. Somebody we found is working, but we'll be available at that point. So they've just filled their calendar for that. So, you know, and look, you all are always looking unless you're on a long-term assignment, in my opinion.

Amy O'Donnell: Yeah. And the ideal situation is to flow from one contract to the right for most people. And we all know there's a lot of upfront time, background checks and all of that other kind of stuff can really hold it up. So, yeah, I think that's an important field that Vince and I agree on. We both use it. I use job titles sometimes. It depends on the role. So if I'm looking for a business analyst, most people will call themselves a business analyst and I can get from that other role like a consultant or role where people could have a whole variety of titles, then I don't use it because it's going to limit me. One thing I would mention with titles is make sure whatever titles you do have on your profiles are matching the kinds of work you want to do and might not be, you know, an internal title that you got from an H.R. department where you worked full time. Keep in mind that some recruiters will use that field and will search for titles. And if they are using that exclusively, you might not show up. As a little more seasoned. Vince, we don't. We don't. We rely on it.

Vincent Valle: Right? Right. And that brings up a really good point. You and I were talking about this the other day. You know, they are different. Every recruiter has a different skill level, OK? You have folks that are that that might be starting out with one to two years of experience. OK, I know. You know, I know for a fact that newer recruiters and I'm not speaking for everybody, OK, but newer recruiters rely solely on LinkedIn to find their folks and they rely solely on these filters. When I'm training recruiters, one of the first things I cover with them is what happens if LinkedIn goes away? What do you do right? What happens? And it scares the heck out of him. And so when you're using this system, you want to make sure that you're compensating for the recruiters that are green and the recruiters that are seasoned. So, yeah. So my team, for example, we're going to go in and do a very basic boolean search string, not even using some of most of these filters. And we're going to probably find even better results than using these filters. So just keep that in mind when you're doing that.

Amy O'Donnell: But you have to go to, like the fourth grade reading level. I mean, we find this all the time in communications that it may be highly technical material, but you have to dumbed down for people. And so you're telling me I have to dumb my resume down to match the keyword searches that a junior recruiter might be doing.

Amy O'Donnell: We hope we get events looking for us, but we may get a Sally who's just out of college. So I think that's a thing to compensate for.

McLean Robins: Let's move to location if we can hear it. I think we're getting a lot of questions in the chat about location. Post Covid you know it mattered a lot at one point. How much does it matter now with remote work, whether or not there's travel? I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.

Amy O'Donnell: There's a field now that you can use that is new this year on LinkedIn, where you can click open. To remote work, and so I would encourage most people to do that, I'm assuming they are. So I think that helps. It was a little harder to find people remotely before. So I'm glad that's a positive change, I think, for LinkedIn. And I know, I think some clients that we have are still very geographic centric. And even though they might be remote right now, they want people coming into their area into the office when everybody goes back. I think, Vince, in your world, how is location for you?

Vincent Valle: It really depends on what the person is doing. So, for example, we have document reviewers that can be anywhere in the country. They used to just be focused on Minneapolis and Orlando and that limited our pool. We talked about the practice and said, hey, guys, listen, you're going to get more bang for your buck and more good candidates like who we have in those areas. And we opened it up. And so now they're convinced, you know, they love that. But, you know, we're trying to build certain teams in certain areas. And so there is a certain number of folks that they do want in Orlando to be able to work at our lake house facility when it reopens. So it really depends.

Amy O'Donnell: But I would encourage people to put the location you're in. And if you're open to remote work, just make sure that your profile also stands that way, because there are again, a recruiter might be searching on that, even though you are open to remote work. If you don't show up on that list, then they know, they're just going to talk to the people that did.

Vincent Valle: Which is a shame because a lot of times in our screening, we asked folks, look, are you interested in travel? If that's something that comes up in the future or are you open to remote work? So that's that's something. But it does help to put that in there. Give an indication if you're open to travel post covid, you can put that in there, too. You know, we're down the road when the time is right, because that's also something that people want. And we want to find out up front.

McLean Robins: And that flag for remote work. We're going to have questions in the chat. It is just below your profile where you indicate if you're open to work. Right. It's a newer, a newer feature. And you say it's a little button to check there.

McLean Robins: Sorry, we don't have a picture or profile. Yeah, that's correct.

Vincent Valle: I'm guilty of this. I don't go in and use LinkedIn tutorials and and I really should I mean, because I even use them, I'll go in and and brush up, especially if I'm doing any sort of career coaching or, you know, working with candidates. So they do have some good things in there that we do.

Amy O'Donnell: Yeah. And, you know, I've found that I just Google something on like I say, how do I do X on LinkedIn? Just in Google. I get great results. And it helped me right to, you know, the steps that I want. So I do think they do a good job of that.

McLean Robins: If you just look for it like Google is my friend all the time, how do I learn how to do things? I Google them, which sounds like it's talking down to somebody, but really I Google things even though I know how to do and find better ways to do it. So I there are a couple of fields in here, Amy, I know we talked about this before we started today, but that you say you use but you don't use. But Vince, I want to talk about companies because I know you do sometimes use it with your consulting work. So why don't you guys talk about companies, schools, industries, years of graduation?

McLean Robins: The stuff that matters doesn't matter. And give us your thoughts on that.

Vincent Valle: You know, sometimes when we will use companies and it's only in these types of situations, let's say I'm looking for previous experience, our consulting roles don't. Generally don't require that, but let's say it's a little bit of a higher level, they want someone that's consulted before or contracted before with one of these firms. I'm going to put those company names in there and see what happens, you know, and it might be, you know, sometimes someone will put PWC the way, you know, the modern way of putting its other folks will spell out PricewaterhouseCoopers, that sort of thing. Be aware that the company name in your resume is up to date. OK, because most likely they're going to search for that term. I mean, Amy, unless you think differently.

Amy O'Donnell: Yeah, no, I agree with you. And I think what we're trying to get to is like maybe Vince and I would have a boolean search to search on both because we understand that some people write it differently, but not all recruiters. Well, they'll just put PWCin there. And so my point on companies is I use it once in a while. But what I would say for candidates on this stuff, your companies are what they are. You can't really alter that. You can just make sure that you have names in there properly, that if somebody was doing a company search that they're going to find. Right. Right. And I think the same goes for schools and things like that. I mean, you went to school wherever you went to school. Vince and I very seldom search for schools, right?

Vincent Valle: That's right. Yeah. But we don't. I don't really don't search for schools.

Amy O'Donnell: Yeah. And your graduation, the only time I use that is. I'm really looking for entry level people, so the only time that's there's a one to two year job and you just want to find the new graduates. But other than that, I really don't use that. I don't use industries because it would be nice if I could. But, you know, there's no commonality in what industry somebody puts or there are people that have multiple. So maybe you have worked in energy and in health care and in financial services. So that's why, again, recruiters there do certain things like business and I don't trust and we don't trust industry. So yeah. Yeah.

Amy O'Donnell: That's because we want to keep our net kind of wide.

Vincent Valle: And look, it doesn't, it doesn't hurt for you. Putting things in here is not going to hinder anything now, OK? It's not going to hinder anything. We're not saying don't use it. You know, if anything, it could help. But for industry, you know, one of the things I do, we have roles that we have contractors that go into manufacturing plants and work on looking at supply chain efficiencies and reworking them and helping the company save money, that sort of thing. You know, at one point we were looking for folks with an automotive background. So I immediately started looking for people that may have retired from GM. Right. They may have retired from Toyota. You know, the practice came to me and said, hey, you know what? We really I mean, some of these folks retire. They have great backgrounds. So I started searching specifically for those on those company names. So I put it into GM or, you know, Toyota or whatever. Right. And so that's that. That kind of goes to industry. And, you know, you might search for the term automotive. Right. Or manufacturing. I searched on both those terms when I was looking for these types of people.

Amy O'Donnell: Yeah, and so that works sometimes I saw some of the questions, too, on companies like if your company was acquired, if your company how you work for Andersen Consulting many years ago and now it's Accenture. So what I suggest is you can say Andersen Consulting, but in parentheses you can put, you know, has become Accenture. So you have to formally get on there. So if somebody was searching on Accenture, they're still going to find you. So I think we do have those situations. We understand when there are acquisitions as well, that companies changed hands and there's different names as recruiters. We're used to dealing with some of that. So I think that just be cognizant of putting both, if you can, even in the body of your resume, you might not be able to choose that under the company like the company, they might not let you. LinkedIn has that kind of closed. You have to pick which companies they have, but as long as you have that on your resume somewhere, we're going to find it in the keywords.

McLean Robins: I want to ask a quick question about that, because that's a fairly common question that's come in. I know we want to move over to the actual search terms and we'll do that in just a second. But we've got a couple things percolating here.

McLean Robins: If now Accenture, we're a little firm about Oracle. So do you put the little firm's name or do you put the Accenture in the company name and then. Right. I worked there when it was X..

Amy O'Donnell: If you want to show up under the company search, you can put Accenture and then you can put in parentheses. Yes, was Andersen Consulting so that if somebody searched on people who have experience working with Accenture and other companies, you would come up so you could do it either way.

McLean Robins: Excellent. OK, that's very helpful. And then a couple of quick questions.

McLean Robins: I'm getting some questions come through on age discrimination, which people are really saying this is really a real thing. Do I have to put my graduation here? I'm just going to open up quickly. Do you guys want to give a 30 second on what your thoughts are on on age discrimination?

McLean Robins: I like to think the higher the age, the more the experience. And that's a good thing. But maybe I'm just being idealistic here.

Vincent Valle: I can speak. I can speak for myself and my team. You know, we take that very seriously. I honestly don't ever look at a year of graduation unless I'm looking for an entry level person like Amy said, if I'm looking for an analyst. Yeah. I want to see. OK, you know what, they may have just the right amount of experience. They're just green enough that they can grow into a role if it's a full time thing or but but I see a lot of resumes where people don't even put it on there.

Amy O'Donnell: Yeah, I agree. And I would say once again, the other point I would make with this is that we're talking about independent contracting, in my experience. Right. Clients care about what you can do. Well done, what projects you've completed, maybe. And I see some people saying, like, yes, it can be a real thing, just maybe in the full time world, people are using that. I think we're talking about contracting here where people are actually looking for your experience. Vince's example was let's go find retirees. Yeah, I mean, retired from this company because they probably know a lot of great things that can make them. But it's all so I think in our world I feel the same way. I only do it to limit myself if I'm looking for entry level people, jobs that other people aren't going to want and aren't aren't appropriate for them. I don't see it that much of an issue in the contracting space.

Vincent Valle: And that that kind of goes along with degrees to I you know, our roles. You know, sometimes a client, you know, part of our SOW may require certain things. OK, then we have to look for that criteria. But our roles don't always require degrees. They don't always if I have a dev ops person or or a developer, you know, if they have the experience and they've done these things, I don't care.

Amy O'Donnell: That's what people care about.

Vincent Valle: I don't care when they graduate. Yeah. Yeah. And that's, that's what I like about it.

Amy O'Donnell: Right. And vise versa even if you're younger. But they've completed three implementations of an ERP system. That's what they're, that's usually what we're being asked. They want people that have done something, you know, two or three times. Right. It doesn't matter if they are on the earlier side or the later side. They're looking at the experience.

Vincent Valle: And as I get older, you know, one of the things I think about personally is if a company is not going to take me on, not that I'm going anywhere, but if a company is going to look at my age and determine. You know, my fit because of that, I don't want to work for them, you know? That's just my personal opinion. But one of the things I like about working in the contingent space is that, you know, we're not really limited by any of those degrees. You know, it's it's skills. And what can you do in a certain amount of time, you know, for our client?

McLean Robins: Agree. Well, that's that's great. I'm going to Rapid Fire. A couple of quickies that you guys sort of move on to the searches that we can cover, aging all day. It seems there's lots of questions about a premium worth it or not.

Amy O'Donnell: What do you say, premium? She asks, a premium linked in premium. I think it's worth it, do you?

Vincent Valle: Yeah, I think I think it's worth giving it a try. Absolutely. Yeah.

McLean Robins: OK, awesome.

McLean Robins: Next question is the quick question about spotlit. So a lot of people are really interested in this feature. The question is, is there any worry if you are employed but looking for contract work or looking for another job that your employer might see it and do more harm than good? I've seen this one a couple of times.

Amy O'Donnell: Your current employer can't see if you are open to opportunities.

Vincent Valle: But I don't want to scare anybody. And I saw this the other day. I don't think they can guarantee, though. That a recruiter at that, I'm not sure that they can guarantee that they won't see it.

Amy O'Donnell: So they try to block it if a company for that privacy. However, let's be real. If I wanted to ask Vince to go look somebody up for me. Yeah, you could tell me so your recruiter buddies could. But like, I guess the other thing there is, if any company is worried about it that much, then and then here's the other thing, too. There's a lot of gig work and moonlighting, and that's OK. So. But what if you're open to opportunities for contract because you wanted to do things in the evening or on the weekends? So I think the world is changing in terms of all of that. And people are working more than one job.

Amy O'Donnell: So there's that possibility, too.

McLean Robins: Awesome. Well, thank you guys for answering those, so I want to dive into the searches because I just think this is so fascinating. If we can move to the next slide, exotic. So Boolean, for those who remember their library science days is a type of search that allows users to combine keywords with operators like and, not, and or to produce more relevant results. So we'll go one in. And Amy, what we're, what we're getting started. Can you just sort of say, like, what Boolean I give you that I mean, even why do you use it?

Amy O'Donnell: Yeah, and it's relevant to us and recruiting is mainly we're trying to take a sea of people and we only have so much time and narrowed down pretty quickly with a search, you know, hopefully the 10 or 20 that we want to review that have the experience that we need. And so what Boolean searching helps us to do is zero in on who we're looking for with a combination of words. Then this is Vince's search string. And I think the important point about this one, especially for all of our IC's, Vince religiously uses that look at the contract or contractor or independent contractor. So Vince's teams are always looking for contractors linked in. Indeed, every place else has full time people too. So they are putting in a series of search strings here to make sure that they're having those people show up. So I think it's important to make sure that these words are on your profile or resume somewhere if you're going to be found. So, Vince, sorry I stole your spotlight.

Vincent Valle: Oh, no, that that's OK. This is and really the way I again, when I'm training recruiters, the way I, I explain this is it's a shopping list. So if I'm given a list to go to the market and I'm going to pick and they, you know, they want either apples or oranges and not pears. OK, that's essentially what I'm doing here. I'm telling you, I'm telling the database to give me just these things. I just want profiles that have the term Oracle that I have the term cloud and have the term the abbreviation HCM. OK, and then I want to see profiles where somebody has listed themselves as a as one of these these titles here and why the string works just in case this doesn't make sense to anybody as we get to do one search instead of five right now, we put in the "or" and the "and" for all that contract stuff, and we use that every time, so you don't have to do a series of different searches, right? There's different words, right.

McLean Robins: A little birdie Vince told me that you have a library of searches that you do, so you just copy paste. So some people get really into their Boolean.

Vincent Valle: And I, I have to admit, I yeah, I've kept it since I started at KPMG.

Amy O'Donnell: It's I mean, if you figured it out once, it's like, why retype it over and over again?

Vincent Valle: I go back to it all the time. Honestly,.

Amy O'Donnell: I bet on it too. You probably give it to newer recruiters.

Vincent Valle: Yes, absolutely.

McLean Robins: Make it easy. So this HCM is pretty straightforward. Like you either have HCM or you don't either know it or you don't. A couple of questions coming in from people, which is basically like I'm learning HCM, but I've never worked in it. Can I still how do I get found?

Amy O'Donnell: Yeah, you can click here.

Amy O'Donnell: Remember, this is just getting you to show up on a list, OK. And. It doesn't mean we're not going to hire somebody from this, this is maybe maybe that's OK for that particular role.

Amy O'Donnell: If it's something you're learning and you took some course in it or something, put it on there. You might not get called for the role if it's going to require somebody to five years of age. But that doesn't mean that you can't put that on your resume.

McLean Robins: Yeah, OK, this is a pretty straightforward resume. I know we have one next, we're going to go to the next slide. We have a project manager and.

Amy O'Donnell: We're talking about the job description.

McLean Robins: The job description. Yeah. So I want to show I want to go to this, which I think is really interesting. We'll show the Boolean for it in just a minute. But what I found fascinating about this is, is this is actually what the job is. This is what I see as an applicant. And Amy and Vince you guys highlighted what you would sort of search on,.

Amy O'Donnell: It was kind of funny because I did it for the first. I didn't know Vincent. I do kind of have the same brain with the stuff I said, Vince, roles like I'm scanning a job right quick. I'm going, oh, what's popping in my brain? And that kind of highlighted. I'm scanning it and going over budgets multiple times. Oh, vendor management, large SAS applications a big deal. Oh, it's an implementation. They have to have SDLC that it's going to be that world, that's how I will kind of screen out the functional versus technical type PM's. So these are just the words that pop out to us. And if you want to go to the next slide, Vince, you could speak to that. This was the beginning of the roles and responsibilities and the second slide shows in the same job rec, what the experiences. They're asking for it. And you kind of saw the same thing, right?

Vincent Valle: Yes, yeah, whenever I'm working, my eyes immediately go to the must haves. So when we're going through even when I'm working with the practice or the teams, the hiring manager, I take the job description or ask for it. If they haven't given it to me and I go through and I highlight these and then I say to them, look what's a must have because there's always things in there, you know, they're always going to try and get more for their money. And I don't blame them. But what they're going to do, what I want to know is, look, do they have to, you know, how much SDLC do they have to have? Right. Can they have anything besides biopharma experience or do they have to have change, you know, whatever, whatever it is. And then when I break it down, those are the terms that I'm going to search on and I'm going to certified as utter bullshit.

Vincent Valle: Go ahead. Yeah, yeah, yeah. To move over to that.

McLean Robins: I want to point out for those we're still getting a pretty robust chat about age discrimination guys, I just want to point out that, you know, let's let's take a look at the depth of experience needed on this here in the icy world ages the benefit where I'm going to move off of that issue, we won't be answering any more questions about it. But let's look at this really complex boolean string here. And all of these items are now incorporated into this. I did get a couple questions just moving through. I wish we could show Vince's library.

McLean Robins: It would be fascinating for everybody as proprietary secrets are lost. So you feel degraded.

Amy O'Donnell: Maybe next time.

McLean Robins: But but yes, it sounds like you have lots of these search strings. So I would comb through five and six job racks, sort of make some highlights for yourself, and then see if that appears in your profile. The good good tip that I think maybe you gave in a previous session. And then we'll show those previous sessions at the end. We'll give you guys a look.

Amy O'Donnell: And remember what Vince and I are trying to speak to here is that you have the experience. Let's just assume that you've got the right experience. We just want to help make sure that you end up showing up on the list based on this on your profile, on your resume and, you know, somebody at X. How do I know what keyword? Well, you know, and just to be clear, you don't have to have all of these words on here for the independent contractor.

Amy O'Donnell: And you see one of them you don't need all of them don't don't get hired and your resume still needs to be readable.

Amy O'Donnell: We still want to be able to read your resume and have it look nice. So you just need where you see the orders. Just saying, like, if you have Pharma experience, you should have Pharma somewhere in your resume because somebody is probably going to search on that word.

Vincent Valle: That's right, that's right, and and the way the way you know what a keyword is, it's it's, you know, is what is somebody going let's say if you were looking for someone that does what you do, what are the words that you would look for? Right. I mean, is it? You know that that's what I that's what I explain to people, whatever your profession is, whatever your skill sets are, that's what you want in there. I'm not going to search on terms like must have or I'm going to search on the meat. Right.

Amy O'Donnell: Yeah. And if Zack, I don't know if you can go back to the job description that we just had up. If you look at that job description, Vince and I aren't searching for soft skills. Every rep out there says, oh, great communication skills and organizational skills. We're not searching for those words. We're searching on. Does the person as the person manage vendors? If you haven't managed multiple vendors, the manager is not going to want to talk to somebody for this job. If you've done that, you should mention that somewhere in your profile so you would come up.

Vincent Valle: And I might even just search on the term vendors or vendor.

Amy O'Donnell: Exactly.

Vincent Valle: I mean, it might I mean, I may not even use multiple.

Amy O'Donnell: Exactly. Exactly. But the word vendor would probably be somewhere there if you had strong experience in that.

Amy O'Donnell: And so these are the ones that pop out, because if you look at some of the expected I guess I would say most people know that a project manager should deliver things on time. They should be organized. They're managing the budget. It's the things outside of that that can help take us from a thousand people to twenty to get the right candidates in front of us that we're looking for.

Vincent Valle: I just saw a question. I just happened to see a question pop up. How do I work with a client who doesn't know what they're looking for? You know, I run into that quite a bit that people know people know what they do, but they have a hard time putting it into words. And I end up asking them to give me three or four sentences about what this person is going to be doing for our client. Tell me what they're going to be doing for the client. And then from that, I pull out certain things that there are certain things that they're going to need to have. Right. There's going to be some sort of skill set or something around what they're doing. It might be accounting. It might be a document review. It might be anti money laundering, whatever it is. What are they going to be doing for the client?

Amy O'Donnell: You know, Vince, I get the question, too, because one of the things near and dear to my heart these days and I don't have a great answer for it, is job racks are frequently not accurate. And I think that might be what this consultant is getting at is people will pull some rep from a system that's, you know, ten years.

Amy O'Donnell: Somebody wrote ten years ago, used it twice before, and they plopped out there. And I think the best answer I have for that is that you've got people like Vince's team. This is where recruiters can work. Really help you, because recruiters don't just take that risk and throw it out there and post it like Vince just said, if he saw what he went to, they interview the manager and say, do you really mean that? Do you really need that? And so hopefully you've got some intermediary there trying to interview the managers and understand what they're looking for, because it isn't a problem that people don't always know how to articulate that that's really important to to see.

McLean Robins: I think we've spent a lot of time on the racks and the booleans. So if you guys are OK with that, I want to sort of go broad and then we just have a lot of questions coming in. So I want to make sure we spend some time getting to questions. So can you talk a little bit? We can pop the slides down and we're good with those today. But we've really talked a lot about search criteria, what you look at, what you don't, what matters, what doesn't, how you're looking at the racks. How do we want to talk a little bit broadly about getting candidates to align their profiles to the resume? As we've seen and we covered this in the first couple of sessions. But for those who didn't join, what's sort of the bottom line of what you need to do with your profile I'm gonna start with your Vince.

Vincent Valle: When recruiters, your LinkedIn profile should mirror your resume in my opinion, because the profiles that are not built out, that don't have the description in them are not going to come up in searches. So I knew I had gone in to look for a candidate's profile to see if they had any updated skills, because I had talked to them years ago and they just had their titles in there with nothing listed. And look, even recruiters, even I'm guilty of it. But if I'm actively looking for an assignment. Right, I'm going to want all that information in there. And a lot of times what recruiters will do. I don't know if people are aware of this, but you can actually in the LinkedIn recruiter part of it, you can actually create a resume. It creates a resume or a resume looking PDF with all your information in it. And that can be presented as well. So that's something that's that's really good to know. But having that information in there is key because when we're searching, we're doing that boolean search. It's going to go in and review all that information. I don't believe I don't know. Amy, can they still attach resumes or is that no LinkedIn?

Amy O'Donnell: What LinkedIn has done recently, you can't upload a resume, which is really annoying to me. What some people do is put a picture of it, but that doesn't help me very much. I can't really answer that. Yeah, but so here's why they did it. And it's important for people to realize this. Every single LinkedIn profile in LinkedIn recruiter, I have the option of printing to a PDF, as Vince was alluding to. Yeah. So they did it so that all of the resumes that I might pull out of there from a LinkedIn profile all look the same.

Amy O'Donnell: They're all formatted the same. And it's just important for people to realize that recruiters might use that PDF version and put it into the system. So if you have all of those things in your fields, that's where a lot of recruiters are, because that's where they make it easy for recruiters to just print a resume from the profile. Yeah, some of them might be putting that into their systems

McLean Robins: We did a really good question. Come in. That said, what if I want to have some privacy on LinkedIn and I don't want to put all the stuff on my resume on there? What's the advice for that one?

Amy O'Donnell: I mean, you can sort of there's no downside to that. We're just saying if you want to be found in a search and you don't have a certain keyword on there that's on your resume, then you're probably not going to come off.

McLean Robins: That's a risk. Then we gave some good general tips from Vince. I want to make sure you had a couple of things you wanted to point out to generally how to make sure your profiles found anything you want to add.

Amy O'Donnell: I mean, first of all, make sure you say that you are an independent contractor or consultant or freelancer if you are. A couple of reasons for that.

Amy O'Donnell: One, people like Vince will search on these terms. Two, sometimes I look at profiles of people that I know are consultants, and if I didn't know that, I would have thought they've been full-time at some company for twenty years. I can't tell by looking at their profile they're running their own firm or have their own business. The second thing I would say that I think is useful for people to do. You can update your skills on LinkedIn. So there's also the. You can add all types of things to maybe you don't want to add to your resume. So say, for instance, we have a nice-looking resume to profile and it reads well. And on the other hand, I get we're telling your body to be concise and not overly wordy. Well, then look at your skills on LinkedIn and make sure that if there are tools or any other technologies or methodologies that you have certifications and the skills.

McLean Robins: Yeah, OK. Those are really, really helpful tips.

McLean Robins: I am going to dive into Q&A here. So we're a mix of sort of long-form questions, things that I didn't get to answer before. So I'm going to get to as many as I can here in our last 10 minutes for you guys. Zach, while I'm doing that, do you want to pop up the poll?

McLean Robins: We're going to just quickly give you guys a chance before you have to run out at the top of the hour. If you want more information from MBO to join our marketplace for opportunities, please ask for an invitation. If you're not already a member, if you're interested in our service for high-end independent consultants like No Advantage, which will give you some additional support in branding and marketing yourself, I would suggest that you check the box for MBO advantage and we have several members on the line today. And if you want links to the previous three webinars, they are on our website at mbopartners.com/independent-professionals down towards the bottom. But we'll also send them in an email if you ask us to do so. By all means, you can check any of those things here and feel free to go out and start voting. I'll leave that up when we start answering questions.

McLean Robins: Peter had a couple of good questions here. Pretty quick ones. What's the definition of a long-term assignment? Vince?

Vincent Valle: It's really what you consider a long-term assignment. It could be six months. Could be a year. OK, great. You know, I personally, I think three months. That's sort of a bit of a long, it's a bit of a short-term assignment, but anything six months or longer to me is considered a long-term assignment.

McLean Robins: Cool. Any correlation between seniority of position and seniority of recruiters like executive positions that executive recruiters or. It's a mixed bag.

Vincent Valle: It's really mixed. I mean, I know that you know, if folks in there are recruiters at our firm that solely focus on folks at the partner level or managing director level, and they're typically more seasoned. They've been with the firm longer than you know. So it depends on the role.

Amy O'Donnell: Yeah, I get the one thing I'll say is you could have a recruiter working for a small company looking for small or midsize, and that recruiter might be looking for VPS. If that's all they have, that's what they're going to use.

McLean Robins: That's very true. I want to give a little tiny bit of love to our entry-level folks here. Do you have any advice for those entry-level folks who don't have a super robust set of experience or skills yet, but still want to get noticed? Any specific advice for my entry-level folks?

Amy O'Donnell: So make sure you work on building your profile. You can't make up for the experience you don't have. You can be active on LinkedIn. You can, you know, like things.

Amy O'Donnell: And build your network, I mean, that's one of the things I see is that people have a very small like 30 people, 50 people.

Amy O'Donnell: I remember when I was working at building a network and it was work, I was going down the list going, who else do I know? That person, me or knows me that I can invite, because the broader your network is and that is something everybody can do or people will find you and then just try to be active on LinkedIn with posts and threads and activities and anything that you can put out there professionally. Do it.

Vincent Valle: When I'm working, when I'm working with folks, I always tell people to make a list of your centers of influence, like Amy was saying. Who are the people that you know personally that would have contacts for you that would talk to you about possibly passing your resume on and starting with them? That's always you know, there's always one or two bites that folks get from that. Yeah.

McLean Robins: But we have a couple of questions that have come in about the recent election and the work with Prop 22, unfortunately, we won't be able to get to that today, but we will have likely something in the early twenty, twenty that talks about a future outlook. I would encourage you guys to check that out. Also, if you go to the news and press section of our website, there's a great hit from CNBC where our CEO Miles Everson is talking about the impact of Prop 22. And I think that he offers some really good contacts there. So if you guys are interested in diving in, that's there. I'm just taking a quick look through these questions, though. And one future-forward question I think it's a good one to ask is what is your thought on the job market for contract work in 2021? I think it seems positive from everything I'm hearing but Vince. I want to ask you that question.

Vincent Valle: Absolutely. I've been reading article after Article two about this since folks can now work remotely. I think that that changes a lot. I think it's opening up a lot more opportunities for people across the country. I've seen it at our firm. OK, just with our document review folks are Amelle folks. Yeah. You know, people are realizing that it can be done with little to no problems.

Amy O'Donnell: And we talked about this in some earlier sessions. But in some ways, this whole year that has been crazy and different is going to be good for independent consulting because lots of clients required people on site and we all used to fight that battle because we would have lots of talent, but not talent.

Amy O'Donnell: Exactly where they wanted them, they've now allowed going remote because they had two or more companies starting to see this can work in certain roles and I think that's good for consultants. It opens up the whole United States to them of different contracting roles. And I think companies are getting better at being open to it. I won't say, though, they're 100 percent all the way there yet, but I think it's been a positive move this year.

McLean Robins: That's a really great question. A quick question on recruiting activity, a couple of nuance questions on this here. What is recruiting, recruiting activity on LinkedIn?

Amy O'Donnell: And that just means all that is McLean is for Vince. And I can see our team's work. So I could search on only people that had notes, only people that had tags or that were in a project say like, if one of my recruiters save people to folders, I could search on just the people in this folder. So that's kind of an internal term, except for there is one thing that recruiters can search on there. It's funny, Vince and I both said we never use it, but some money recruiters can search on their first connections and people they know.

McLean Robins: OK, so connecting to those recruiters is what you're doing.

Amy O'Donnell: OK, now some people might use that, you know if they want to look just in their own network.

Vincent Valle: And another example of that, too, is over the weekend, I was doing a search just for actually realizing and I created a pipeline or a folder just for folks that I'd want someone on my team to reach out to who actually has a real background. And I could make notes in their looks like they'd be a good fit for such and such, you know, I mean, we can do that on the back end. You all don't see that. But that's something that LinkedIn recruiter provides to us so that the rest of my team can see what I'd like them to do or what I've said about, you know, moving forward with the candidate.

Amy O'Donnell: We can share information pretty easily amongst recruiters.

McLean Robins: Boolean search applying on the entire resume. A couple of people are asking. It does go to the entire resume, not just the experience section. It looks at your skills and stuff, too.

Vincent Valle: It looks at the entire resume. So I could do a boolean search on Google and just pull up specifically. I can pull up PDF files. I could tell Google to go search Google, to go search the Internet for PDF files that have the term resume and automotive in it or whatever. So it's going to search everything. It's not just a specific section, OK?

McLean Robins: Absolutely. I did see one person ask if they have retired but are potentially open to consulting work. Is there a downside to listing themselves as retired on their profile?

Amy O'Donnell: Well, the only thing I would say I have seen some people that say in their header retired, so maybe don't do that if they pop up and that's the first thing they see, they might not read any further. So in the body of it, I think you can say recently retired in my summer, I recently retired from X, Y, Z. Right. That's fine. That's not right in your header because some might just close the profile.

Vincent Valle: But if your last one of your last positions, you know, your end date, you know, 2020 and you put, you know, retired like Amy. So that's different. Yeah, absolutely.

Amy O'Donnell: Sure. And I think that's very desirable to lots of companies. They want to tap into that market. So that's a good thing to put in your summary.

McLean Robins: Our data still shows a ton of boomers working the mature hours. The people older than the boomers have pretty much left, but lots and lots of boomers doing contract work stuff, and boomers are not that old. So I know it is a big age range.

McLean Robins: Guys, I'm really sorry we didn't get to your question. We're at the top of the hour or want to be mindful of everybody's time today, but I hope we got to a good selection of them. Thank you so much for joining us. Don't forget to go to my partners' dot com slash events to sign up for future events. And big thank you to Vince from KPMG today for joining us. You will get a copy of the recording. You will get copies of links to previous webinars if you've requested them and other things coming out within about 48 hours. So thank you so much, everybody, and we hope to see you on a webinar soon.

McLean Robins: Have a great afternoon. Thank you.