Hiring Process & The Four Gatekeepers

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>> Jerome Hardaway: First thing that I focus on is we have to know our adversaries. We have to know the things that we're working on. Now, I don't use adversaries like a violent word. I'm just military adversaries, just, hey, yo, this is my opponent. These are the things I had to prepare for, right?

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So what I have created, and this is what I use in my troops. I call it the user matrix. My user matrix framework helps them and helps me be able to identify the needs and wants and tactics that we have to use for each level. Particularly for me, because I'm coming in from outside in directly for every experience because I'm not working on my experience.

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I'm working, I'm leveraging someone else's experience, right? So, my user matrix, four components, my framework. This is where I start at every day with every new troop, every new civilian, and I work through these with every person, right? I'm actually gonna share with you later on one of the project boards that I have that I share with my troops.

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And I make them start answering these questions, adding me as a collaborator so I can learn part of this with them.
>> Jerome Hardaway: My first user, User Zero, because programmers start counting at zero, right? Is you. You're the first user. What I've learned in ten years of experience is that if I can get you to focus on your personal passions.

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And how to figure out what makes you click when it comes to this type of industry particularly in times like this, you're not going to survive, you're not going to win. So my number one priority at this stage is to see what is in tech that makes you wanna A, be in tech, B, thriving tech and how to make make you stand out from your constituents.

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Also out to get that mental toughness and grit for when the markets crazy hard, right? Like it is right now. So that is my first user on every conversation and that should be your first user as well. Start with you. Start with what are the things that you wanna do?

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I have my own personal philosophy, including I have what is called a 5 AM rule, which is what is the type of tech that I would love to work on. If somebody called me, there was an outage at 5 AM, I wouldn't be super mad if I had to go roll out a bit and build on this stuff right now.

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You can have your own personal philosophy, right? But that is what User Zero is about. It's dive in deep and focusing on, all right, who you are. So that way we can build projects around the things you care about. So that way no one's sharing the same three pit league projects, right?

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It's saying, here's a JavaScript calculator, here's a Netflix clone and what is the other most popular project that you see with junior? These days, Netflix clone, Jaws calculator, and.
>> Student: To do list.
>> Jerome Hardaway: To do list, there you go. Those are the top three that you see in your life, okay?

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That's that doesn't really apply and then you have seen this a million times. What are we gonna do?
>> Jerome Hardaway: Now this is the scary one for those that don't have network's either let's say you've been in tech so long, you haven't been really focusing on your network has been saying job.

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Or you're just now breaking into tech ATS which is applicant tracking systems. Let's now talk about the big man in the room, workday we all hate workday combined, workday is, I'll never be sponsored by them. [LAUGH] So, those are the applicant tracking systems that focus on key word technical skill identification.

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They have artificial intelligence built into them, whereas they start focusing on what words and what resumes start getting the most success rates starting and hired from those clients. Stores dwindling down, and you have to start getting it started and get smarter and more difficult at the same time.

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So you have to get you have to beat the machine in the sun game. So that is user one, where we do this is we focus on our resumes. We focus on updating our resumes based upon those components and we constantly we evolve with the machine? Yes, sir.

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>> Student: Are there any websites or tools to analyze your resume to pull out what it's seeing?.
>> Jerome Hardaway: Cool, so I have my own resume GPT that I can actually make public and share it with people. It does want to, but I have tested three different companies and the company that works the best right now is Teal.

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Teal is the best tool out there.
>> Student: How do you spell that?
>> Jerome Hardaway: T-E-A-L.
>> Jerome Hardaway: That's the best tool out there for your resumes. If you're for resume tracking and cleaning up, making sure as metric based all the things that are evolving with the current market that is the best resource that I've seen if you're gonna pay for a resource.

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That's what I recommend. User two, HR managers now, two years ago, HR managers were fun because the cash was flush and they could just throw a job out there with like 20, 30% more money than what the job is and pick up whoever. And they get their percentage, you get your percentage.

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Everybody's happy, right? Well, 2022 happened and they were one of the first people that were cut in the culling of markets when it came to companies. And those that stayed, they are having to be very stark stewards of the jobs and the budget, right? So they're not as fun as they used to be one and two they're looking for more false positives than negatives in the market right now.

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So these are the things where your clarity, your organization and your professionalism is getting the one and done rule. We're I see a typo, I'm not gonna use this person's, we're not gonna hire this person they're trying to find ways to disqualify you. And the disqualifications are minor and insignificant right now in this market because how tight it is to right now the talent is talent rich, but job poor, right?

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So they have to find the best client or best talent for this woman, take the job based upon that, that salary, and they're disqualifying people on the smallest things, unfortunately. So we have to focus on being sharper as well as they are also using artificial tools. A lot of HR managers are using a lot of sentiment analysis tools to try to figure out not only on that first call.

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I don't know if you have gone through an interview with HR Manager in a recent time. But they are using phone technology to own the door and to call for sentiment analysis to AC if you're lying and to C, to pick up if you're nervous, confident, what is your emotional status while you're talking to them, right?

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And then they're also having that recording and having other team members listen before they move on to the second round, right? So this is the new game. So one of the things that you're gonna have to do that we're gonna go further into is you're gonna have to practice your interview skills a lot more.

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Particularly your elevator pitch and just practicing how you speak to people in general, because that's part of the new interview phase when it comes to artificial intelligence.
>> Student: Any tips for staying confident?
>> Jerome Hardaway: Practice, biggest tip is practice, one you have to understand that the person on the other side of that line doesn't know you as well as you know you.

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So, make sure that you're a, practicing the pitch, practicing the things that you want to say that's gonna make you stand out, right? Practice ensuring that you have your metrics, is very metric based. Right now, they wanna to see not only what you've built, but what was the impact of his building, even if you're a junior like which is why building in public is so important now.

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Because you know how many users have touched your has touched your portfolio? How many are you getting feedback? How are you handling feedback? Things like that. So that is what you do. You just have to practice. You have to keep practicing, get your pitch down, understand how to tell your story.

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And also, like I said, remember, this person does not know you better than you know you. So you don't have to be nervous, be confident in your skills right? In the military, we have a saying that confidence, like confidence nervousness comes from lack of preparation, right? So the more prepared more you prepare, the more you practice, the less nervous you're going to be right because that nervousness comes from things external that you can't control.

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I can control with the things I know about me that I'm gonna tell a person, right? So I'm gonna practice that, and I'm gonna get better at that, right? Now developer teams used to be, though, unless you're getting for the magnificent seven, you were gonna go through a three, four, five round inner process, right with a developer.

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Now, in this current market, it's very normal to go through multiple rounds and have multiple developers. I have seen at least two that's for pre IPO startups where, you have to do the code challenge and then you'd have to do multiple round interview with the dev team. And that is very different when we were getting two years ago right unless you are going for the Microsoft, the videos, apples of the world it was a three interview process.

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And then you were like okay cool now it's five, six rounds for the interview and the developer team is playing a much more, much more hands on role for it. So with these, they want to see if you're a team member, how you collaborate as a unit, how do you communicate, and of course, focus on technical skills in this era where everybody's focusing on productivity.

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The harsh reality is the things that are being pushed away is how do we onboard? Two years ago, onboarding was such an important, holistic approach. And now we're seeing, because everybody's trying to move fast, and particularly in this current era where we're trying to adopt new technologies. They don't want to have to spend the time onboarding you in a company onboarding you into the stack as much as they used to.

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And while that is a detriment to the talent, the current market, that's the world we live in and we have to be prepared for that. So you have to, and I'm also seeing a lot more computer science, questions, a lot more, complexity and talking about performance within code challenges.

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So we have to start planning and practicing for that when we're building out our plans to get on the market. So the matrix is a strategy of improving how you present well for your work. And also how to continuously present well for yourself, right? I used to matrix on myself regularly to build my projects, to build what am I gonna build next externally?

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How am I gonna explain it? What is my next career step, etc, right? So that's how I focus. I use the user matrix on me to focus on how to prepare well for the market. I want you to start using the user matrix for you to enhance your professional success and your chances and keep it going for yourself, right?

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That is one of the biggest things that I want you all to take away. This right here is the core foundation of my style of self-improvement, as well as helping my troops and helping big civilians that I help, right? Keeping a nice long career I'm always assessing, starting here and assessing with these things with every job, even the job I'm at currently I'm looking at all right.

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When I think about the developer teams I'm looking at okay, what developer teams aren't being impacted by fire and what it is skills that those developer teams at work have. And what do I need to do to quickly upskill on those skills, right? When Microsoft two years ago was starting talking about AI and big data, I started learning Python on my own.

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Because in case things changed drastically, I wanted to be able to say, hey, I already have this skill. So I can go over here and do big data and do data engineering, and that helped me not only with one of our projects where we had to do data engineering, cuz I was already upskilled in Python.

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It also helped me prepare for the current era AI since JavaScript and Python are two of the most popular languages in this space right now. So that is how I might even in my current role planned out how hey, based upon user three, what do I need to do user three been developer teams at Microsoft?

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What is the business line looking focusing on? Hey, this is what the business line is paying the developer teams to do And these are the safest teams, let me acquire these skills, right? So like even when you're at your current job, you can be using the metrics.