Communication Connection: How To Build A Resume That Gets The Job With Daniel Usera

Posted by John Livesay in podcast0 comments

 

First impressions last long, and the first impression usually comes from your resume when it comes to finding the right job. In today’s episode, John Livesay is joined by Daniel Usera, an Executive Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University and a Corporate Trainer and Communication Coach. Daniel is a Nationally Certified Resume Writer and has helped over 500 job seekers find employment by improving their resume, interviewing, and networking skills. He shares the key to building the right resume for getting the right job. Plus, Daniel explains how to improve your LinkedIn page and network successfully. Get more insight on how to land the job of your dreams and build the right connections by tuning in to this conversation!

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Communication Connection: How To Build A Resume That Gets The Job With Daniel Usera

Our guest on the show is Dr. Daniel Usera, who is a Communications Consultant, as well as being a teacher of it. He talks about how to have a great resume, how to bring your LinkedIn profile to life as well as how to communicate in a way that has an emotional connection. Enjoy the episode.

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Our guest is Dr. Daniel Usera, who is an Executive Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University and a Corporate Trainer. His public speaking career started with high school speech and debate, where he won numerous tournaments and made multiple state championship appearances. He then earned a scholarship to do it for Washburn University, where he was a nationally ranked Debater.

After earning his Doctorate in Interpersonal Communication from the University of Iowa, he decided to enter the workforce to gain some valuable industry experience to complement his scholarship. He started as a career coach at a Workforce Development Center in Kansas City, Missouri, where he helped over 500 job seekers find fulfilling employment by improving their resume writing, interviewing and networking skills.

He joined the National Resume Writers Association and became a Nationally Certified Resume Writer. After realizing there was a large market of working professionals seeking his expertise outside of the center, he started his own career consulting business in June 2015, where he produced job-winning documents and interviewing coaching for hundreds of professionals across several industries.

As he now transitioned into a business in corporate training in April 2009 where he teaches essential communication skills, including presentation, customer service, and teamwork, Dr. Usera has held an academic appointment at the Arkansas State University, California State University Channel Islands and Austin Community College. At each institution, he taught Business and Professional Communication courses that helped both graduate and undergraduate students launch their careers and improve their communication. He continues to teach graduate-level Business Communications at Mays Business School. Welcome to the show, Daniel.

Thank you, John. Thanks for having me.

That is certainly a great little insight into how you’ve got to be where you are but I want you to expand on it and you can start anywhere in your career. You could even start younger than where you started all of this training in public speaking. How did you know that this was where you wanted your career to go?  

When you are a kid, the world is very open to you and there’s no limit to your creativity, you always have that big dream. That’s a little bit out there. I still remember in 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grade, I wanted to be in the NBA. I saw this movie about Isaiah Thomas with my brother and I was super inspired by his story of how he overcame injury and played good basketball for the Pistons. I was super inspired and the takeaway was I want to play basketball like Isaiah Thomas, but then early on, I was playing Pee Wee basketball and we had this tall red-headed kid in our grade. His name was Billy.

I remember the very first Pee Wee game, I thought I had a good game but I take my first shot and he’s way taller than me. He just packs the ball. You have that moment where you were like, “Basketball is fun but I don’t know if I’m going to be tall enough.” Once you see all these other kids playing and I have a lot of work to do but for a long time, I thought I wanted to become a sports psychologist and do that for a while. I’ve got interested in Psychology. My sister is three years older than me but she’s two grades ahead of me. When she was a sophomore, she started doing a debate in high school. I didn’t think much of it at that time but at dinner time, we would eat dinner as a family, she would start telling stories about her debate experiences.

[bctt tweet=”Research is Me-search.” username=”John_Livesay”]

She would be talking about this one team said this thing, and then I went up there and I said this other thing. She made it sound really cool and fun. When I became a freshman and she was a junior, I started at my very first tournament and she had already built a reputation of being an excellent speaker and an excellent debater. She set the standard of, “You set a standard,” if you will. When I first joined the team, my nickname was Little You because my sister Marissa was the big person. She had laid down the path and it set the standard. I did well at my very first tournament. My sister helped me and she helped me get better.

I ended up building a whole career of my own while she was there. After she left, I went on with it. During that time in high school, I fell in love with speech, debate, speech competition, persuasive speaking and formative speaking. I was doing well. I was pretty much the varsity in my freshman year. I did some state competition all four years and got a scholarship to at Washburn. I thought I was going to be a lawyer. All of these speaking skills and such, I thought, “I’m going to be a lawyer when I go to college and maybe a politician. Who knows?” I started watching lawyer shows in high school. I watched The Practice, Boston Legal, Law and Order. Do you watch any of those?

All of them. Ally McBeal, even.

I did not watch that one because I heard about the dancing baby thing. I was totally enamored with the legal field but in college, I majored in Pre-law, took Political Science and also Communication because I figured, “I was good at it, might as well get a degree in it.” It’s a double major and then minored in Philosophy. In my sophomore year of college, I had this Political Science professor named Dr. Beatty. He was young-ish, maybe 40s or late 30s, something like that, but he made professoring looks so much fun coming to class so energetic, happy, lots of knowledge and experiences. He had met Gorbachev. He had been to North Korea.

He had done all these things. One day in the middle of class, I was thinking like, “I could become a lawyer but I was hearing all these stories about it being 70 hours a week paper-pushing.” One of my fraternity brothers who graduated got a law job or he’s an alum. He was talking about the works in a telephone booth-sized office. He’s working all the time. In the middle of my Political Science class, I thought to myself, “What if I became a professor instead? It has all the skills that I want and all the passions that I care about.” After that, I said, “Sure. It looks like fun,” and no looking back.

To this day, I still wonder you have those key moments in your life where you have to make a big decision. I call them the forks on the road. When you have made decisions about moving to Austin or you have made career decisions, it’s like this big fork in your life. You are like, “If I go left, what would my life look like? If I go right, what would my life look like?” You don’t get to know what would have happened if.

It’s a whole another story even deciding what university you go to. You realize that one decision impacts who you meet, your life, your choices, changing majors and all of that stuff. There’s a movie years ago with Gwyneth Paltrow called Sliding Doors, which is all about in one scenario, she catches the subway in time to catch her boyfriend having an affair. The other one, she doesn’t catch the subway and she doesn’t catch him. It completely changes, whether she stays with him or not, and how that impacts the rest of her life. It’s constantly cutting back and forth.

I love anything around changing one decision. There’s another story playing and in another channel, you never get to see. The thing that fascinates me about your PhD is that your dissertation on online dating interactions. How did that come up? That’s an evergreen topic for goodness sake. First of all, I usually don’t understand half of them. The other is it doesn’t sound interesting to me but this definitely sounds interesting. What was your look at it? Has it changed now since you did it?

I had a professor and actually in the actual dissertation. I quote her saying it, which was a little bit unconventional for a dissertation because it was just a one-sentence foreword. It was, “Research is me search.” At that time, I was studying Interpersonal Communication, particularly persuasion, and this concept is called Facework. Facework is the idea that we all portray a particular image in interpersonal interaction. The image can vary from audience-to-audience, context-to-context. Sometimes an interaction stink puts our image under threat.

 

For example, if I say, “I’m a very smart person who knows everything about communication,” and then you ask me a basic communication question and I don’t know the answer. I put out this front or the space that I’m this smart guy, but then you call me on it, which is a simple question, and I don’t know the answer. Something has to happen called face work. I have a face threat here. There are different strategies and tactics that I can do to try to make up for the fact that I didn’t know the answer.

It’s quite amazing what the human mind will come up with. It’s predictable what people will do to a degree. I was interested in all that, but then online dating was this booming thing. At that time, I was doing online dating. As a guy on an online dating site, I was always like, “I wonder if I’m doing stuff wrong. What can I do to improve my own profile? How does that tie into what I’m interested in?” In the dissertation, you are spending a year writing, researching and talking about something. When you go to academic events and you say, “I’m writing my dissertation.” You have to be ready to talk about it. I want it to be interesting that means something to other people but also means something to me because I’m the one who has to do all the late work of this.

My advisor would help me a little bit. He was great, don’t get me wrong but the whole point is it’s supposed to be yours and only your project. I picked something that I thought would be interesting, timely and useful. I went with online dating plus, a lot of the dating research had limitations. It wasn’t even a purely selfish thing.

When you study First Interactions like opening interactions between two people who are potentially interested in each other, usually, it’s done in the context of speed dating and speed dating is a context. The problem is speed dating has its own context. It’s rare. It’s not a naturally occurring context. You have to go to speed date and you know that somebody is recording you. That’s going to put you off a little bit.

It’s going to change things. You can’t secretly mic up people in a public setting and then say, “Go talk to people at a singles bar, and secretly, you can’t do that IRB.” What you were able to do is ask people to submit conversations that they have had with people anonymize who they send it to because online dating is already anonymous but to a larger degree, any identifying information and look at the conversations themselves. What I was interested in was, how do people begin the conversation? What were the first messages like? What was those opening? What kinds of topics do people talk about?

There are five different types of openings that I found in my data based on people mostly submitting from OkCupid and Plenty of Fish. Now, I don’t remember all five but there are things like the phatic opening like, “How is it going?” Something that’s like, “How was your weekend?” There is something like the profile opener where you talk about something in their profile, and a random opening in which you asked some random questions. I still remember one, it was like, “Pizza or sushi?” That was literally the first.

It couldn’t be shorter, could it? It could be less threatening.

The person responded. They had a fun conversation. Most of the messages I saw were ones that led to a conversation. It wasn’t just all these bad ones. Somebody submitted pretty bad ones but it was a qualitative study. I couldn’t make generalizations about, which ones work better than others. It was more of what were the types and how did they play out conversationally. It was called Conversation Analysis. It’s what I did.

What I find so fascinating is it directly applies to people’s LinkedIn profiles. Of course, you are not trying to date but it’s the same conversation. How do you reach out to somebody that you don’t know on LinkedIn? How do you open that conversation? Many people make the mistake of you want to connect and I want to sell you something. They are asking someone to marry them that they haven’t had a coffee date yet.

[bctt tweet=”When you network, focus on giving, not getting.” username=”John_Livesay”]

It feels like spam because it’s a sales pitch right away.

A lot of it is. Sometimes, it’s artificial intelligence now looking for certain titles and sending the same email out every day to 50 people or whatever. I do a whole thing toggling back and forth between dating and business in terms of going from invisible to irresistible, and jumping the gun. Being stuck at the friend zone at work is a big soundbite of mine where you get people to say they are interested but they never buy. It’s almost like, “I’m not going to date you because you are in the friend zone.”

The dating stuff now has evolved where they try to help people. “Here are six things you could click on and not even have to type now an opening to a conversation.” The other thing that I instantly find that would let me know that’s not somebody I want to date is when they can’t come up with anything more interesting to say than, “How long have you been on this site?” It’s like, “What am I, a house on the market? You can’t think of one other thing to ask me than that? That’s the last thing I want to talk about.”

It reminds me of The Office, Michael Scott. He’s like, “I’m a dating expert. I have been on 100 first dates or something.”

You are also an expert at helping people to write their resumes. Two questions, the first one is, how closely should someone resume mirror what’s on their LinkedIn profile for consistency purposes?

Here’s the interesting part. Your resume is supposed to be targeted towards a specific job posting, and somebody can have 2 or 3 different resumes depending on the degree of difference between the jobs that they are targeting. For example, if somebody’s account is targeting accounting, let’s say. They have an Accounting background and they should make an accounting resume. That’s geared towards the accounting job postings that have those keywords from accounting job postings and make it sound like you are a born and bred accountant. If that same person is also like, “I like marketing too,” then they need to have a marketing resume that takes their work history and highlights the marketing aspects of their work history, and then sell themselves as a born and bred marketing person. Now, that’s the interesting question.

That’s fine because companies aren’t going to know which resume you submit to where if you apply a Deloitte for an accountant and then XYZ marketing company in New York. They are not going to know how you are selling yourself. On the LinkedIn side, that’s where things get a little bit interesting. You might keep your LinkedIn profile a little bit more generic and talk more about you are a professional overall in these two areas and here’s where you’ve excelled in these two areas. Your LinkedIn becomes more of a broad, full story of you. The resume is an opener that leads you into the funnel of your LinkedIn but your LinkedIn should do.

The resume is boring basically. It’s texts. It’s very technical, resume speak, summary, key skills listed out, your work history, maybe some accomplishments highlighted, bullet points and all that but it’s still very two-dimensional. LinkedIn should be what makes you four-dimensional. This is where you get to share stories. Linkedin is where you get to share videos, share pictures of you accomplishing those things and should be a story page more than anything else. The idea is that you put your LinkedIn profile on your resume and you should be hoping they click on your LinkedIn profile because your LinkedIn has everything else that you could put on a resume that makes you look good because LinkedIn is also a branding enterprise as well.

LinkedIn has allowed you to create a short little 29-second video on your headshot.

 

You can take advantage of that. Now, it gets complicated because it’s like, “That can lead to discrimination and so forth.” That’s where those things come into play. In the age of Google and search engines, people will find out anyway. If I’m going to be filtered for looking older or looking younger, I would rather filter the process that happened earlier rather than later. Being passed over on the resume side, I don’t think it’s always a bad thing or in the early interview stages if they are screening for bad criteria.

Your resume has to have certain keywords to get past the AI that’s scanning them now to even get you to interview because that’s the big challenge, correct?

Yes. That’s why on the resume side, there are three levels of resume that everybody should have. They should have their super generic resume that has their whole life career history, every single job that you have had. You would rarely deploy that resume ever but let’s say you’re giving it to a recruiter or you are going to put it on a reverse job search like Monster.com, where you post your resume and employers come to you. If you have no idea what you want to do, then maybe you would do that. You have your second level, which is your job-type resume. You will have an accounting resume, and then your marketing resume, let’s say. You then have your third level, which is your company job-specific resume.

It branches off the accounting resume, for example. This is for the accounting position at Deloitte and it’s keyworded directly to Deloitte’s job posting. Whatever Deloitte’s job posting highlights, I’m going to highlight that summary and all that. On the marketing side, ABC company. It’s three levels and it gets more specific. What you send to a job board or a job link is the job-specific resume that you might give to a recruiter. Let’s say, recruiter, comes to you and says, “We are looking to fill accounting positions.” You then would give them your generic accounting resume. You do deploy those but it depends on who you are giving it to.

One of the things that makes you unique is not only can you help someone get all these three different types of resumes. It’s like an investor. Founders need to have three different kinds of pitch decks depending on who they are pitching, then you have the skillset, and I’m going to say expertise, to help them communicate when they do get the interview, whether it’s virtual or in-person because you’re such a communications expert. Usually, someone will say, “I do resumes or I help people with their communication skills.” You could help somebody from start to finish on the whole experience.

I technically can. That’s actually what I do more of. I don’t write resumes anymore. I had fun doing it. When I first went into consulting, I took the dive. I quit my 8:00 to 5:00 job to do resume writing and it was so much fun, but then I realized very quickly that it’s mentally taxing because you have to get to know the person, interview them, you have to figure out how to word this and you don’t always know all the specifics.

Anyways, it’s a lot of fun. What I still do because it’s fun is interview coaching. That’s where we are helping people prepare post-resume. How do I take that document and answer those generic questions, “Tell me about yourself? What are your weaknesses? What are your strengths?” Also, there are very job-specific questions. I’m a full-service guy and I do pitch coaching, too. That definitely resonates too with the idea of the different pitch decks, who you are talking to and all that as well.

A lot of people make a mistake when they are pitching in an investor. They treat them like a customer. If you love this as a customer, you will love it as an investor. They are like, “They have completely different criteria.”

You are exactly right. They have to know the difference between a product pitch and a business plan pitch. It’s nice to know what the product is but what they want to know is, “Is there a market for it? Do you have a production plan? What’s their price point is going to be? Do you know when you are going to be profitable?”

[bctt tweet=”The resume is like an opener that leads you into the funnel of their LinkedIn.” username=”John_Livesay”]

“Do you have a secret sauce?” Any of that.

“What’s your unfair advantage,” as they say? If you say, “Here’s why you need this product, that’s good if they were a consumer.” That’s why business plan pitching is its own thing. I did some coaching with the pitch this summer with that at the contest. It was a lot of fun.

We know you are going to get asked on a job interview after they ask you tons of questions, “Do you have any questions for us?” Some of my friends who have kids on their first job and all that stuff, I try to help them a little bit and say, “What questions are you going to ask them?” I’m sad to say that half of them will say, “How much vacation do I get and when does it start?” They don’t know better.

Your questions are statements in that phase. If my question is, “What’s the tardy policy?” Behind every question is, “Why do you want to know?” I’m asking a question, and then as the inquiry, something that goes through your head is, “What’s the answer and why does this person want to know.” If I say what’s the tardy policy, what’s the vacation, even what’s the pay too early on, there’s a potential statement in there that you may not want to convey at least that early.

The pay is an interesting one because as somebody who you want to make sure that meets your requirements, there are different theories on when you should bring that up. Definitely what’s the tardy policy and what’s the vacation, you don’t want to come across as somebody who may be wanting to use a lot of those.

The question I give them to ask is, “What would it look if I were to exceed your expectations in this job?” You are painting a picture of you are already in the job. Instead of saying, “I’m someone that goes above and beyond.” By asking that question, you are showing it instead of telling it, which is why I love that.

That’s a good generic one too that you can use in almost any phase of the interview regardless if you are interviewing with the HR person versus your potential manager. One thing that I generally coach is part of your interview process when you get ready is you should be doing a ton of homework on the company. You should be looking at their website, mission statement, and products. You should be going to their LinkedIn page and look at their social media. You should become an expert on that company and learn as much as you can about the company as much as possible. As you do your homework, as recruiters call it or your research, some natural questions will probably come up in your research.

What you want to do is prefaced with a little bit of research that you have done. Something like, “I saw on the website that your company announced a partnership with the Susan Komen Foundation. Can you tell me more about how I will be working in service? Can you tell me more about what other initiatives the company is taking towards serving women?” Something like that. Now, I have done two things. First, I showed that I have done my homework, I have done my research and I’m paying attention to this company. Number two, I’m able to use that to ask an insightful question that might be important to me.

It’s a win from both sides, isn’t it?

 

Yes, because you get that preface in and then you also get that information. Generally, with the questions, you should still ask things that are important to you as a job seeker as somebody who’s going to take on the role. If there’s something unclear in the job posting that you think might be important, for example, when I interviewed for my first job ever, post-graduate school, one of the job descriptions was, teach workshops on the job search. I didn’t know what kind of workshop, so it’s a very easy question for me to ask. The first interview was, “I saw on the job posting that it says, ‘I’m going to teach job search workshops. Can you tell me a little bit more about what those workshops would look like, what the class size might be and how I can best prepare?’” Something like that.

You start by mentioning the job posting and saying, “I read it. I want some particular clarification. I’m paying attention. I know the job posting.” It’s a win-win on both sides. I generally recommend that people write down their questions. Here’s the next part, the delivery of the question. You could ask the questions but what I like to do also for preparation and asking questions is when they say, “Do you have any questions for us?” I will say, “Yes,” and I will pull out a legal pad or a notebook, something professional-looking, and I will already have my questions written out. Sometimes when you do the questions, you forget what your questions are, and then you have to go, “Yes, I had a question. What was it?” You have that.

You don’t want to stumble, so have the questions written out, and then you go to your first question. Have 3 to 5 written out is what I would recommend and then prioritize them. If you look at the clock and there are only two minutes left, pick the most important one. You don’t have to ask all five by any means. You just have five picked out. If they have already answered some of your questions throughout the interview because maybe the interviewer will be conversational and they will talk through things, you can still show your preparation and your listening skills by going through the list and doing something like this.

Let’s say, your first question was about the Susan Komen Foundation. You could say, “My first question was actually about the Susan Komen Foundation and your service initiative with that. What you said earlier was that we are actually going to be doing a lot of events with that, is that correct? Great. Is there anything else that I should know about that?” I can ask a follow-up or I can move on to the second question. “You also answered my second question. My second question was going to be,” and then say the question, “But it sounds like the answer is this.”

You are making them look good like, “We are on the same page because you have already answered a lot of my questions but I’m reinforcing I heard the answers properly.” That’s what builds a connection with people. They go, “We want to hang out with you.” At the end of the day, what you are offering people is the ability to create communications in multiple platforms that create a connection, which is energy.

People forget whether you are a coach, consultant, lawyer or whatever your job is you are selling yourself, people buy your energy. When you are interviewing, you have to stand out in a sea of sameness against everyone else who’s graduating, everyone else who has the skills that are required or if you are an entrepreneur, you’ve got to stand out.

The way to do that is those energy things but it takes some preparation and strategy that you obviously have thought through to help people in these situations. Let’s face it. A few of us interview that often. You are a little rusty and you are crazy to think, “I will just wing it,” versus someone who prepares and ask strategic questions. The big other parts of that are the follow-up. Back in the day, people actually write a letter or a handwritten one even, get in the mail and they would be checking how fast did they do it and all that stuff. Now, it’s acceptable to email something.

I think so, too. I still hear people, “You should write a handwritten note.” I’m like, “Now, it’s a little personal, I feel. Maybe it seems too personal and slow.”

Do you have tips for people like you did with the questions on the active listening part on, the recap on those because you are still selling yourself? We want to avoid those cliché things, “Great meeting you. Thanks for the opportunity.” Everyone says that, so don’t say stuff that’s common as my initial thing.

[bctt tweet=”Going to a networking event is to do two things: to teach and learn. ” username=”John_Livesay”]

Definitely, you want to send a thank you email after your interview with anybody. They gave you their time and this opportunity. It’s an opportunity to reinforce your key points, your summary of who you are, and your branding statement. Depending on when you interviewed and how people they are interviewing, if you were that 9:00 AM interview and they interviewed three more people that day, it’s very easy for you to get buried in memory because you were primacy but a lot of things happen. You want to have another shot to reinforce those memories and reignites the memory bank one more time of you before they decide if possible if you know when you think they will make a decision.

There’s a timing thing that gets involved in. I usually recommend 12 to 24 hours after the interview, send that thank you, email. I don’t want to send it right away when I’m done because if they don’t decide until the next day, I can come in the morning before. I don’t like to be too quick. I feel like you’ve got to let it sit. Maybe the next day after they slept on it because they are more likely to forget about you when they sleep.

It’s almost like the dating thing. You don’t want to be too needy.

That’s what I generally recommend. It’s called the 24 hours depending. As far as the content of the thank you, you do want to thank because after all, it does make a thank you email. You definitely want to start off with a thank you. What I generally like to do is start off with, “Thank you for the opportunity to interview with your company.” I usually say something about what I really like about the company. “In our interview, I learned that you all are driven towards innovating in the green sector and this company is very committed to building a team that will take us to the next level. Here’s what I have learned from what you told me in the interview. Things that you, the interviewer or interviewing committee told me.”

That way I listened again because listening skills are always valuable. I would also say something along the lines, and it depends on what happened in the interview like, “I also know that with my,” then I reiterate 2 or 3 key qualifications in 1 to 2 sentences that basically say, “Here’s why I’m qualified for this role. Seeing how I have done that industry experience and I know a lot about solar panels, I know that we will work well together. If any other materials can further demonstrate my qualifications or sample works that can help you with your decision, please let me know. I look forward to meeting you.” It’s a thank you and a sales letter a little bit but you don’t want to be too overt about the selling because I feel like if you are, it then makes the thank you seen. You have to balance it right.

It’s like a sales call. You need to follow up, it’s a thank you and, “Let’s do this. I really want this.”

That’s more or less the point of the thank you email more than anything else. It’s to indicate that you want this job and you are really interested in the position because here’s what you can also do with the thank you email. Let’s say I don’t want to move on. You may have been there. You interviewed for a job and you were like, “Heck no.” How do you bail out without your burning bridges? You send a thank you email and you say, “Dear company, thank you so much for the opportunity to interview. I enjoyed learning about your company and all the great things that it does. At this time, I would like to pursue other opportunities, but I thank you again for this. I will keep you all in mind in the future.” Something like that and you bailout.

The other thing that is necessary for your expertise is the networking part of this, whether you are looking for another job or not, or you are an employee already, so many people want their employees to network, even if you are not quoted in sales. I know you do workshops and coaching on this. Before I let you go, do you have any tips that you can give people on how to become better networkers, especially if they have gotten a little rusty during a pandemic?

I went to a networking event. That was my first in-person one in a while because of the pandemic. I can definitely understand that. There are a lot you can say about networking. I used to teach a whole workshop on it. If I was going to give some beginner short tips, the first thing is a mindset. Mindset is this. A lot of people think networking events are the place to get things from people. The point of going to a networking event is to get more customers, investors or recruiters to call me. It’s getting mindset.

Getting mindset messes people up because number one, they come in to try hard to the extent that I have seen realtors and insurance agents. I have seen people literally handing out their business cards like it’s a flyer or something like, “Hi, I’m Chris.” These are called cardboard connections, I have no reason because you know you leave the networking event and you have a fat stack of business cards. You have to sort through them.

For that reason, at least to try harder. We call it try-hardism. The second reason is when you go to a networking event, sometimes you don’t meet a client. You based on who shows up. There isn’t anybody there who matches what you are looking for or there wasn’t a recruiter there, whatever your goals are. You start to get frustrated, “Networking events are a waste of time because the one time I went, nobody was there. It’s no point.” If you think that way, you are going to have a hard and bad time.

Again, back to the dating. If you are going to a party, “I have to meet my soulmate or this is a bust. It’s too much pressure.”

The whole point of networking is this. This comes from a book called Make Your Contacts Counts by Anne Baber. It’s a really good book. She puts it well. That’s how I teach my students, too. If you go into a networking event, it’s to do two things. To teach and to learn.

If people want to reach out to you and find out more about, either having you come to coach them, run a workshop on communication or giving better presentations, where should they go?

I have a consulting website it’s www.DanielAlexanderCC.com. I’m also on LinkedIn as well. Send me a connection request on there or a note that hears me on this show. I love to connect with you all. I also teach at Texas A&M. If anybody here decides to get MS in Business or an MBA of any type, I would love to have you in the classroom as well. Texas A&M is climbing the rankings in the MBAs. It’s Top 20, I believe now, in business schools and MBA programs. It’s a great place to be.

Thanks so much for sharing your wisdom and your passion for what you do.

You too, John. I appreciate you, your passion, your energy and all your storytelling. We’ve got to talk more about storytelling. There are a lot to discuss there. Let’s do part two sometime.

 

Important Links

• Daniel Usera
• Texas A&M University
• National Resume Writers Association
• Monster.com
• OkCupid
• Plenty of Fish
• Make Your Contacts Counts
• LinkedIn – Daniel Usera
• Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course

 

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Tags: career development, communication strategies, job interview tips, LinkedIn, networking, resume writing