Why 80% of candidates get overlooked with career coach Adam Broda

Standing out in today’s competitive job market can feel like an uphill battle. With countless professionals vying for the same opportunities, differentiating yourself is essential. In this week’s episode of Recruiting Insider, I sit down with the incredible Adam Broda to explore how job seekers can build a compelling personal brand that gets them noticed.

Adam shares his expertise on the three key elements of a strong personal brand. He explains that visibility, credibility, and consistency are the foundation of a brand that stands out. By honing these aspects, professionals can ensure they don’t blend into the crowd but instead attract the right opportunities and connections.

One of the biggest mistakes job seekers make is failing to optimize their online presence. Adam discusses how an incomplete LinkedIn profile, generic messaging, and lack of engagement can hurt visibility. He emphasizes the importance of curating a profile that tells a story, showcases expertise, and makes a lasting impression.

A major highlight of the episode is Adam’s journey in growing his LinkedIn network to over 438,000 connections. He reveals the strategies that helped him achieve such an impressive reach, from thoughtful engagement to providing valuable insights that resonate with his audience. His success proves that personal branding isn’t about self-promotion—it’s about adding value.

Beyond LinkedIn, Adam dives into the role of content creation in building a personal brand. He explains that sharing authentic, informative content establishes credibility and positions professionals as thought leaders. By consistently publishing insights, job seekers can attract recruiters, employers, and industry peers.

Personal branding isn’t just about what you post—it’s also about how you communicate. Adam shares tips on crafting a compelling elevator pitch, networking effectively, and developing a clear message that highlights one’s unique strengths. He stresses that confidence and clarity go a long way in making a memorable impact.

Another crucial aspect of personal branding is engagement. Simply having a polished profile isn’t enough; job seekers need to actively participate in discussions, comment on relevant posts, and build relationships within their industry. Adam’s approach to networking is all about fostering genuine connections rather than transactional interactions.

For those struggling to gain traction, Adam provides actionable steps to refine their brand and increase their visibility. He suggests identifying key differentiators, optimizing professional profiles, and leveraging storytelling to make an emotional connection with an audience. These small yet powerful changes can lead to big results.

The episode also touches on the importance of adaptability. Job seekers need to stay up to date with industry trends, continuously refine their skills, and be open to evolving their personal brand over time. Adam encourages professionals to see personal branding as a long-term investment in their careers.

If you’re tired of being overlooked and want to become the go-to person in your field, this episode is packed with invaluable insights. Tune in to Recruiting Insider and take the first step toward transforming your career with a powerful personal brand!

 

Mary (0:1.108)
Adam Broda, welcome to Recruiting Insider!

Adam Broda (0:4.371)
Happy to be here, thanks for having me.

Mary (0:6.514)
I’m so excited that you’re here. Okay guys, so if you haven’t seen Adam on LinkedIn, then you’re probably living under a rock or something. Adam has spent a decade in people leadership and development as an engineering and product leader at huge companies like Boeing and Amazon. And he’s worked with recruiting firms, universities, and even startups to learn the best
paths for job seekers at each level. He opened Broda Coaching in 2020 with the mission to help tech and engineering professionals land job offers at 150k to 300k or more by teaching a value -based job search strategy. So today we’re going to discuss a topic that’s near and dear to Adam’s heart.
how we can maximize our visibility and value proposition during a job search. But before we dig into the topic, Adam, tell us just a little bit more about your background and who are you?

Adam Broda (1:14.121)
Yeah, that was a great intro. I appreciate that. Let’s see, to get into more fun information than just what’s the general ho -hum on LinkedIn. Yeah, I’ve got an engineering background, so.

Mary (1:15.809)
Yep, thank you.

Mary (1:23.437)
Yeah.

Adam Broda (1:28.041)
My brain is kind of still wired very much like a mechanical engineer. I spent a lot of time in college and then even like my first few years at Boeing doing a lot of design work and I was doing tools and equipment. eventually moved into like large scale robots and stuff. And now at Amazon, I work in the product sector. that career transition has brought me to a lot of different spaces and places, but I would say I still feel like an engineer somewhere deep down underneath the surface.

Mary (1:55.659)
Mm -hmm.

Adam Broda (1:58.047)
My time in corporate has been great. I’m not one of those people that’s, you you need to escape the nine to five and corporate sucks. I think I’m a realist though, right? It’s not a family. A corporational job is limited and you’re always going to be a number, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t maximize your opportunity to work at a great firm and meet great people and build your brand and do all these other cool things.
I’d say Bird of Coaching has also been an interesting journey. I started it right at the beginning of COVID and we just passed our 250 clients a month ago and that was really exciting. The way that we do coaching has just totally changed in the past three, four years as we continue to try to find ways to work with more people.

Mary (2:33.772)
Mm

Mary (2:38.624)
Wow.

Adam Broda (2:49.973)
But yeah, that’s been a fun journey. then fun stuff, like I said, I have two kids, have been married for 12 years. I live about 40 -ish minutes outside of Atlanta. I was in Seattle for 10 years. I’ve now relocated back to the East Coast. I’m from Virginia. My wife and I are from the same town. So all our family’s over here.
And then, I mean, if you have kids, then you know that you don’t really have hobbies. It’s not like a thing. Your kids are your hobbies, which is fine. But I do enjoy trying to get outside and I’ll do triathlons maybe a couple times a year. to force myself to exercise by signing up for things I have no business doing that’s been my strategy for a while. then cooking, traveling, like the typical boring dad stuff. I enjoy all that. So that’s me in a nutshell.

Mary (3:39.680)
That’s awesome. How old are your kiddos?

Adam Broda (3:43.592)
about to be three and about to be five so you’re in it

Mary (3:46.753)
Oh, you’re in it. So did your five -year -old just start kindergarten then?

Adam Broda (3:51.815)
My about to be five year old is right at the end of the cutoff so that technically they’re in pre -K and they’ll be kindergarten next year. Yeah.

Mary (3:53.823)
About to be five, okay. Got it. Okay. I have a five year old as well and he just started kindergarten this year and I can very much relate to not having hobbies because kids take up your entire life outside of work, which is a blessing.

Adam Broda (4:11.366)
Yeah. Right, yeah. I mean, it’s different than it used to be for sure, but we love it. I absolutely love getting into my kids’ lives and doing stuff that they like to do. There’s always opportunities to kind of guide them in maybe a slightly selfish direction, and that’s okay. Every good parent does that to a certain degree, but now it’s good. Just a different chapter of life.

Mary (4:28.328)
Yeah, oh for sure. Yep.

Mary (4:35.104)
Yep, but they’re all their own little people. So even if we guide them, they’ll still make their own decisions. Yes. Yes. So you work with a lot of people in tech and engineering. is, would you say that that’s different than somebody that’s outside of those fields when it comes to job searching?

Adam Broda (4:40.745)
That’s the goal. That’s the goal.

Adam Broda (4:54.877)
I mean, yeah, the short version would be yeah. Every field is its own little market or network. You know, the skill sets are different. The experiences that we’re looking for are different. Characteristics even to some degree are different. There’s always overlap between things.
So pivoting from one industry to another or from one job role to another, there’s always some level of overlap between those skills. I am a firm believer that there’s never zero separation between any job. As long as you’re speaking and functioning and organizing things, there’s always something transferable. I would say, yeah, in the world that I work in now, even in product, there’s…
many layers and levels to the product space. There’s technical and non -technical, there’s different styles of products like B2C products, B2B products, internal tools, and even between those three delineations, the things we might be looking for for a person could change just a little bit. So the short answer is yeah, those skills are different.

Mary (6:1.321)
Yeah. Yeah.

Adam Broda (6:5.833)
but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re unachievable or unattainable in any way. Just kind of depends on what your expectations or objectives are.

Mary (6:14.175)
Yeah. So I think a lot of what we’ll talk about today can be applied to both job seekers that are pursuing opportunities within the tech and engineering space, but you can also apply these concepts outside of those spaces as well. So, I mean, let’s just kind of jump right in because a lot of our listeners are, they’re searching for a new job. So what can they do today to really maximize their visibility for a better job search?

Adam Broda (6:43.317)
Stop applying. That probably would be the first thing I would say. A lot of the folks that I work with or that I interact with on LinkedIn, a higher percentage of the questions than I would like are all around, what do I do to stand out in the ATS? How do I submit better applications?
what do I put on a resume? And I would just tell you, the market is competitive right now, especially in tech where there’s just not as much growth as there have been in the past five to 10 years. So the first thing that I would do is I would say, don’t, stop panic applying, stop clicking the LinkedIn easy apply button because it makes you feel like you’re making progress. Doesn’t necessarily mean that’s a total waste of your time, miracles happen, but.
know, Airbnb is one of the companies that I pay pretty close attention to and track with different dashboards and they posted a senior program manager role, I think two weeks ago. And in 48 hours, 560 applications, right?

Mary (7:48.234)
Poof. Wow.

Adam Broda (7:49.109)
560 applications from LinkedIn to that role. And I would say again, like know your market, right? You know, know your market if you’re talking about big private companies versus large tech giants or FAANG, like sure, there’s different considerations to make, but in general, there’s lots and lots of applications coming into the ATS system, which means the likelihood of a cold application is multiple times even lower than it has been. We’re talking less than 2%.

Mary (8:18.420)
Mm.

Adam Broda (8:18.649)
of a chance that you’re getting selected or noticed, my first and maybe most important advice is to switch to more of a networking forward style of job search, right? Like let the people that know you and are willing to help you drive where you look and how you look and how, you know, even how you search to some degree.
people really are the X factor right now, at least in the companies and jobs that I am seeing, know, fill roles and fill positions. And that’s probably the most obvious thing that I could say. And I would say I’m repeating it because it’s true, right? When it’s an employer’s market.
There’s less appetite for risk for people that aren’t super qualified. There’s less appetite for risk for people that don’t have strong referrals. There’s less appetite for risk for someone transitioning into a new role or new industry. So I would say the obvious statement is use your people. A couple of the things I’d probably throw out just to think about is,
If you want to compete for high caliber positions at high caliber companies, mean, unfortunately, this is the reality. Like extra efforts and extra materials really are kind of required at this point to separate yourself. you know, inside of my coaching community that I run, I’d say, you know.

Adam Broda (9:47.029)
probably of the people that have landed jobs in the past month, something like 70 to 80 % of them are submitting video introductions, right, or submitting customized pitch decks for that specific company. In addition to a tailored resume, right, so mean, some of the basic level stuff, but that above and beyond step really is helping with networking conversations, it is helping with, you know, screenings and considerations, does help you stand out when you’re able to network with recruiters and
hiring managers, some of those efforts are going a long way. And then the last thing I would say, in addition to just saying like, network more, which I think isn’t really helpful, is that one of the things that we’re doing a lot of right now that’s getting…
that’s helping our clients get traction is what I would call engagement networking. So in addition to leveraging people you know and finding new people and creating relationships and all that stuff, what we’re doing is we’re thinking about strategies for driving visibility back to.
landing page, right? So can think about a landing page like a LinkedIn profile page. You can think about it like a personal website. You can think about it like a GitHub portfolio or a Notion template, right? It could be anything, but…

Mary (10:57.223)
Mm

Adam Broda (11:7.017)
The strategy that we’re deploying and we’re doing successfully is creating content in some capacity that drives traffic back to a place where they can be advertised to, right? So where you’re selling your skills and your experiences and what you’re looking for. yeah, know, posts on LinkedIn at some level of consistency are really great for that. Comments on, you know, key influencers content is great for that. You know, the right…
Discord community the right Facebook group them the right Twitter, you know Following stream. There’s just a lot of places that you can go where eyeballs are and
good strategies right now are figuring out how to take some percentage of that traffic and divert it to your profile. And the more profile views you can get, the more likely somebody that’s in hiring position might see what you’re offering and be impressed by it and then therefore pick up the phone and start a discussion. So that’s probably where I’d start. There’s a lot that could be unpacked there.

Mary (12:9.574)
Yeah. Yeah, a hundred percent. And I think, you know, when I asked that question and your initial response was stop applying, people are probably like, wait, Adam, what? That’s the only thing that I’ve been doing to, you know, mean, obviously if I’m going to land a job, I need to be applying to hundreds and hundreds of positions. But I, I think that you’ve really, you know, opened the flood gates here to lots of different types of opportunities or different ways.
that job seekers can really increase their visibility outside of just, like you said, that easy apply button on LinkedIn, which we found, especially in a job market like today, it’s not going to be nearly as effective as maybe it was even a year ago or two years ago. So, I mean, I love your idea of that networking first approach. And I’ve seen the same thing. Like, yeah, you need a powerful…
resume and you need a powerful LinkedIn profile. But I think even more importantly right now in a market where one job posting is put up and within 48 hours, there’s 500 applicants and I’ve seen a thousand applicants. It’s hard to stand out against so much competition. So let’s unpack that.
you know, what you just said a little bit more, because I know you mentioned briefly, you know, video intros and pitch decks and engagement networking. So, you know, for the job seekers that are listening to this podcast right now, and they’re like, okay, this is great information, but where do I even start?

Adam Broda (13:55.721)
That is a really, really loaded question. A lot of what we’re talking about right now is kind of the end game, right? The visibility piece is not the start of the process. The start of the process, in my opinion, is getting foundational career clarity on what good looks like, right? What industries do you want to be a part of? What problems do you want to solve? What skills do you want to use? What kind of comp package do you look for?

Mary (13:57.956)
Hey

Adam Broda (14:22.099)
What are your requirements for remote work or travel? There’s just a long list of questions that we would typically walk someone through in our program to understand what considerations need to be made before picking roles or companies or titles. But once you get to the point where you’ve got a target established, so a set number of firms, set number of roles, you know where you’re gonna start seeking a job.
You need to build a brand around that. You need to build a brand that can attract that audience. And again, like if you say, hey, my objective is I want to work at Spotify and HubSpot as a project manager, we would say, let’s go find job descriptions at those companies for those roles and pick out the key themes that are in there and start thinking about how do we speak to these with examples? How do we use some of the language? How do we use some of the terminology or the metrics or the…
you know, critical skill sets that continue to come up in these job descriptions, you have to sell what those hiring teams are looking for. So that’s where you’d start. Once you’ve got the brand created, you know, and brand could mean…
You know, your about me section on LinkedIn, can mean your professional summary on your resume, it could mean the results that you’re talking about or the accomplishments that you’re messaging in a network message or a resume. But once you have those things figured out, then it’s time to design a networking strategy that works for you, right? How do you find the people that have the ability to influence decisions that could go in your favor?
Again, I would say a lot of people make the mistake of kind of just jumping onto LinkedIn and running searches for employees that work at companies and then messaging them. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I guess I might not even call it a mistake. There’s just better ways to start. I think everyone should start the networking process by doing an extremely thorough deep dive of who they already know.

Adam Broda (16:23.215)
Again, if you have a second level connection that…
could potentially, you could potentially get an introduction with through a friend and that connection works the place you want to work at and can refer and can recommend and can push your information. That’s a massive, massive amount of time saved as opposed to going out and messaging a hundred people that work at that company to see if you can get one person or five people that will respond to you at all. And then maybe over some amount of time get to that level of relationship. So I’d say, you know, there’s an order of operations
to things. A lot of people that I work with, that we place into positions already have good networks. Sometimes they just don’t know it or they don’t remember it and we’d have to take some time to kind of draw that out, right? Like who went to your college? Who’s in alumni communities? Who was a part of that club at that thing that you did five years ago? And in addition to all the places you used to work or all the people you used to work for or work with.

Mary (17:12.602)
Yeah.

Mary (17:25.626)
Yeah.

Adam Broda (17:26.623)
we definitely start with a really thorough deep dive. Again, to kind of continue on the path of like, is the list of steps? I’d say the networking strategy that we typically would design for a person at a high level is gonna be like one of three things. So I talked about the engagement side of it, right?

Mary (17:49.474)
Mm

Adam Broda (17:50.961)
our strategy would be like, hey, we have a brand, let’s figure out how to put this brand out there, right? Maybe we post about topics, maybe we share stories, maybe we create articles or videos or again, some kind of content that attracts an audience in some way. And that’s a very generic statement I know, but there’s a lot that could fit there. Before we ever get to that, I would say that the first thing we’ll do is what we would call short -term networking. And that’s trying to figure out
where we can get conversations going that can help us do stuff in a shorter amount of time. So this is where we potentially would play a numbers game. you don’t, let’s say you want to work at a startup and you know absolutely no one there and none of your second or third degree connections know anyone there. It’s just total ground zero, right? The first step probably would be to hit the LinkedIn messaging boards pretty hard and get out 50 to 100.

Mary (18:38.137)
Mm

Adam Broda (18:48.469)
connection requests or messages to people that might work at that company or connections of connections that could make introductions, even if they’re not strong connections, you really might have to start with a little bit of a numbers game just to see if 100 messages yields 10 responses, or if 100 messages yields five responses. And we do help people with that. We talk about like…
What are the types of messages that are more likely to get someone to reply, right? Who are the people we can hunt down that are more likely to apply? For example, we ran a networking strategy for an individual a couple months ago where we targeted people that were posting about jobs they had landed because we know that those people are generally operating with a higher level of energy and are way more happy to reply to somebody.

Mary (19:14.798)
Yeah.

Mary (19:34.233)
Mm -hmm.

Adam Broda (19:37.938)
So yeah, you kind of need to be smart and creative about how you start those conversations off. But yeah, short -term networking is playing a numbers game, trying to generate responses, and essentially opening doors to the next series of responses.

Mary (19:40.227)
Yeah.

Adam Broda (19:52.941)
you know, conversely long -term networking is kind of the next step of our process and that’s where we instead of looking for someone that might just be able to click her incentivize referral button or respond in some way we look for opportunities to create career advocates and That’s probably pretty obvious, but I’ll just explain that right is that’s a person at a target company that can do things Beyond an incentivized referral they can send you contact information they can introduce you to people in an email or
phone call. They can send your resume and pitch deck and intro video directly to the hiring manager as opposed to saying, I’ll just refer you and you’re going to go to the top of the ATS list.
we skip that entirely, we just go right to the hiring manager, right? Because you have an advocate that’s willing to do that. So it’s kind of the next phase that we work on. And then I’d say in parallel, we also run some form of engagement oriented strategy where we talk about how do we get our content or expertise or our knowledge out there to the right people. But.

Mary (20:39.223)
Yeah. Yeah.

Mary (20:50.531)
Mm.

Mary (20:54.936)
Yeah.

Adam Broda (20:56.787)
Yeah, that’s typically where we start. That’s a very long -winded answer, but as I said, we spent months working on this stuff with people, and it’s a good thing to dive into.

Mary (20:59.179)
Yeah. No, that’s amazing. Yes. Yeah, no. And there’s just so much. I think that I agree. think a lot of people forget to reach out to their first level of connection, their second level of connection. They jump right to, okay, the blind networking, like you said, like maybe they’ve pinpointed.
company that they want to work for like Amazon and then they start, know, blindly reaching out to people within that hold the job title that they’re targeting, you know, and they’re currently at Amazon. But maybe the best way to start is just by thinking about who is already within my little circle, who’s already within my network. And then those people have networks and those people have networks. you know, these things kind of have a way.
of just kind of expanding and adding more and more people. So I guess before we even start looking outside of our own little network, what are some good outreach strategies for reaching out to those people who are already in our network to ask them for help?

Adam Broda (22:14.825)
Hmm, another very loaded question. I would say that…
Again, the first thing that I would encourage everyone to do is before you start messaging, which is always the thing that is tempting, right? Because again, you feel like you’re making progress just by sending messages and you’re not necessarily wrong, but there’s more strategic approaches to waste less of your time. I would say map it out and write it down. We have a template for this inside of our community that we give everybody and we say, you’re literally going to fill this out.

Mary (22:32.727)
Yeah.

Mary (22:36.630)
Mm

Adam Broda (22:53.431)
we call it the networking step ladder. And we have essentially our clients kind of score each potential connection on a number of factors. And those factors determine the order in which we’ll reach out to folks, right? You know, how responsive they might be, how active they are on LinkedIn, kind of connection we have with them. Last time we chatted with them. There’ll be some things that we, you we ask, but I would say…

Mary (23:9.718)
Mm, sure.

Adam Broda (23:22.229)
Generally the biggest roadblock for most folks that I work with is just the first message, right? Like the hardest thing is to just start. So my recommendation would be, and this is gonna probably way oversimplify, but if you struggle with writing, if you struggle with thinking about how to write effective sales messages or respond to me messages, like get on chat GPT, get on Clawed 3 .5.

Mary (23:49.182)
Mm

Adam Broda (23:51.541)
Ask it for some help and just say, hey, you are a career coach with 20 years of experience, right? You help place people into this company or this company or this company. How would you approach a contact? How would you approach a hiring manager? How would you approach a fill in the blank in a short, clear and concise one paragraph outreach message for LinkedIn? See what it gives you and then tweak it from there.
As I said, that’s probably a gross oversimplification of what we do, but if JetGBT can get you something that’s 70 % of the way there and you can polish it up and put some finishing touches on it and make it unique and customize and have a call to action at the end or say, hey, we have this commonality. There’s a lot of things that you can do to boost that, but a lot of times people just struggle to send that first message because they feel awkward or.

Mary (24:43.424)
Yeah.

Adam Broda (24:43.669)
they don’t know what to say and I’d say, don’t let that be a roadblock, use AI or use someone to help you get the words to say, have someone look at it or validate it that it’s not terrible, maybe before you send it. But a lot of times, those connections and those referrals happen simply by just taking the first step to reach out.
I’d say the more active they are on a given platform or given profile, the more options that you’re gonna have to make those connections. If somebody is active on LinkedIn where they’re maybe posting a couple of times a week or commenting a couple of times a week or they’ve reposted content.
I’d say then we probably wouldn’t want to start with a cold direct message. If you have the time, I would say, let’s go interact with your content. Let’s comment and let’s like, and let’s do that a couple of times to the point where we get some facial or name recognition. And then we make our move to make a connection. And the connection is not about, hey, help me find a job. The connection is, again, find a commonality and see if there’s a shared interest, talk about that. Maybe even the connection.
and you let them know that you’re interested in the place where they work. There’s a number of different templates we would use for that initial reach out. But yeah, it’s really a process of just taking baby steps, seeing, I tell this to my clients all the time, but like your number one objective with most networking conversations, whether you know the person really well or it’s been a really long time or you don’t know them at all is to just start.
the conversation. It doesn’t mean it needs to be about careers. It doesn’t need to be about placements or referrals. Just get a conversation going, right? Choose the option that’s most likely to get a response. Maybe you talk about something hilarious. Maybe you send a meme. Maybe you send something that’s crazy and can’t be ignored. Whatever it is, you know, know your audience, but…

Mary (26:23.991)
Yeah.

Mary (26:41.130)
Eh.
Yeah.

Adam Broda (26:44.211)
That’s the first and most important starting point is get the conversation going and once it’s going, generally it’s a little bit easier to steer the ship.

Mary (26:53.174)
Yeah. Yeah. I think from a visibility perspective, a lot of people tend to think, well, to get visible, I need to post content on LinkedIn and I need to create newsletters and I need to, you know, start groups or, you know, interact in groups. And those are all great ways to become visible on LinkedIn. But I think, like you said, Adam, one way that a lot of job seekers overlook
is just simply interacting on the content of those people that they’re trying to attract. So if you want to build a relationship with somebody at a company, like you said, jump on their LinkedIn profile and start interacting on their posts in a really meaningful way, because that’s going to stand out to them a lot more than if you’re just jumping right into the in -mails and shooting them a message trying to get them to help you.
That’s probably not going to grab their attention, but if you take a week and interact on every single post that they make every single day, well then they’re gonna start to recognize you. You your visibility is gonna go way up.

Adam Broda (28:3.359)
Yeah, agreed. mean, again, the tricky part is finding people that are active enough to where that strategy works, because not everyone’s gonna be active, but finding those people is not that difficult. It’s just, again, it’s a question of who’s the target, right? If it’s a five person startup and not a single person is active on LinkedIn, probably don’t need to spend a ton of time on LinkedIn. Let’s go to something else.

Mary (28:8.332)
For sure. Yeah.

Adam Broda (28:26.345)
But yeah, if you’re talking about Microsoft, there’s probably no limit to the number of people we could potentially use that are active and chatting and could engage with.

Mary (28:31.724)
Mm

Mary (28:37.110)
Yeah. So once we start to kind of build that visibility and we’re taking all these steps and we’re, you know, we’re posting content, we’re interacting on content, potentially even making some video introductions that we’re sending to people and just, you know, kind of starting to make this small talk. How do we start to bring in that value proposition piece? You know, how do we start to have that conversation of, know, Hey, this is the value.
that I could bring to this XYZ product manager position at your company, how do we even start that conversation?

Adam Broda (29:14.683)
It’s in heavily, heavily depends on your audience, right? That again, like in an ideal world, you’re starting the value proposition conversation in comments, On friendly or neutral interactions where you’re not asking for something.
coffee chats, right? Get to know you calls, intro calls, things like that. And value proposition doesn’t always have to be, hey, here are my skills and experiences and results I’ve delivered, you know, AKA my resume. I would say that most of the time when we talk about value proposition in terms of networking, it’s investing into a relationship like you would invest into a bank or a bank account. You have to put stuff in, in order to make a withdrawal at some point in the future. And…
How you choose to invest into that relationship, I think, is kind of where the magic happens when it comes to people that are good at networking and people that are just kind of average or not good. Find creative avenues to get people excited about the relationship with you. Connect them to someone really important. Connect them to someone who can help them. Introduce them to someone who can put them on a podcast.
invite them to participate in a panel discussion at your company. Tell them that you shared something with your manager where you work that they talked about online and tell them about the glowing reviews that it created. There’s just a long, long list of ideas that aren’t, hey, my name is Bill and I need a job and I’m good at this, here’s my resume, please refer me. I’d say.

Mary (30:50.923)
Yeah.

Adam Broda (30:56.949)
The less candid you can be about the chores that you need the person to do upfront, the better. And give them lots of reasons to trust you, give them lots of reasons to think that you have something important to say. And that could happen in a lot of different places, right? It might happen in the comment section, it might happen on your post, it might happen in an intro call or a chat, could happen in a restaurant in real life, if that still happens today in 2024. But…
Yeah, I’d say think about it more as a relationship building exercise and look for opportunities to benefit them first before you, you know, pull the lever and ask for a mountain to be moved, right? A referral we submitted or something to happen. They need to have enough interest in you and belief in your capability before I think you ask for something like that. Does it always have to work that, you know, to that level or that intensity? No, right? There’s plenty of people that are super nice and will offer

Mary (31:28.652)
Mm

Adam Broda (31:54.887)
referrals on the very first discussion call. It just really depends on a lot of different factors, but generally speaking I’d say it’s a building block process.

Mary (31:58.273)
Yeah.

Mary (32:6.556)
Yeah. Yeah. And I think, you know, I want to kind of nail that down even, you know, a little bit more for our listeners who, you know, they’re still stuck in that grind of, you know, just applying to jobs, applying to jobs through LinkedIn, you know, using their resume. And they’re not really using any of these networks, networking strategies in their job search at the moment.
So let’s say they have, you know, they have the basics nailed down. So they know that they want to apply to an engineering director role at Metta, right? And they’ve nailed down, like they know who’s in their network and they’ve, you know, they know who they can reach out to. And they’ve also identified some people outside of their network that they could potentially reach out to. And they’ve been doing all these things in terms of, you know,
building up their visibility by, you know, posting and by interacting and doing all these things on LinkedIn. So what are, you know, the first one or two or even three steps that they could take to actually start to reach out to some of these people within their network?

Adam Broda (33:26.047)
might ask you to clarify your question a bit. So what…

Mary (33:28.923)
Yeah. Yeah. So I guess the main, the main question there is what are some tangible steps that, you know, job seekers could take today to kind of pursue more of that networking first approach.

Adam Broda (33:45.557)
I mean, in addition to a lot of the things we talked about, I would say, yeah, practical first steps to just briefly summarize, right? Like you need to know who your target audience is. need to know the things that they care about. You need to know the language that they speak. again, what are the themes in the job descriptions?
what kind of company or corporate information is relevant before I jump into kind of the wild, wild west of networking. That’s generally my preference is to arm yourself with as much useful information or helpful information and then get started. Map out who’s in the network, right? Literally put it on a piece of paper and rack and sack the folks based off of different criteria and.
put a strategy together that says, I’m gonna start here. I’m gonna start sending these kinds of messages to this aspect of my network and to send some different ones to this aspect. People I know a little bit versus people I don’t know at all. I would say again, use a writing assistant or if you don’t need one, write the messages yourself and.
Start the process of thinking about what can I say in these messages that are going to make someone more likely to respond? So I generally would say, pick a commonality if there is one, talk about shared interest. Send something interesting, right? Send something interesting if it’s a cold open and…
You’re trying to find creative ways to get someone to respond, share something that you saw online that’s relevant to their company, relevant to their title, relevant to their level. We have a lot of product managers in our community and we would say, share a cool product study. Those are coming out all the time from different universities and different publications about how users think and pick a product manager at a company you want to be at and send them a useful tidbit of information or a new tool or a new automation.

Adam Broda (35:41.019)
and just say, I thought this might benefit from you. Again, you’re looking for ways to just start the conversation. But I’d say overall, the process in my opinion generally goes something like this. Identify the target. Look for the best possible option for establishing a conversation with the target. Establish it.
Create a system for following up. So how often do you want to touch base or warm things? Maybe that’s a comment again, maybe it’s another message, maybe it’s just sharing something, a piece of information that is all gonna be based off a lot of different factors like how active they are, what are they posting, when do they come to the table on LinkedIn. If you need to try to get other contact information, you can try to do that maybe on a coffee chat call. understand how you can just continue to invest and then

Mary (36:11.954)
Mm -hmm.

Adam Broda (36:38.663)
And look for opportunities for when the time is right to ask for the thing that you need help with. Sometimes if you play your cards right, people will volunteer referrals. Sometimes if you play your cards right, they’ll volunteer introductions to hiring teams.
that really is kind of the high level overview of what it looks like is it’s a people first approach. Your time goes into facilitating conversations and growing relationships and finding the right individuals as opposed to tailoring resumes and submitting more applications. But I still think LinkedIn is probably the best place to do those initial steps. There’s lots of other platforms that can be leveraged.

Mary (36:59.377)
Yeah.
Mm

Mary (37:13.714)
Yeah.

Adam Broda (37:24.251)
It really just comes down to who your audience is and how you can best get in front of them. And the last thing I’ll say here is, overthink it, right? Like in many, many cases, if you don’t have people and you really are starting from scratch, don’t be defeated by the fact that it is a numbers game. There are coaches in MySpace
that would say, for anyone going after connections at a target company, the minimum number of messages you should send as a starting point is 150. Like find 150 people that work there, send 150 messages. I generally go a little bit lower than that, but again, be prepared to be rejected 95 plus percent of the time. Maybe a really, really creative opening message that…

Mary (38:3.706)
Mm. Mm -hmm.

Mary (38:13.734)
Yeah. Yeah.

Adam Broda (38:20.628)
again shares your, let’s say like some portfolio work or has a video attached to it or has something that again, like you specifically took the time to create for that company or that business unit. Maybe there’s something you’re adding in that makes that percentage go from four to 5 % to 10 or 12 or 13%. That’s still mostly rejections, right? Like the best.

Mary (38:33.211)
Mm

Mary (38:44.951)
Mm

Adam Broda (38:46.535)
cold open I’ve ever seen in the history of better work was one of my students who was sending like a paragraph swung.
introductory message and they had a Notion portfolio linked to it and they had written some scripts in there that could essentially customize what the person saw when they popped it open. It would build this little custom graphic based off of the LinkedIn page that they were coming in from. And that person was averaging something like 23 to 24 % response rate. That’s not, I’m gonna hire you, that’s a response rate. And that’s super, super positive and it’s still 24%.

Mary (39:11.450)
Yeah.

Mary (39:18.629)
Wow, that’s awesome. Yeah.

Mary (39:27.023)
Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. I was just going to ask for an example. So that was perfect. And I think that, you know, this will really get people thinking about ways that they can approach job searching that isn’t just kind of spraying and praying and, you know, sending out a bunch of resumes. Although, you know, like you said, it is still important to apply. think you can be using both of these strategies where you’re still creating these tailored and customized resumes and applying to positions.

Adam Broda (39:28.064)
But yeah.

Mary (39:56.737)
on LinkedIn while also implementing some of these networking first approaches that you’ve been talking about today, Adam, and really, you know, tapping into their network and, growing their visibility and expanding their network in different ways and starting to reach out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Adam Broda (40:10.249)
Yeah, don’t get me wrong. You have to apply at some point, right? When I say stop applying, I don’t mean never ever apply again. I mean, I’m a hiring manager. I understand how the ATS system works. You will need to apply at some point. I just think the ratio of time spent is way, way too overblown in the application direction, where…

Mary (40:21.840)
Yep.

Mary (40:30.308)
Yeah. Yeah.

Adam Broda (40:32.565)
When we talk about the likelihood of an hour being invested into the job search process and where it’s most likely to pay off, I’d say, you know, less than 2 % of the time it’s likely to pay off with a cold application, you know, and that’s just generically, that’s not even like the hyper competitive tech space where it’s 10 times worse. The likelihood of an hour invested into chatting with people and sending messages is so much better than that. It’s still low, but it’s way better.

Mary (40:50.009)
Yeah.

Mary (41:0.502)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s kind of thinking like an entrepreneur too, right? Because you’re reaching out and you’re really, really proactive in your approach. And many entrepreneurs, they’re trying lots of different things and they hear no all the time. So you kind of get used to it. And it’s kind of like that, you know, with your outreach approach, it’s like, you you’re saying you’re going to reach out to 125 people and maybe 100 of those people or even 119 of those people are going to…

Adam Broda (41:5.300)
Hmm.

Mary (41:27.798)
either say no, go away, or they’re not even going to respond. But those six people that do respond could be, you know, amazing. One of those six people could be the person that introduces you to your next boss. You never know. Yeah.

Adam Broda (41:42.109)
Yeah, I mean, it’s so funny just to kind of give you maybe the last data point and then we can kind of, we can wrap up. But I would say the shift of power between employer markets versus employee markets.

Mary (41:46.732)
Mm -hmm. Yep.

Adam Broda (41:56.853)
it really does play a factor, right? When there’s more jobs available than there are people and then when the inverse happens, right? And there’s not enough jobs to go around, but I can remember as a hiring manager at Amazon in like 2021 during the height of like the tech expansion when, you know, again, like it was such an employee’s market. I would post, you know, mid -level program manager roles on LinkedIn and I would get like three people

Mary (42:18.020)
Yeah. Yep.

Adam Broda (42:26.807)
to respond to me on LinkedIn interested in the position. Three, you know, versus now if I was to do that, would have, I mean, I have probably a thousand people reaching back out. So it’s just kind of funny how that shift can happen so quickly.

Mary (42:27.898)
Hmm.
Mm -hmm.

Mary (42:35.119)
Yeah.

Mary (42:40.420)
Yep. Yeah, and I’ve seen it. I’ve seen the shift too. It’s crazy. And I’m sure anybody listening has felt that shift as well. Well, Adam, where can we find you on social media?

Adam Broda (42:48.017)
Yeah.

Adam Broda (42:52.549)
I mean, I’m really only on LinkedIn. think my wife has an Instagram profile for me, but it’s mostly just for family pictures. But yeah, shoot me a message on LinkedIn if you ever are interested in connecting or want to chat, tag or job search. That’s the best place to find me.

Mary (43:8.632)
Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on today.

Adam Broda (43:11.323)
Absolutely, thanks Mary. a pleasure.