Interview Like a Pro: The 5 Core Stories Framework

Sign up for our FREE weekly newsletter 

In this episode of the Career Starter Podcast, I’m joined by Jonathan Corrales — former engineer and program manager in the software industry. Today he is an interview coach who shares the powerful framework that helps his clients land jobs in under 10 weeks, even in a tough market. We break down:

- Why the “spray and pray” job application strategy fails
- How to build a standout resume and LinkedIn profile
- Jonathan’s signature “5 Core Stories” approach for interviews
- How to start networking (even if you feel like you have nothing to offer)
- Tips to rebuild your confidence and prepare like a pro
- If you want to get hired and start strong in your role, this one’s for you.


Our Guest: Jonathan Corrales
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathancorrales/
X: https://x.com/readyinterviews
website: https://readyaiminterview.com/


Mentioned In The Show:
1. Austin Belcak: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abelcak/
2. Study Academy of Management Journal: Assessing Creativity in Hollywood Pitch Meetings: Evidence for a Dual-Process Model of Creativity Judgments https://www.jstor.org/stable/30040623
3. Jonathan refers to FANGS. "“A loop to one of the FANGS." This refers to :Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google.
4. Careerflow.ai: https://www.careerflow.ai/
5. Teal or Teal HQ: AI Resume builder: https://www.tealhq.com/
6. Jeff H. Sipes YouTube Channel: Interview negotiation advice https://www.youtube.com/@jeffhsipepi
7. Adam Broda, Broda Coaching: https://www.brodacoaching.com/
8. Reno Perry: Career Coach: https://www.linkedin.com/in/renoperry/
9. Madeline Mann, Self Made Millennial: https://www.youtube.com/@SelfMadeMillennial
10: Colleen Paulson: De-age your resume: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colleenmpaulson/

📚 Book Recommendations:
1. Adam Grant, "Give and Take" : https://adamgrant.net/book/give-and-take/
2. Madeline Mann, "Reverse the Search": https://madelinemann.com/
3. What Color is Your Parachute? by Richard N. Bolles 
https://www.amazon.ca/dp/1984861204/?coliid=I2UV77S8XTIEH2&colid=1YHBMFR2D918H&psc=1
4. Cracking the Coding Interview: https://www.crackingthecodinginterview.com/
5. Cracking the PM Interview: https://www.crackingthepminterview.com/


To see all the Career Starter Program book recommendations, click here: https://a.co/dAb1jZf

📩 Sign up for our free weekly newsletter 

📣 Connect with Ashley!!!

LinkedIn, website, X

P.S.

To see all the Career Starter Program Book recommendations, click here: 

Transcript

0:00

Is there a common mistake you see people making? Or is it often a series of things that you see? It's a series of things, but there's one that stands out to me the most. Jonathan, you talk about your five core stories. Can you tell us more about that? The five core stories came from actually a huge mistake that I made. I was preparing for an interview with Amazon a couple of years ago. Welcome back to another episode of the Career Starter Podcast. My name is Ashley Misquita and I'm your host. If you already subscribed to the show, thank you very much, but if you're new, please go ahead and subscribe. Because today, like every day, I'm going to be bringing you amazing guests, and we're going to uncover the tips and strategies that will help you get your dream job. And once you're in that job, help you launch your career and accelerate it like a rocket ship. All righty. Let's kick things off here. Jonathan Corrales, great to have you here. Thank you so much for doing this. I've been following your stuff on LinkedIn for some time now. So many great insights, and I'm very excited to have you on the pod. Yeah. Thank you very much. Happy to be here. Excellent. So, Jonathan, why don't we kick things off with, just some background on you? Tell us about yourself. Tell us what you do and how you help people. Yeah. So I've. I've been in software industry for over 20 years. 15 of those years, I was a hiring manager. I've been an engineer. Program manager. Any role that you can think of in software, I've played. And in 2023, I was laid off twice. Once at the beginning of the year and once at the end of the year between layoffs. I had a very short contract, with a company and dealt with one of the worst micro managers that I've ever had. So at the end of the year, I thought, I'm done doing the corporate thing, I'd love to do something for myself. And a lot of my friends were getting laid off from different companies, and I decided to do something about it. And so I became, an interview coach. Interesting. That was sounds like a rough 2023 man. Yeah, tell me about it. Jeez. Interesting. So then let's talk about what you do. So you're an interview coach. Does this stuff apply specifically to people, mid-career people who've lost their job? I know you mentioned you had some friends who lost their job. How do you think about this in the context of, like, the whole spectrum from when I'm in university looking for a job all the way through to mid mid-career? Just apply there as well. Yeah, absolutely. I started off with with folks that are in the industry at the moment because my friends have been most of my friends have been in the industry now for at least ten years. If not longer. And so I started there. But along the way, I've actually helped quite a bit of of students that are currently in university. They're either looking for internships or they're looking for their first jobs. And they come to me with a lot of the same questions that people who are on the market or have been in the industry for a long time have as well. So the advice is, is generally applicable to everyone. I mean, the most important thing is to prepare for your interview ahead of time, do your homework on your company, on the role that you know just come in prepared and don't tell them that you're passionate, but show them that you're passionate about what it is that you're doing. I mean, I followed your stuff for a while now. I've been reading your your work for some time. You certainly have credibility in my eyes. But maybe if you can talk a little bit about how you frame your success rate when you're helping people. So our audience, you know, really appreciates that this is someone they ought to be paying close attention to. Is it like the percent of clients who get jobs or the speed or something like that? Maybe if you have any thoughts around that? Yeah, sure. So one thing I'm not very good about is tracking the percentage. I actually need to do a better job of that. But for the most part, I help people get jobs within 5 to 9 weeks. That's the time frame. And in this job market, that's a stellar result. Most people are on the market for six months on average. The median is about five months. I don't want them to say that it's it's easy, but it is possible to still get a job in under three months. So that's that's how I'm measuring my success. You know, my goal is to try to get somebody a job within ten weeks. Yeah. That's amazing. I mean, that's a relatively short period of time, especially in the, you know, in the job market we're in if it was 2021, it'll be a different story. But, in this job market it's quite a bit tougher. And there's, there's, you know, hiring freezes and people being let go. So that's, that's pretty remarkable. What's preventing them from getting the job when they, when you first crossed paths with them typically. Yeah. So they have a couple problems that they're facing. The first one is getting the interview. That's like the first hurdle that obviously everyone has to jump through. The second one is getting past the phone screen. And then if they're getting to the final interview, the last challenge is how do you convince the person that you're speaking to that you're going to be a good asset to that, company? So typically it's somewhere in, you know, one of those three stages that that folks come to me. And what. But at that point, what they're dealing with is, as a confidence issue. They've been rejected, they've been ghosted, and they don't know how to how to sort of dust off and keep going. That can be very demotivating, very frustrating. And so, that's when they usually come to me and they start off by asking questions about the resume. They think it's the resume is the real problem. But then we uncover all sorts of other issues, like it's not just a resume, it's is is a job description. Like, is it a good fit for them? Is it the kind of company they want to work at? You know, and if it's not those things then it comes out in their interview. It comes out in like the things that they're saying. So that's one of the first things that we tackle. So I hope that kind of answers your question. Sort of like in that first, you know, it's that first kind of struggle that they encounter and they and they're, they're willing to deal with it for a couple of months. And so for the most part, people come to me when they've been, they've been looking for a job between 4 to 6 months. So, yeah. There. That makes sense. Yeah. certainly resonates. I was chatting with someone yesterday, a student who was making the comment just how demotivating and how frustrating it can be when you're, when you're applying, applying, applying and, not making any headway. And it's like they're trying to figure out what's going wrong. Okay, so let's get into the meat of how you do things and what you do. Is there a common mistake that you see? I think you touched on this a little earlier. Maybe I'll give you a chance to expand on a little bit. Is there a common mistake you see people making? Or is it often a series of things that you see? It's a series of things, but there's one that stands out to me the most. I would say your your resume, your cover letter. Like not tailoring those things for an application. What most people are doing now is what what we're all sort of calling the spray and pray method. So they're just applying to absolutely anything and everything that comes up. And there's even a service that you can pay like $100 a week, I'm sorry, a month. And they will apply to 100 positions a week for you. And I won't mention the name of the service, but I met someone who was doing that, and he would get phone calls from random companies and they'd say, oh, you applied to our company. And he's like, I did. And then he forgot that he had his he was paying for the service. So, you know, he wouldn't do well on the phone screen because he wasn't prepared he didn’t do any homework, you know, things like that. So, so that's the the main mistake that people are making right now. I know everyone thinks it's a numbers game and to some extent it is. Obviously you don't want to just apply to one job and wait for that one job, but I don't think that you need to apply to 100 jobs a day. And some students that I've spoken to, like focusing on student specifically, are doing just that. They'll apply to 100 jobs a day. They're racking up like thousands of applications overall. And then they have a really bad response rate. They have less than 1% response rate. If they get a response, most of the time it's to get nothing. And, and they're incredibly disappointed in the job market. But, you know, if you're just applying with one resume to everything, you're not going to make any progress. So that's the thing that stands out to me the most. And there are other problems too. But that's the first one that, that we really should, should address. Yeah, I heard someone make the point that because the bar is so low to apply, it's so easy to apply and you feel like you kind of feels like you're doing something. It feels like, well, I applied 100 jobs today. I'm moving the ball forward. You know, it's a numbers game, but in reality, if it's that easy for you, it's that easy for everybody else. And so everyone else is applying to 100 jobs a day. And these companies who are getting these resumes and applications are just getting utterly spammed and overwhelmed by them and, you know, by people who are randomly putting in applications. And so, yeah, no, I think that's absolutely there's there's a quote that I remember that, that I know, but I can't remember who said it. And, the quote is the person who invented the ship also invented the ship wreck. Right. So like Easy Apply is a phenomenal tool. Like, you know, I remember when, when I had to apply to jobs and I had to physically fill out like a piece of paper and hand it in and, you know, things like that. This was like a late 90s, early 2000, especially for retail jobs. And now you can just click a button and you've applied within a couple of seconds. So to your point, you know, like in user in, in UX and user experience, what we call that like friction, right. Like it's frictionless. It's so easy to apply to a job that anyone can do it. And there's no filter on the application side that says this person is qualified or anything like that. So yeah, recruiters are getting applications to jobs that are posted in the hundreds. I was speaking to one recruiter and he said he posted a position and he got 600 applications within two hours. How how can anyone go through 600 applications even if they spent 6 or 7 seconds on everyone? Just do the math. That's hours and hours and hours of going through applications. So how could somebody that's qualified stand out amongst that? You know, the sea of applications? It's absolutely. So you have to do something different. So someone comes to you Jonathan, and you know, you guys decide to work together. Why don't you tell us if you wouldn't mind. Like what are the next steps? How does that look? Talk us through how you help. Yeah. So the first thing I do is I talk to them about their goals, their values. Those are sort of things that people kind of ignore. They're like, well, I just need a job. Yeah, you need a job, but you want to have a job that you enjoy. You don't want to work on. You know, for 40 hours at a place that you hate. So first I start with their goals and their values. I call it the North Star. So we define that and that not only helps us understand the kinds of, of jobs that they're interested in, but also the kinds of companies that they want to work at. So we can make a short list and say, okay, these are the companies that we're going to target. Then I look at their resumes, their LinkedIn profile resumes, if they have more than one, because some people are applying to multiple positions or resume, if they only apply to one position on their resume, their LinkedIn profile, and I do something that's old school, I know it's not popular, but I also help them write cover letters because, you know, cover letters are storytelling devices, especially if you're a career changer or you're just getting into a field, like a junior or person who just graduated college, you want to be able to tell your story. It's kind of like writing your essay to get into university. That makes it interesting. It makes it makes you memorable. Our brains are wired for story. And people think that the resume is a storytelling device. It's not. It's a highlight reel. It's like these are all of the things that the that are important to people, but when they're trying to think about, like, how do I how do I stand out? How do I become memorable? So I call that the rebrand. Yeah, yeah, that's what I mean. So the thing about cover letters is if someone barely has time to read one of 600 resumes, they don't have time to read a cover letter. How do you help people get that read? How do you help people get that noticed? Yeah, so I have to reframe it so it's no longer a cover letter is now an icebreaker. Right. So if you send somebody a DM in on LinkedIn, if you send someone an email, there's a message that's attached to that, right? Your resume is attached to that message. That's all the cover letter is 12 sentences. This is why I'm qualified for the position. This is why I'm interested in your company. And then a call to action. That's it. So we're not talking about like an old school cover letter. That's like a big full page of text. No, not at all. Half a page or under a small icebreaker just to kind of like I've spoken to many recruiters on LinkedIn and they'll say, well, the problem with most of these, like DMs that they get is I'm just as, hey, I'm interested in your position. I submitted an application so the recruiter is like, all right, cool. What? So what? Like, why are you telling me? Right. But if you tell them, well, I'm qualified for this position. I've been doing these kinds of projects for three years or ten years or whatever the case may be. Now they're like, okay, now I do see why you might be qualified for the position. So then they'll go into the queue and they might look at your application. And to your point from earlier, these recruiters are bombarded with all of these applications, but they're also bombarded with DMs. If everyone's following that advice of like reach out to the hiring manager, reach out to the recruiter before or after or during the application. They've got inboxes that are flooded with DMs and, you know, so so let's start there. Like, let's show people why you're qualified for the position. That's your icebreaker or your cover letter, which I know is a dirty word. And then and then attach to your resume. And that should help you stand out in that initial phase. It's so interesting you say that, I was at a, I was speaking at a, an event recently, and the topic of reaching out came up. You know, I get a lot of inbound as kind of people are starting to get to know that I help students and that kind of thing. And they kind of break down into three categories. Category one is, people who just connect, which is fine. And maybe they're like, I don't know about this guy. Let me read his stuff and see if he's got anything interesting to say? Fair enough. There's a category that say, I'd really appreciate the opportunity to have a quick 15-20 minute chat with you. Get your advice. Fair enough. And I’ll typically say yes. And so I try and block off a little time in the late afternoon, early evening on on Friday to do that. But there's this middle category that say, I'd like to stay in touch, and I don't know what to do with that. Like, that would be nice. Well, it doesn't give me something to respond back to. And I wonder if it's people trying not to be too pushy or. But if you don't get it. I mean, I think part of it too is like us all being humans. We don't want to. Many people don't psychologically want to run the risk of someone saying, no, I don't want to talk to you or no, I don't have time. So by not asking for something, it doesn't. You don't have that potential friction point of someone saying, no, I can't do it, but it doesn't move the ball forward for you at all. And so it's it sounds a little bit like what you're describing. Yeah, absolutely. I want to give you a little tip that I learned from Austin Belcak to overcome that challenge, what you can do is instead of saying, let's keep in touch or let's just have a coffee chat, like ask the person that you want to talk to for some advice. Say, hey, you know, I'm thinking about applying to this job. I'm not sure if I should, and then give them two options. I'm thinking of doing A or I'm thinking of doing B, what do you think? And have the other person give you their opinion. So let's say they say all right pick option okay cool. So now what you're going to do is you're gonna follow up with them and say, hey, I've tried A and here's how it's going so far. Right. So you're following up with them. Nobody wants to give advice and then have that advice ignored. But if you tell that person that you're following their advice, they're most likely going to give you more advice because, hey, now you're listening to me. I have an audience now, right? So I'll give you more advice. Well, now we're in touch. So if I were to ask you for more advice later and these are like small asks, like, hey, just, you know, choose A or B, like it's I'm not asking you to give me a referral. I'm not asking you to put me in contact with anybody. Now we have a conversation. We're building trust and rapport. So if I did that a couple times and I asked you, hey, would you be willing to do a coffee chat with me or a tea chat, you know, for 15 minutes you're going to be more more inclined to do it. So now when you're on the call, I can ask you for for other insights like, hey, I noticed that you're working at this company. How did you get in? Like, what were the steps that you took to get in? You know, people love telling their story. That's just who we are. Like, we love telling our story. We love when someone asks us questions and they listen like it's very comforting. So there's also this thing that comes from positive psychology where like, if you want to build trust, you have to treat the other person like you trust them. It's counterintuitive. Like for example, one of the easiest ways you can you can build trust is to ask someone for a favor like, hey, can you do me a favor and do X? It's like, oh, you're trusting me enough to do that favor for you and not mess it up right? It is completely insane that that so I so I heard a story about that and I think, oh, I hope I don't get this wrong. I think it goes back to Ben Franklin, who was he had a politician who was not a fan of his, was not supportive of him, and he had to try and figure out how to bring this guy on board. And he found out that this guy had this incredibly rare and valuable book. And he went to the guy and said, I understand that you have this book. It's something I've wanted to read forever. Would you be willing to I'll take great care of it. Would you be willing to lend it to me? And the guy lent it to him. And that small act suddenly built this trust the guy. The guy thought, well, he must he he respects me and he likes this. He asked me if I can help him. It's remarkable how this works. That's right, that's right. Yeah. When people talk about networking on on LinkedIn, the common interpretation or misinterpretation is sending a DM and asking for a favor. Right. And there's a great analogy about how that's really like, like having a bank account. It's like going to the bank and withdrawing before you put any money in. You're going to be at negative right? So make a couple deposits first. So give some value, recommend a book, share some articles. Do a podcast together. Like all of that sort of stuff will give value to the other person so that at some point, if you ever need to make an asking, you don't have to. But if you ever need to make a request, ask for a favor or something. That person will be more inclined because they'll feel like you've given them so much value that yeah, it makes sense to give you a little bit of value back. Yeah, Adam Grant talks about the story and I'm trying to remember who the actual who did the actual experiment. It was related to, the mindset of being paid for your work, or was it doing something out of goodness of your heart? So the experiment was, someone was on the on the ground floor with a couch outside their building, and they needed to get the couch upstairs. And there were three groups of people. Group one, they offered to pay the going rate. The group two, they offered to buy them a coffee or something, a small a small token of appreciation. And group three. They said, can you do me a favor? And it was fascinating because group one kind of behaved like you would think they sort of were exchanging value for money. The third group were happy to do a favor. The group that agreed the least frequently was the ones who were offered a coffee, because you took them out of the mindset of I'm doing something good. It turned into a commercial transaction. And then they were like, well, you're just underpaying me for my work. That's right. Yeah. Whereas when people were happy to like, sure, I'll give you a little bit advice. It's not, you know that won't hurt me. Exactly. And people, people are often willing to do that. So yeah. Interesting advice is free. It doesn't it's it doesn't cost a lot of energy or time, you know, especially if you give them two options, which is why I think that approach from Austin Belcak is genius. It's a really good approach because it's sort of it's in between if you don't feel comfortable yet asking, I mean, asking for, a 15 minute, 20 minute chat, it's a really good way to actually move the ball, nudge the ball forward. That's right. Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, that's one of the things that I, that I talk about often in, on on my, on my what profile I guess is, you know, that when you're, when you're trying to network with people, try to give them as much value as possible. And people are always I get a lot of, feedback that's like, well, I don't have anything to give. Not true. You have tons of stuff to give. Book recommendations, movie recommendations, share an article. Those things are completely free. It's copy paste, copy, paste a link, copy, paste the title of a book. That's it. You've done your job. So tell me more about what that looks like. Jonathan, I'm I'm trying to start by giving value. How do I like do I just reach. Is there someone I've already connected with because I don't I wouldn't randomly necessarily just DM someone and say thought you might find this interesting. Is it is there something I would I queue to that it's only I've actually done that too. So there's, you know like if there's someone I'm following and I love their stuff and you know, I'll comment on it and then, like this person, I might mess up her last name, Colleen Paulson, who helps. She has this, this program called Ageless Careers. And so she helps people that are over 50 get to the workforce. And she's always posting about, like, how do you how do you like, de-age your resume? Like, what are the things that the signals that you remove so that, you know, you get more interviews? Because ageism is a is a huge thing, especially in the tech space. So so I love her stuff. And I saw an article from some company for, Forbes or Harvard Business Review, and I just sent her the article. I've never had a conversation with her. And I'm like, hey, I think you might like this because I know that she can then take that article and turn it into content, right? Or help or help her clients. So whether or not she responds doesn't really matter too much to me because I know that I gave her something. Yeah, I know that I helped in some way, however, however minor it might be. So that's a great way to, to start off. I mean, like, if you like someone's content, if you're on LinkedIn, comment on their content, like add to the conversation, add the value in your comment. Right. And this has happened multiple times. People reach out to me, they'll say, hey, thank you very much for supporting my content. Okay, great. Now they open the door for me to have this conversation. I can continue to add value. I can give them another article. I can get them, you know, a recommendation. So using Colleen Paulson as an example, I've been supporting her content for a while and now we're connected. So now I can send her DMs without having to have an inmail or a premium account or anything like that. And I'm not doing it because I want something in return. I'm just doing it because I know how hard it is to come up with ideas for content, you know? And I'm like, hey, I, I want to support other creators, especially if they're doing something meaningful, like making sure that people are employed. So I think if you take that approach, it's a little altruistic. And some people might not like to do that. If you just give as much as you can, eventually it comes back to you. I've gotten support from so many people that they're like, hey, you're oh, you're so consistent. Like you're and you're always giving value, like, how can I help you? And I've never asked for anything. I'm like, okay, sure. Yeah, let's talk about that. It's one of the, I think, the most underappreciated things, in looking in life in general, but definitely in a job search too, of if you can become the person who is constantly giving value to constantly helping other people. And I think the the angle of article and podcasts and stuff like that, just sharing that stuff is so underappreciated. I agree, it's actually a very good point. You don't actually have to know the person you just, hey, I noticed you, you talk about this stuff or you've posted about this before. I thought you might find this interesting. That's right. Yeah, you're totally right. But I think that the more there's, you know, I love Adam Grant's book Give and Take. Right? And I am utterly convinced that the more aggressively and generously you do good for others and give value, the better and more things come back to you. Absolutely. You know who's a who's a genius at this? Gary Vaynerchuk. How so? So I agree with you, but I'm curious of how you how you think of it that way. You look at all of his content, whether it's his videos on YouTube, his stuff on LinkedIn. He did a lot of, Snapchat stuff. He's always giving some insight. He's always giving a recommendation. He records himself when he's at conferences and stuff talking to people, and he'll just like, talk to them for, you know, for a couple minutes and give them advice. He's just like gives and gives and gives and gives and he doesn't ask for anything. Return. Yeah. That's not to say that he's not successful. He has a very successful marketing agency. He's got a great PR team. He's got all that. But he's always giving stuff. And he said in a couple of videos he doesn't expect anyone to buy anything. Like he'll give stuff just because he wants to give. And if you want to buy from him, great. But if you don't, that's great to like. He'll still give to you. And I think that that approach, especially for networking like that, works so well. You know, it works shockingly well. I mean, and it's so it's so under appreciated because it doesn't, at first blush, doesn't feel intuitively like it should. Right. Because it's counterintuitive. So like I don't know about that. But when you if you do it, it's it's a huge win. There are a bunch of different roads. I want to go down very quickly. Can I just ask you, you talked about, LinkedIn. You help people with their LinkedIn profile. What are the main things, that, like, just maybe three quick hits on, what people can do to improve their LinkedIn profile? Okay. So I want a caveat this by saying I'm not a personal brand builder or anything like that, right? I know that that personal brand is like the thing and there are many people that that you can, you can look at for, for advice on that. But what I would say that are the things that make the difference. And I'll give you an example of of how it made a difference for one of my clients. The banner, the headline and having some sort of like, like a story or a story driven about section. Okay, so I had a client that I worked with, he was just laid off from a company and he was grossly underpaid. He was overworked the way it all went down as he went in basically to his boss's office and said, hey, you know, I think that, I should get a promotion. And the boss was like, oh, you think you should get a promotion? All right. You're laid off. Your last day is Friday. And that's and yeah, it was a very it was not good. So he reaches out to me that week and says, hey, listen, I just got laid off. He told me the story and I said, all right, so let's work together. And going back to what I was saying earlier, the first thing I do is I define someone's Northstar, and then I work on their resume and profile, what I call the rebrand. And so we looked at his profile and we changed a couple of things. His banner, his banner didn't say anything. So we changed his banner to include some key skills, some key impact. His headline, same thing. And then his about section. And we just fleshed that out. Everything else was fine. The experience. And you know, I just recommended a couple minor tweaks. So shortly after we did his his we fixed up everything. He got a call from a recruiter and the recruiter said, hey, I've been looking for someone to fill this role for the last year, and I just decided to change up my search criteria, and your profile popped up with all the keywords that turned into three interviews and it turned into a job offer. So he made $66,000 more than what he was making at his previous position. And he's now running an entire IT department for one of the biggest dairy manufacturing companies. Wow. That was the power of improving his profile and his resume and his cover letter and everything else, like we did the whole shebang. Yeah. And let's dive into the headline conceptually, what is before and after look like people don't even have a headline, or they just fill it with a bunch of stuff that's irrelevant to what they're looking for in terms of work. And just so we're all talking about the same thing. The headline is the thing where you have that short description under your name, right? Is that right under your name? That's right, that's right. Yeah. And and some people would just put their title like software engineer. Some people put things that they're interested in. You know, some people try to be clever and say funny things in their headline, and that's fine if you're not looking for a job, but if you're looking for a job, recruiters are looking at your profile to see if you're a good fit for one of their roles. So they're looking for keywords. So the before is like ambiguous. It's not not descriptive. It doesn't show your value. The after is you showing exactly who you are. What are the things that you do and who do you do it for. So something like software engineer at company Vertical Character Pipe and then something that you've done in the past or some key skills like, for example, a developer might be a frontend developer. So they'll say react, JavaScript and HTML, CSS, you know, and and that could literally be enough for someone to look at you and say, you're qualified for this position. You just need to know what the right head what the right keywords are to put in there. And you know that from job descriptions, if you're looking at job descriptions, what are the keywords that they mention often? Yeah, I thought that was a super interesting insight or something you wrote recently. In terms of, you know, if you're struggling to get get interest, go look, you know, five, six, seven job descriptions of jobs you're interested in, and want to do, and look at the keywords and see if anyone's going to see any of those keywords on your resume or profile. That's right. Yeah. So one of the the roles that I help people with is, product management. And so product managers, you know, manage like the roadmap for a project for a product or other. Sorry. Sometimes they do customer outreach, like they'll talk to people and they'll say, hey, you know, you're using our product. Like, what are some of the things that you'd like to see improved or what are some of the difficulties that you have? Or they might observe a user using their product, and so they grab all those insights to gather them. And then they try to come up with like basically a hypothesis, okay, if we add this feature, this is how people are going to react. So most job descriptions will say if you're going to be a product manager, you need to know how to define a vision for a product. Right? Which is like gather the insights and then generate some hypothesis, like what does this look long term? And you need to be able to define the roadmap okay. We're going to we're going to release this feature in Q1, this feature in Q2, this feature in Q3, those two keywords show up on like 99.9 90% of all product manager job descriptions. So when I look at a resume for a product manager, if I see that those two things are missing, I immediately know why they might not be getting contacted. So we have to put those in there. And then there's, you know, a bunch of other ones, like if you're a software developer, you have to have version control, right? If you're a project manager, you have to have risk management. Like there are these keywords that and I know this because I've seen so many of them at this point that I just know intuitively, like, what are the keywords that I'm looking for? For certain roles? I'm in the tech space only, like I don't do anything else. And can it be that simple where like super simple? Yeah. Don't have those. You're not getting calls. You do have those. You are getting calls. Yep. That's part of it. Because when I talk to job to to recruiters I ask them like, okay, so now you have let's say 600 from my example earlier 600 resumes or applications. How do you sift through them? They'll say, well, the first thing we do is we whittle down the applications by keywords. So in their system that has all the applications and everything, they'll do a keyword search and they'll say, okay, what? Like let's say product management. All right. Someone who knows how to define a roadmap. All right. Roadmap might be the keyword. So of all the applications how many have that keyword. That's the first pass. So maybe it went from 600 to 400 okay cool. What if we do another keyword on top of that. Right. And their keyword list comes from the job description. That's like not magic right. Yeah. No, but it's a it's a great insight. Interesting. And so they whittle down whittle down until they find the people that are qualified. And then they decide to give them a phone screen. So like I'll give you some stats though. On one recruiter I talked to said after a day she got 800 applications. Of the 800, like 20% were qualified. Of the 20%, she spoke to maybe 20 people. Of those, a portion, let's say like less than ten went on to interviews, four made it to the final round. Then one person got an offer. So at each at each layer there is like a reduction of applications because they realistically can't go through all those. So keyword search first, then they skim the resume. They're looking for other keywords qualifications. Then they decided to the phone screen and so on. So the first thing is keywords. The second thing is impact. So a lot of people, when they talk about polishing a resume, they say you have you have to put your accomplishments. When I say the word accomplishments to jobseekers, they freak out. They're like, I don't have accomplishments for my job. So I said, okay, well, what about impact? Have you ever impacted your company? Like, have you ever earned the money? Have you ever saved the money? And they'll say, yeah, I've done that. All right. Cool. So I've learned that you don't tell somebody to put their accomplishments. You tell someone to put their impact. So anyway, so once I mentioned the word impact that part gets a lot easier. So it's the amount of money they've made. Did they speed up a process. How much data have they managed. You know and so on. There's like a bunch of metrics that you can add in. And that's answering the question of like so what? So for example, most resumes you'll see like a responsible for bullet. So a bullet that says like I handle customer support requests period. Okay. Cool. So you've done your job. I'm happy you've done your job right. That's what we're paying you for. Okay. So then the next question you should ask yourself when you're looking at your own resume is so what. So you handled customer support requests. So what what does that mean. Does that mean that you saved the company money? Does that mean that you improved the user experience of your product for the customer? Like what was the outcome of doing that. And so if you have those two things, your keywords and your impact, you're most likely going to get interviews relatively quickly. So when I do that with and so people are like, well, I don't believe that, I customize my, my, you know, my resume all the time. But when I do that with my clients, I walk them through the process. I show them how to do it, how to parse the job description, how to show their impact, how to pick the right keywords literally within 1 to 2 weeks they start getting interviews and I always tell them like, that's the easy part. The getting the interviews, the easy part. The hard part is convincing them to give you an offer. Right. So and that's where I spend most of my time. Let’s talk about that next then. In terms of preparation, that's something you highlighted before I’ve seen you write about it extensively. Let's talk about how you recommend people prepare for interviews. I know there's only so much we can get into in this time, but maybe some of the high level stuff. So the first thing is do your research. And when I say research, I know most people will say, well, I've read the website like I've looked at the website and I understand what they're doing. That's not really research. Like for job preparation. You've got to do a lot more than that. So you're going to have to look at news articles. You're going to have to look at YouTube videos. Like one example that's genius, also from Austin Belcak,(you know, I want to make sure that he gets his credit) look for the leadership team of a company and then Google their name plus YouTube, and then see if you can find interviews with those people. What are the sorts of things that they're talking about? What are the insights that they're generating? What what are the things that they're worried about? What predictions do they have. And take notes on that. Right. Write down questions. So now you have something to to speak about when they ask you, like why are you interested in working here? Like what brings you here? Right. At some point they're going to say, do you have any questions for me? So if you've already prepared them ahead of time, just pull out your list of questions that always impresses interviewers. Like, oh, you actually prepared questions ahead of time. Like it's not something that’s common. So would you advocate actually pulling out a list like would you advocate making a list of questions. Yeah. Literally have have a document like a notebook that's by your table and have questions, have notes like, hey, I noticed that like for example, I was helping a client prepare for an interview with Apple. And one of the questions was, how would you improve an Apple product? Right. So I could say, hey, I've noticed that in Apple Pay you're missing bills like splitting the bill, right? And all my friends, we all have Apple Pay and we all like to split the bill. So I know at least ten people want it. Right. So now you've got some insights so you can say, you know, and I've noticed that you haven't included it in the last three releases of Apple Pay. Like what's up with that? Well, now that's an interesting conversation right. So I can make a recommendation. Right. Well you just hit something very interesting to and that is the idea of having a conversation instead of having a Q&A. Yes, yes. So that is actually another thing that I like to talk about often is turning an interview into a conversation. And the only way you can really do that is by asking questions. So ask like when they ask you a question, for example, don't immediately give a response, right? Repeat the question and then maybe ask a follow up question. So for example, if the question was how do you improve Apple Pay? You could say, so you want me to to talk about how I can improve Apple Pay. So now I haven't answered the question with a question. Right. Okay. So in what terms like should we be improving Apple Pay for who like for what customers? So now I have the interviewer say something. So now we're in like a brainstorming session. What I like to tell people is imagine that the interview is not an it's not an interview in the way that like you would interview a celebrity. Imagine that. It's a trial run for like a brainstorming session. Someone came to you and said, hey, you know, we're we're getting slaughtered on the market. We need to improve this product. So a bunch of people get into a room and you start brainstorming ideas. So if you can turn the person on the other side into a collaborator with you, well, now they can see you as a coworker. They experience, what it's like to work with you in a short amount of time. But if all you're doing is answering questions, that doesn't really make that impression. So yeah, so do your homework so that you have questions to ask. And so you have these interesting insights so that you can have that conversation. And what you're showing them also is like how you come prepared to meetings I'm going to do my research. I'm going to, you know, take initiative and talk to people who are actual customers of this product, you know, or users of the product. And that's what you that's what you should be expecting. Every single day I come here, there's a really interesting subtlety that you, you highlighted there, which I think most people often people don't appreciate. And that is that interviews are sort of like a risk reduction exercise. Right? Like, so what are my risks? Suppose if I'm interviewing someone for a job, you know, one of my risks is that they come across really good in interviews. They arrive and it's completely, you know, completely different story. And, you know, maybe something I didn't pick up in the interview, you know, they're tough to work with. It's such an interesting insight that the more you can create a proxy experience for what it's like to work with you, the more whether they're conscious of it or not, the more you're reducing their risk and your increase in the likelihood that you get selected. That's right. So there's, there's a research paper that was published in the I think it's the Journal of Management, and it was a study about pitches in Hollywood. So the research question or like what they were trying to figure out, the objective was why is it that some pitches get picked up and others don't? So in Hollywood, you and obviously I'm not from Hollywood, right. So I'm getting all this from the paper. So in Hollywood, if you're going to do a pitch, you put together sort of the idea, and then you walk into a room and you pitch this to a bunch of producers, and the producers are in the paper are called the catchers. So the catchers are going to listen to the pitch and decide whether or not they want to fund it. Imagine like a 2 or 3 hour movie might be a couple million dollars of an investment, right? Or a TV series. So what they're trying to figure out is, is this person creative enough to put in that work to, or are they going to have enough ideas? Can we work with that person? Can they take feedback on their idea? And so the researchers like observe the pitches. And then they interviewed the catchers and they found that the catchers, the producers, they make their opinion about the person and whether they are creative the moment they walk in the room. Do you look creative? Like what does a creative person look like? Well, they might have different colored stuff like, you know, it's multicolored. They might wear certain kinds of glasses. They might come in like, sort of like they rolled out of bed, right? Their hair's all messed up, you know, and that sort of stuff gives them gives them confidence that you are a creative person. Then they listen to the pitch. If you don't take feedback well on your pitch, they know they can't work with you. So most likely that pitch will get rejected. So there was like, I don't know, like ten different like stereotypes or I don't think they call them stereotypes. They call them like prototypes or something. And if you fit one of them, you're you're more likely to get the pitch accepted. So taking that idea and applying it to to job interviews, you're applying to be an engineer. What does an engineer look like? What is an engineer sound like? How do they behave? What are the sorts of things that they know? If you can demonstrate that within the small amount of time that you have the 30, the 40 minutes, whatever that gives them confidence that you're worth the money, right? Like a person who's going for an engineering position makes six figures on average. How do I know that's a worthy investment? How do I know you're not going to cost me more? Right. You need to give me at least 1 to 2 X like my return on, return. So if I'm giving you a $100k, I need at least $200k value or $300k or whatever, right? Whatever makes sense for the business. But if I hire you and you're costing me money because I have to keep mentoring you and coaching you and cleaning up your work, well, now you're not not worth it to me anymore. It's a bad investment. So you have to try to demonstrate that as much as possible on this, like, research paper is just fascinating. I'd love to do that research from an interview standpoint. Like, I wanted to go to a bunch of local businesses and observe their interviews and then talk to the interviewers and kind of just basically repeat the whole thing. But for interviews. Then I got distracted and I was like, I'm going to talk to job seekers and listen to like, you know what? What's happening on the market. So I did a different research study, but that's something I might do in the future. So that's interesting. Yeah, I mean, it's it's one of those things where a bad hire is not producing the work you need them to produce. They're sucking up your time. They might be affecting morale. And then if you have to separate, then that's highly costly for everyone. And then you have to go do this whole process all over again. Right. So it's, Yeah. No, it can be a really costly exercise. So, Jonathan, let's talk a little bit about attitude, confidence. There's there's a bunch of things that you have to be able to do successfully to succeed in this process. Why don’t I let you go from there and follow up with more questions. Okay. Yeah. So the thing with most job seekers is that when they when they've been on the market for so long, for six months, let's say their confidence is shot like it is barely existent at that point. This is one of the reasons why I strongly advocate against the spray and pray method, because it seems like it won't impact you. But every time that you submit 100 applications or more and you don't get any response, or all you get is automatic rejection, it like chips away at your your confidence. Like imagine like a stone. You know, a person who's like carving stone. It's like a little bit of stone disappears every time, you know, you get that rejection. So the first thing that we're going to do is that I do when I'm working with my clients, is that I help them rebuild their confidence. And the only way that I can do that is by practicing all of these skills that I'm teaching them. So every week I do mock interviews with them. I do two mock interviews on Friday, small groups like 5 to 6 people, and we just go through like just rep it like this Friday, for example, we did elevator pitches. We did a couple behavioral questions and then a problem solving question or like what we would call a technical question, an engineer in like a software interview. And we just do it over and over and over and I give them feedback. Everything is recorded, you know, so they can go back and listen to themselves that by the way. One of the most underappreciated things. Yeah. Recording yourself and seeing it as opposed to just to me like, no, no I got it. Yes. And that's one of the things that I know that is hard for people to do. It's hard for me to record myself and listen to it and watch it. But when someone else is doing it for me, it kind of takes that like pressure of me doing it right away. So that's why I record it. I record the session, I give everyone the session, and then also I give everyone in the in the call an opportunity to give feedback too. So it's not just me, right? So like one question I'll ask the group would be like, was that answer clear? Do you think that that person answered the question? And so hearing different opinions from different people will make you realize, you know, very quickly, like, what are the things you need to think to improve on. In doing that, I can get someone to be interview ready and like two, three weeks, which is why it's it's possible to get someone a job within 8 to 9 weeks. Yeah. Right. There's because they're at that stage where they're ready to. Yeah. You have to put in the reps. That's right Jonathan you talked about your five core stories. Can you tell us more about that? Yeah. So the five core stories came from actually a huge mistake that I made. I was preparing for an interview with Amazon a couple of years ago. And they’re really big on their leadership principles. So it's 12 leadership principles. And the recruiter said, if you want to do well in this interview, you need to prepare multiple stories for this conversation. And I said, okay, well, how many stories? They said, well, at least two stories per leadership principle and I have ADHD. One of the problems with people that have ADHD is we take things very literally. And so I literally created two stories for every leadership principle. I had something like 24 stories, and I had it all in a spreadsheet, and it was all in the STAR method. So I had a column for a situation and task and everything, and it was like the worst experience I've ever had. When I got into the interview, they'd ask me a question and I'd say, hold on a second, let me look for a story that makes sense and I would. I'd spend time just looking at the story. And spreadsheets are not like the best thing for writing. It's all kind of like jam. That is terrible. So I did the interview, I completely bombed. I didn't even get like one piece of positive feedback, like nothing. And after that I said, I can't keep doing this. Like there has to be a better way. And I thought, what if I reduce the number of stories I prepare for any interview? And what if I use the same stories over and over and over again? And what if I can answer any behavioral question from these five stories? So I, I landed on five, I started with three. I tried that and and that worked. But I thought, if I'm going to go for a bigger company like Amazon or Google or anything like that, I need to have a couple more. So I went to five. And so I have a I have five stories and each story can have a different perspective to it. So I listed like eight perspectives like failure, conflict, something I'm proud of. You know, things like that. And if you do the multiplication eight X five core stories, gives you 40 stories in total. So I can answer at the very minimal 40 behavioral questions and you'll never be asked 40. So once I sort of mastered that, I kept practicing over and over and over. I started teaching my clients and I said, okay, I want you to do this. And so I showed them how to create their five core stories, and then how to use each core story to answer different behavioral questions. And that's part of what we practice in our mock interviews. But wouldn't you end up let's say you have six behavioral questions when you're not bringing up the same story again? You could, but you would. You would bring up a different perspective. So if I’m telling. What’s that look like? So if I'm telling a story about conflict, for example, this is a very common question like tell me about a time you had conflict, or tell me about a time you resolve the conflict. So I'll tell it. I'll tell a story like this one time, I had a developer that I didn't work well with. We would always butting heads, and I thought that we were going to have to move to separate teams. Right. So then, I pulled him into a room, we had a conversation, we hashed it out, and we live happily ever after. So that's one perspective. So now if somebody would say, well, tell me about your biggest failure, I can say, well, let me go back to that story about this issue that I have with this developer. Now, one of the things where I failed, like a place where I failed, is I didn't I didn't get ahead of that problem quickly enough. Like I started to see some conflict and I kind of let it go. And eventually it got so bad that, you know, like we couldn't work with each other. So then if they asked me another question like, tell me about your proudest moment, I could say, well, let me go back to this question, because one of my proudest moments was when and then, you know, continue on the exercise. So let's just practice because I don't know what behavioral questions they're going to ask me. Right. So I may only use that question once that story once in an interview. But if they ask me other questions and I can't think of another story, I can say, well, let's go back to this story and I'm going to tell you a different perspective on that. That works great for long term projects. That works great for if you're doing programs, if you're working with big teams, you're going to have lots of stories like that. We just need five that we can rely on every single time you're in an interview and you haven't gotten any sort of pushback, I mean, there's only so many of those questions are going to ask you, right? That's right. So you cycle through your first five. And then maybe you cycle through them again and you're not getting you're not getting more than ten quick ten behavioral questions. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. You might get you might get 2 or 3 per interview. And if you have five interviews like a loop for one of the FANGS, you might only have ten questions that you have to answer. Let's shift our discussion. I know we're a bit tight on time here, so I just want to shift our discussion to starting a career up strong. What advice would you give to 22 year old Jonathan to really crush it in your career? That 22 year old Jonathan struggled to find a job. I was applying to work my senior year of college starting at the beginning, like in January, and I didn't get a job until almost the end, the end of that year. So for me, my big problem was I didn't know how to build a resume. There weren't great resources that were available online. There were a couple templates and stuff that you could copy, paste and adjust. But now there's all sorts of great, great, great resources out there. There are services like, Careerflow.ai to make resumes, there's Teal to make resumes, all sorts of things like that. So that would be the first thing is to try to find a resource that gives you, a method of creating a resume quickly. Yeah. And I'll put all this in the show notes so people don't have to go and, like, pause and run. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So that's the first thing. The second thing is look at a job description, read the job description, understand what it is that they're looking for, and then try your best to demonstrate that you have that experience or that you can solve that problem in your resume. And if you don't know how to do it, those tools Careerflow.AI, Teal HQ, they can walk you through it. And I'm I'm actually a partner. So full transparency. I'm a partner with Careerflow, but I'm not a partner with Teal HQ. But I do like the experience of of Teal. So that's that's the first and second and then the third thing would be do your research on the company, like go beyond the resume. I'm sorry, go beyond, go beyond their website, look for interviews, look for news articles. If it's a publicly traded company, look at their financial records like they're available. They have to be reported according to the Security and Exchange Commission. So there's tons of great information out there to mine. I wouldn't trust AI at the moment, I wouldn't go to like ChatGPT or Gemini and say, give me everything you know about this company. I'd try to go to the source, right? I don't those things can hallucinate. I don't want to say something that's wrong in the interview. And and it seems like I didn't do my research properly. So those are the three main things. Okay, one other question I was curious about. I've heard you talk about or I've seen your writing about having mentored people and things like that, and people often talking about wanting mentors. In your experience, how does that stuff come about? Did someone come up to you and say, hey, Jonathan, you know, I'm looking for a mentor. You seem like a good candidate. Or, you know, how does how does that come about? I was sort of always been skeptical about the someone reaching out and saying that because you're like, I don't know who you are. I don't know how motivated you are. I don't know what really you're asking for. I'm asking for, like, this open ended thing, you know? How does that come about in your experience? So I've actually had a couple of experiences with mentors, like three unique experiences that I can talk about. The first one is very early on my first job, I got a mentor assigned to me. So the place that I was working at, which is the patent office, when they bring you on, they give you a trainer, a supervisor and a mentor. They want you to be successful, especially at the time when I joined, they were doing like a big hiring spree. They wanted to bring on like a thousand, patent examiners every year to deal with the backlog. They had, like a 2 or 3 year backlog. I like that experience to some degree. The mentor was good, but I don't think that he was, like, emotionally invested in me. You know, it's an assignment, right? Like you're typically not emotionally invested to your assignments or in your assignments. So that was okay. I did have one person, come up to me and say, I want to be your mentor. I'd love to mentor, you know, someone who's junior, and, he never followed through with that. I, we met once for coffee at a Starbucks here in, in, in Silver Spring, Maryland. And that was the only time we ever had a conversation. I never saw him again. And then. So, I don't know, maybe I turned him off in some way. And then, and then the other mentors that I have have been very organic, like one of my managers from my second company, me and him actually had a conflict. We weren't getting along. And one day he called me out for being late in a meeting. And, and I was sick that day, and I just, I just wasn't in the mood. And I told them, hey, man, why are you always calling me out in front of everybody? And I said this, like, in front of, like, five people. And he said, I'm not calling you out. It's just you're you're coming late and you know, and all this stuff. And I was mad. And then later that evening at like 6 p.m., he calls me and, and he says, hey, I just want to let you know, I, I didn't mean to call you out in front of everybody. I'm very sorry about that, he said. I just I want you to keep your job. It was like, I remember as like 6 or 7 p.m., I had just I was like washing the dishes. And he he called me and said that to me and I like gained this like immediate like respect for him and just. And I was like, yeah, I this thing like I can't let him down. Like I had this feeling, you know and and man like he was, he was and is one of the best mentors I've ever had. And we're still friends to this day, almost 20 years later. And anytime I have a problem, I go to him. I'm like, hey, I'm stuck on this. Like, what do you think? What's your advice? And he's always sort of been my mentor. I've had a couple of other people like that, but no one has stuck around like him, and it just happened organically. Like we just sort of fell into that. So I think if you want to be a little more intentional about it, seek the people that you want to be mentored by. But yeah, my, my, my best mentor was all organic. So I don't have like a great way of, of helping people find one. Well, I think part of it is it's got to be organic, right? Because, both sides have to be like, have to be interested in it. And, you know, one of the things I always suggested to people is the way to get people interested in you is to do interesting things. And if you're doing interesting things, people will want to mentor you. People will want to help you. Yeah, absolutely. Those are great, a great quote that's flowing around social. It's, “To be interesting. You have to be interested.” Yeah. Right. And kind of goes both ways. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. So ask questions. I think I can't stress this enough, especially in interviews like ask questions, don't ever say no. I don't have questions. Always ask something. My god. Yeah, always. It's almost a dealbreaker in interviews where or I'll be interviewing someone. I'll, you know, you get to the latter part and you say you have any questions for me? And they're like, no, I'm pretty good. And I'm like, either you're not at all interested or, you know, you haven't. And that this is this is not like it's a secret. It's not like you and I are just, like, revealing something to the world that nobody knew about before. Like this should be if you're at the stage, professionally, either even as a student coming out or someone further on interviewing, you don't know that you should have some questions. Then you probably, you know, it's probably been the case. You haven't really done your homework. That's right. And and one of the, the, the questions I've always had in my mind is why? Like, why is it that people care about questions so much. And I spoke to a recruiter about it once and that person said the reason why why they care so much about questions, follow ups and things like that is because they don't know if you're still interested in the position after they've interviewed you. So like if you went into Apple and they interviewed you, they cannot assume that just because it's Apple, like you want to work there. In fact, like places like that are always they do the same thing they do recruiting and they try to draw people in and all that stuff. It just at a different scale. Yeah. So even more importantly, to some degree, like you're going to be spending a lot of time in this place. Exactly. I mean, it's in your own self-interest to like, kind of at least get a sense of what the place is like. Exactly. So after they've given you the spiel about like, what's it like to work there and the project and everything, they might have scared you off. So, you know, if you're not asking questions to them, it seems like you're not interested in the position anymore. Yeah. If you're not following up, you've lost interest. You don't want them to have that impression. Totally. Yeah. It's also a little bit like so I find one of the interesting things about this whole process is questions that as an interviewee, you might feel like, why are they even asking me this sort of dumb question? But there's actually really good reasons. Like one of the ones is, you know what? You know, why do you want to work here? Like, yes, you're looking for a job like we all, you know, we all need to work right? But if the answer is, well, I'm looking for somewhere to exchange my time for money. So they're like, well, gee, thanks. I'm really flattered to hear that. But the other reason is there's always a risk to hire. It's kind of what we talked about earlier. If you hire someone who's a bad hire and they're not, they get into the job and they're like, oh my God, this is not what I thought. This is not the company. I thought, this is not the work. Well, that's fine for everybody. And so if you have an answer to to, why do you want to work there? It's suggestive at least that you have you have some understanding of what you're getting into. And then on the, you know, the list of potential risks. I mean, no one makes a list, but if if there were a list of potential risks to hiring that person. Okay, I've checked that one off. That one's probably less of a worry. Yeah. Like one question that that trips people up is like, tell me about a time you failed, right. And so job seekers will play it safe and they might they might tell you about a time that they had they made a mistake. Right. Like they didn't really fail. But you know, it didn't go well or perfectly or whatever. But but what the interviewers are trying to figure out there is like, how do you handle these difficult situations which are going to come up, right? Do you crumble or do you have the resilience or like the wherewithal to to come up with a way of overcoming that challenge? So yeah, every question might seem silly. I mean, there are some silly questions like what animal would you be, right? I don't like those questions, but if they're asking you questions about how you would like to understand, like how you work and how you think and all of that, like they're very valid, right? It's funny you mentioned resilience. It's such an important one because and it's again, underappreciated, I think because everyone, all of us are going to have stuff that we run into in life, whether it's, you know, health of a parent or, you know, a spouse or a child or a relationship that breaks down, or there are things in life that we run into that just kind of knock us down. And I do think that if you can demonstrate that you have the capacity to get back up, that's an important thing for companies to know that, you know, you can you know, that you're going to go through stuff. They should support you. But at the same time, you have to sort of do your share as well. Absolutely, absolutely. Especially as a junior. So I have two conflicting thoughts like one just hit me in the head, why? Why do companies care about your grades, your transcripts. Right. They want to see like okay, where where did you maybe have an issue like me, for example, I was terrible at mechanical physics. It was the first C I ever gotten in like years. And, and I was so happy to get that C and I remember I was interviewing with a big company whose name I don't mind mentioning, it's IBM. And it was like my it would have been my first job out of college. I remember the interviewer sat down with me in a little room, and he looked at my application and he said, I normally don't talk to anybody that has a GPA that's less than 3.5. And I had like a 3.2, and I was like, well, then why are you talking to me? And he goes, well, you know, because you kind of seem interesting and whatever. And it was already like off to a bad start. And, and he said, well, you know, tell me about why, why you don't have a 3.5 or above, you know, and I was like, okay, so we're going to focus on this for a while. And I remember thinking like, well, I encountered some classes that I like. I was just not great at, like I studied as hard as I could and the highest grade that I can get was a C, you know? And, I didn't impress him. I didn't get the job or anything. And since then, I never applied to an IBM job ever again. And I always take an opportunity to say, I don't like IBM. Not that other people have had good experiences there, but, but I, you know, when I, when I, when I went through that experience, I was like, why was he harping on that so much? Like, why was it such a big deal? And it's taken me years to kind of to kind of come to the realization that, like, he was getting really important information like IBM, you know, especially at that point, it was like a leader in computing, you know, there's server hardware and all that stuff. And I think the position was for, an embedded engineer for their, for their servers and, and yeah, I mean, I didn't like the experience, but I understand now with experience and time that, that he was getting really good information on whether or not I could be successful there. Interesting. Yeah. Jonathan, really appreciate your time. Let's move to our wrap up questions here. We get a lot of job seekers listening who are listening. You know, and in our audience what is one thing that they can be doing and they can implement today that will make them more in demand in the job market? Yeah. So do do the exercise that Ashley was mentioning earlier, like get a bunch of job descriptions and start looking for patterns like what are the key words? What are the phrases that they're mentioning in that list? You don't have to do a ton, do like five, grab five job descriptions. I do everything on paper, so I would print them and then I'd highlight things. You can do it with a word cloud. You can do it with ChatGPT. It doesn't matter. But like what are the keywords and the phrases that that stand out to you the most? Make sure that you have that in your resume, and make sure that you have that in your LinkedIn profile. That's step number one. If you can do that, I guarantee that you're going to get more responses and you're going to get more attention from recruiters that are on the LinkedIn. That's a that's something that sounds like some great advice. Are are there any you mentioned a couple of resources earlier or the books or podcasts that you'd recommend to people in terms of jobs success in the job search or career advice, jumping out, you know, or starting out out of the jump? Really, really strong in your career. I can't think of podcasts, but there are a couple people that I would highly recommend following. Okay. Number one, if you're thinking about going into the FANGS, I definitely recommend Jeff H. Sipes YouTube channel. Okay. He used to be at Google. He puts out all sorts of content about behavioral interviews, salary negotiation, all sorts of stuff on LinkedIn. I would recommend following people like Austin Belcak, Adam Broda. Another person I really like is, Reno Perry. Those guys, they put out lots of great content. And, oh, another person that I would recommend on YouTube would be, Madeline Mann. She puts out a lot of good stuff. She talks about, like, turning job seekers into job shoppers, which I think is a clever play on words. There is a book that I'm currently reading that I like is called What Color Is Your Parachute? That's considered a classic. That's very good if you're in the coding space, if you're trying to get into software Cracking the Coding Interview is a good one. Cracking the PM Interview is another one. If you're thinking of going into management and there's a lot of great stuff out there, it's hard to sort of synthesize everything, you know, and, and a lot of these things come out and almost when they hit the market, they're already sort of like obsolete. So take it for what it's worth, you know? But none of it matters if you don't put it into practice. So, so. Right. You know, start with one resource, put whatever they're saying into practice, test it out for a couple weeks. And you know, if it doesn't work, try something else. Yeah. Jonathan, this has been, great. There's been so much insight you've you've shared with the audience. I really appreciate it. Really appreciate the time. My pleasure. Man, this is fun. And how would, people get in touch with you? I want to make sure people know how to to get in touch with you and check out what you, what you're writing, what you're thinking. I'm on a couple social media sites. I'm on LinkedIn. My LinkedIn profile is LinkedIn slash in slash. Jonathan Corrales. Okay. That's the best way to get in contact with me. I'm also on Twitter and Threads. My handle is @readyinterviews. I just got those up, so I'm filling it up with content now. I also have an Instagram page. It's completely empty so I don't recommend going there. And then you can check out my website www.readyaiminterview.com. Right on. And we'll put all that in the show notes so people can make I can have a good and easy access to that, but that was great. Jonathan, really appreciate the time. Thanks so much for being on here and look forward to staying in touch. Yeah. My pleasure. Thank you very much.