Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for High Velocity Radio.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here. Another episode of High Velocity Radio and this is going to be a good one. Today on the show we have career coach with Strategically Human, Zachary Kuhl. Welcome.

Zachary Kuhl: Thank you. It’s nice to be here.

Lee Kantor: Well, I am excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about your practice. How are you serving folks?

Zachary Kuhl: So right now, what we focus on primarily is trying to find real world applications to give to folks outside of the well, let’s be honest, career coaching has been sort of a polarized business. Some folks think it’s just fancy life coaching. Some folks think it’s just a bunch of workbooks. We’re trying to strike the right balance, give people research backed, actionable steps that they can actually use in the job market as it is today. Instead of just advice from five years ago or speculations on what’s going to happen in the next five years.

Lee Kantor: So what’s your backstory? How did you get involved in career coaching?

Zachary Kuhl: So my background is actually in talent acquisition and recruitment. So I started on the hiring side of things, worked in the hospitality business for a while before moving into go to market and sales when the pandemic hit a couple of years ago. And through that process, it became pretty clear that the job market was moving a lot faster than anyone had realized. And I was talking to a lot of folks who were in sort of sales and marketing backgrounds, and they were going through a lot of disruption, lots of hiring and then firing phases, and people were just unsure about how to leverage their existing experience up against the new challenges and new opportunities that were coming down the pipeline. And so I started to develop sort of a framework that I would use with the people that I was actually recruiting go out, reach out to them, give them tips about how to actually get the job. So they would get the jobs, my clients. And then I realized that it’s a lot more fulfilling to actually work on just the side of the folks who are trying to get the job. So then I transitioned into the actual career coaching side from there.

Lee Kantor: So in talent acquisition, do you find that people who have that role are across industries? Is it the similar work? Is there the same strategy or is kind of every business or company have their own unique way of doing it?

Zachary Kuhl: Every company is a little bit different, but there’s two primary schools of thought across all organizations. So there’s high volume recruitment or what we call data driven recruitment. And then there’s match driven recruitment. So high volume is exactly what it sounds like. Try to get as many people into the interview process as you can to hopefully filter through and find the best number of candidates for the most number of roles the organization has. The match driven is where it’s more like headhunting, where you’re trying to find someone with a specific skill set for the specific problem. Every organization does a little bit of both, but depending on if you are in a specialty organization or if you are in a high volume organization, that’ll affect it. And so I’ve done a little bit of both. And so from that side of it, I know some of the, let’s call it dirty secrets of the hiring business. From the high volume side of things, the things that will automatically get you booted into the no pile. The communication strategies that they’ll use, but also because I’ve been on the match driven side, I know what it takes to stand out from the crowd and to leverage your experience to match what you’re trying to get.

Lee Kantor: Now was the first kind of decision that a candidate has to make is, am I, you know, am I a mass candidate or am I a bespoke candidate?

Zachary Kuhl: Yeah, I think that’s really where a lot of people need to start. If you have some sort of specialty skill set, or you even just have an outlook on a problem that, you know, the organization you’re targeting has to deal with. You have to figure out the best way to get that opinion or that viewpoint in front of that organization, which requires some real out-of-the-box thinking. It’s more than just having a nice resume and a nice cover letter. You have to know how to network and how to put yourself out there in a way that shows that you’re the subject matter expert, which will put you above the rest.

Lee Kantor: But is that where a lot of the frustration lies? Where the candidate thinks that they are a bespoke, but they’re a mass, and then they’re going about it in a way that’s just not going to serve them.

Zachary Kuhl: That’s definitely a part of it. I think what we’ve seen a lot in the last couple of years as well, is you’ll have folks who they think that they are a great fit for whatever position or whatever organization it may be. And what they end up forgetting is that they are their their perspective is unique, but the actual applicable skill set that they have probably isn’t. And so that’s when you have to get really good at taking your theoretical point of view and put it into an actual, tangible thing. And that means that you’re going to need to be volunteering in your community more. You’re going to need to be willing to take on more responsibilities in your current position, things that will take you from that mass candidate to that bespoke, because you’ve taken the extra steps to take your theory and your perspective and make it practical and tangible.

Lee Kantor: All right, so let’s break down each one of those. So what are some actionable things a mass candidate could do to stand out?

Zachary Kuhl: So the easiest thing is to just make yourself more known in your current role. If you’re in any sort of position, just being someone who’s willing to be vocal in the room is going to be a very, very valuable skill set. There are plenty of people who make it to any position in an organization, and they don’t quite know what their place is, and so they will just be happy to be in the room and sit back quietly. At that point, you’re basically just as good as the wallpaper, even if you’re wrong or your ideas aren’t, uh, taken up on if you can at first show that you have something to add and you’re willing to put yourself out there, people will naturally gravitate towards you and they’ll start giving you more responsibility. And that’s the first thing that you can do. Instead of going to your resume and saying, well, I’ve worked on this team with this title, which is great, you can actually go and say, you know, I’ve worked at this, this company with this title, and I’ve worked on this project that had this outcome. The more actual, tangible things you can put your hands on and attach your name to, the more valuable you are in the market. That’s the first step. Secondly is do something similar in your own community. If there’s nonprofits, if there’s initiatives that you care deeply about, give a couple of hours of your time during the week to do whatever you can and again, measure the impact of what that thing is. And you can market that on your resume, on your portfolio, whatever it may be.

Lee Kantor: So now if you’re going the other way and you’re hoping to be attractive to a headhunter, what should you be doing to stand out in that regard?

Zachary Kuhl: It’s still the same thing. You have to build your value where you are. Um, a very unpopular opinion with, uh, with candidates is the fact that if you can’t be considered for a promotion where you currently are, then it’s going to be very hard to get a headhunter to notice you. You have to build the skill sets with what you have available in front of you, and again, then attaching your name to whatever those projects or those outcomes are, it’s going to make you more valuable to them. But the thing that people will miss when it comes to the headhunter side of it, is that once you do that work, you do have to let people know. And I know that people have some polarizing opinions about LinkedIn or getting on different video platforms and things like that. But if you can position yourself as someone in the public eye that is actually doing anything that is tied to your career. The easier will be for people to find you because you’re simply more visible.

Lee Kantor: So now when you’re working with your clients, is this a difficult conversation or are they kind of hungry for this kind of information?

Zachary Kuhl: It depends on the client. You have some folks who they feel they’ve done everything right, and they want to just unlock whatever the next step is, and they don’t believe that they need to do a whole lot more. There are some folks who are more open to it, but the folks who are most successful understand that the market is ever changing, and that years of experience or the right degree, or knowing the right person is only part of the battle. Uh, and so the ones who are more willing to take up that advice and are willing to put themselves out there are the ones who usually find themselves success faster.

Lee Kantor: Now, since you’ve been kind of on the inside. Um, are the, are people’s perceived biases as true as they might think when it comes to age or race? Um, is, are those things that are, are, did you see that with your eyes or was that something that’s implied? Or is there kind of just some subconscious bias when it comes to some of that stuff? Or is that real issues that, you know, if you’re 50, 55 years old, that that’s, that’s a reality.

Zachary Kuhl: I can only speak to my experience. I’ll say that. But in my experience, it is a real thing for sure. Sometimes it is conscious, sometimes it is unconscious, um, or I should say subconscious. So when it comes to things like, uh, ageism or the school that you went to, or the amount of jobs that you’ve had in a certain amount of time, those biases exist, especially when you get into smaller organizations where the amount of, let’s call it layers to the cake are smaller, when you’re a part of a larger organization where you have a very robust legal department and talent acquisition team and HR team, it’s easier to build in processes that actively work against personal bias. But if you’re talking about a smaller organization, a startup organization, anything like that, where there’s only a handful of decision makers there bias, whether they know they’re doing it or not, whether they want to do it or not is going to affect that, that decision making. And so if we’re talking about something like ageism, there’s a few very easy things you can do to work against that. One of it is not list the dates when you’ve graduated from whatever education you have. Only putting the last five years of relevant experience, um, sort of things like that. And then any other biases that you feel you might be victim to if you’re working with a coach like myself or my team. We can address those through the coaching process and figure out how we want to try to combat them, but it’s very personalized at that point about what you feel like you might be at risk of being, um, biased for.

Lee Kantor: So now when a person is hiring a coach like yourself or just a career coach in general, is it because this is a Hail Mary for them? Or is this something that they’re being proactively strategic around or they don’t want to, you know, they think it’s going to shorten the amount of time that they’ll be looking like kind of where’s their mindset?

Zachary Kuhl: Most of the people that we work with have come to us sort of as a Hail Mary last ditch attempt, if I’m being honest. They have they’ve done everything that they think that they need to do and they haven’t gotten the results that they want. And so they come to work with us, which is why we take the research and the data side of what we do very seriously. There’s a lot of great coaching services out there. There’s a lot of not so great coaching services out there. We want to give as much resources as we can to our clients that they can then continue to use down their career, whether they work with us or not. Because by the time that someone gets to us, they’ve already went through all the steps that they think that they need to go through. They’ve updated their resume, they’ve contacted people at the company, they’ve gotten great references. They’re using multiple job boards, things like that. And so by the time someone gets to us, usually what we end up finding in the first meeting or two is that they’re usually just focusing on the wrong areas. And by that, I mean that they are far too focused on trying to get in touch with someone in the organization. Trying to get an inside lead or their resume is overly extensive or under utilized, or their portfolio is a mess. There’s some aspect of it that they tried so hard to polish it that it’s just become almost useless. And so a lot of what we do is just helping people backpedal a little bit, look at the larger picture, and then break down the steps that they need to get to where they want to go, and then we help them through those steps. But ultimately, at the end of the day, it’s not a great business model, but we want to teach people how to be able to do this on their own, because a lot of this is just slowing down and looking at how to market yourself, how to sell yourself better.

Lee Kantor: Now, do you specialize in industry or niche or type of work?

Zachary Kuhl: So my background is mostly in go to market. So a lot of sales organizations, high growth, things like that. So that’s a lot of what I focus on. But as the market’s been changing, a lot of my focus has been moving towards computer science and what’s been going on in that space. But we can work with anyone. We have a big focus on health care as well, because that’s a huge need right now in the market. Um, but if you come to us and you’re someone who’s got a background in accounting, a lot of the same principles that we use are going to apply to that same hiring process. Because at the end of the day, it’s all talent acquisition. We know the steps that go through it. It’s just the decision making factors might be different, and there’s enough out there that we can do the research to find out what those factors are.

Lee Kantor: Now, a lot of, um, executives that I spoke to, they are always looking for a players. They feel like those players are, you know, ten X, you know what a C player can be and how do you coach your people up when it comes to how good they are rather than how good they think they are? Is there a way to assess that? Number one, and is there a way to explain it to a potential employer? Uh, when it comes to an industry or like you said, accountants, like how do you show you’re an a player accountant when it’s kind of a commodity type industry?

Zachary Kuhl: Well, a lot of it comes down to what’s actually measurable, what you’ve actually been able to do or the outcomes that you can bring to the table. And so there’s this thin line. You have to walk between being realistic about what you’ve done and not trying to oversell what you think you could do. I tell everyone there’s a thin line between brave and stupid. And so what we want to look at is the actual tangible outcomes of your work. So if you are, let’s go with the accountant example. If you’re someone who’s working accounting, you’re trying to make it into a more senior role, or you’re trying to get into a more prestigious firm, one of the easiest ways you can show that you actually make an impact is by measuring your impact. Look at the portfolios that you’ve managed. Look at the time it takes you to complete any amount of tasks and compare that to the average of your team. Okay, let’s say you’re 5% faster. Okay, great. We can mark that. Let’s work with that. You have 13% less errors. The more you can break things down into tangible numbers, the easier it is for you to physically say, I am this much better than X. I sit in, you know, this grade point average of the curve. If you really want to get into the numbers of something. Because once you can see the tangible outcomes of what you do every day, and sometimes it’s a pain to figure that out, you have to sit down and do the math and really compare yourself to others. But once you know where you’re at compared to your peers, it becomes very clear to you where you sit at and figuring out where you want to push those values farther and where you might want to push some value back.

Lee Kantor: Now, for the folks that aren’t looking for a job today, but at you know, in today’s world, at some point you will be, um, how important is it to kind of check what the market is paying? Like, should you be doing that regularly and seeing, okay, where am I at relative to where other people like me are at?

Zachary Kuhl: My advice to people is to always look at the market about every six months. Go look at the data from U.S. labor statistics is the easiest way to get sort of a national average. But you also should be going out and interviewing at least every 12 to 18 months, even if you’re not planning on taking another job, just to get yourself out there to get you into the practice of doing all these things that we’ve talked about. And again, figure out realistically what you could get from the market. You might not be looking, and you might go through this exercise and end up getting an offer that you would have never considered before, and it might be the right move for you at that time. But keeping those skill sets sharp and keeping an eye on what’s going on is the best way for you to know when it might be time to move on.

Lee Kantor: Now, when you’re saying interviewer, are you saying externally or internally?

Zachary Kuhl: Both. Ideally. Um, but at least externally, um, it’s one of those things that some people, they get a little antsy about because, well, what if someone finds out about it X, Y, and z? I’m not saying you have to go and do a whole big blast on LinkedIn. You can go and quietly apply to a couple of different places and see what it gets you. But if you’re in a position where you’re just comfortable where you’re at and you don’t know what’s going on with the market, and suddenly you’re a victim of a layoff or a reshuffle that you didn’t see coming down the pipeline, you’re going to wish that maybe you had some options, or you’re going to at least wish that you had some practice under your belt.

Lee Kantor: Now, what advice would you give people that are in, say, the creative field or the arts? Is the is the same strategy apply for an actor as it does for an accountant?

Zachary Kuhl: I’ll be honest, I’ve got a little bit less experience there. I do work with some graphic designers and things like that, but I do think that it is a little bit more of a business mindset in that world, because you have to be almost more data driven with your outcomes than someone who works in any other career. Because if you work in any other career, the the tangible data is right in front of you, you know, or are you able to sell enough? Did you move enough units where projects completed on time? Did your client base like what you delivered? If you’re a creative person, you’re usually working for yourself in some capacity. And so you have to be very, very clear on what your deliverables were, what you got done, and the timeline and efficiency that you got those things done. It’s much harder in the creative space for my experience.

Lee Kantor: Now, talk about your book. Why was it important for you to write a book? I mean, you mentioned, uh, a little bit ago that you said that, you know, maybe your, um, strategy of helping people become kind of, um, self-sufficient maybe isn’t the best business model, but it was the book along the same lines, the thinking.

Zachary Kuhl: So the book is where it all started. I had moved into freelance coaching and had developed a few exercises I would do with people, because when I got started, it was a lot of not quite executive coaching, but a lot of higher level level, uh, folks who were really going through more of a crisis, a crisis of confidence. And so I started to develop these exercises that I would go through with people to help them identify a lot of what we talked about. What skill sets do you bring to the table that are unique to you? What are you better at than others? What maybe should you not advertise as much? And so I built these exercises, and I had toyed around with the idea of trying to write a really extensive book. And the more that I worked on it, the more that I realized there’s just a lot of clutter. And if you look at if you go to any bookstore and you go to the business section or self-help section, you’ll find books similar to this about, you know, uh, become a CEO in ten weeks or some nonsense like that. And so I wanted to strip all the noise out. And so it’s more of a guidebook. It’s right around 100 pages, and it’s just six tips and exercises that you can sit down and do in an afternoon to actually figure out what your value is going into the market and what you need to do for your next steps. And the idea behind it is quite simple. There’s lots of folks that we talk to who don’t technically need to work with us. They just need to identify what those skill sets are to push ahead. And if someone can spend a couple bucks on a guidebook that helps them do that, the labor market overall would be much better off.

Lee Kantor: Now, when a person is looking for work and say they don’t have a job right now, what should their day look like? Like, I can see how this could just be, you know, overwhelming and frustrating. And you could get burnt out in a very short period of time. How do you help coach them on the kind of the grind it takes to get that next gig?

Zachary Kuhl: That’s a great question, because getting a job is a full time job. That’s that’s very, very real. And the burnout is definitely a big part of it. The first step is, I think, figuring out what your timeline realistically needs to be. If you’re someone who their finances are in order and you can take a week to, you know, put some feelers out there and see if there’s any sort of organic leads that you can follow. Great. Maybe start there. But if you’re like most of us and you start to instantly become stressed about the money coming in, regardless of your finances, we like to work in blocks. And so if we’re working with someone who is currently unemployed, we do four days a week where the coach will work very closely with you. It’ll be one day of doing applications, one day of doing cold outreach, one day of doing applications, one day of doing cold outreach, taking some time off and then coming back in the next week until interviews start to come in, and then we break the block up for interview prep. But you want to split your time between passive applications and actively reaching out to people who might be able to help you.

Lee Kantor: So do those kind of job boards work? Like, is that a realistic possibility to get a job through one of those kind of, you know, mega job boards?

Zachary Kuhl: Yes and no. Here’s the uncomfortable truth. Most of the job. I want to say most all the job boards are now more engagement machines than anything else. So to give you some insight on the talent acquisition side of things, if I use indy.com, which most organizations are going to use, I pay them for a couple of things. I pay them for premium listing spots, having my job towards the top of the board to give me the most number of applicants. And I also pay for something called clicks, which is the amount of people that I actually say I want to talk to who have applied, and I pay for messages, which are people who haven’t applied, but I found them and I want to contact them. And so the entire business model of indeed is around getting me the business to pay for the most amount of premium advertising spots, clicks and messages that I can. So they’re going to continue to feed you the business leads, but they’re not going to be the very, very best leads. Because if they’re the very, very best leads, then you’re going to pay for less clicks and less messages. And so if you’re a candidate, you do need to be on those job boards because that’s where the employers are. But it’s not enough to just put out a couple a day. You need to really push volume and you need to do the cold outreach on the other side. Find people on LinkedIn if you can. There’s tools right now, AI scraping tools that people are building to help you find internal email addresses for people. If that’s something you’re willing to try, that’s a great avenue as well. But you need to hit both sides of it, so to say, to really be effective.

Lee Kantor: So what kind of volume do you recommend? Is it ten 100 or 1000? I mean, this it seems like it could be anything.

Zachary Kuhl: In a hyper competitive role. So if you’re not a true specialist, um it’s probably going to be 40 to 50 applications a week. Uh, and that, uh, at least half of those, if you can find contact information for someone in the organization, you need to do the cold reach on top of at least half of those as well.

Lee Kantor: So 50 and then 25, like that combo, you know, twice a week, that’s your week.

Zachary Kuhl: That’s the week. And we usually find success within 2 to 3 weeks. If we hit that volume with the clients we work with in the past.

Lee Kantor: So you better be resilient. You better have some sticktoitiveness because this is not for the faint of heart.

Zachary Kuhl: No, that’s like I said, getting a job has become a full time job. Definitely.

Lee Kantor: Now, what do you say to the people who are like, I’m sending out all this stuff and nobody everybody’s ghosting me. No, I’m not even getting like a any response whatsoever. Like I’m just putting information into the ether.

Zachary Kuhl: Well, if everyone else in the world is crazy, but you, then you’re probably the one who’s insane. Um, there’s something wrong with the process. You’re either not applying to the right places or you’re not leveraging your experience and the way you should be for the places that you’re applying or you’re just completely scattershot. And this is one of the most common ones that we see. We have people who they’re applying to roles that they think they could be a fit for, roles that are exactly what they were doing before, and roles that are underneath what they think that they’re good for. And so the roles that your peer two, you got a decent shot at, but you’re not putting enough applications out to the roles that you might be good enough for. You’re probably not doing the outreach side of. So people think maybe you’re not at the level and the roles that you’re above, well, then they’re gonna the employer thinks they’re gonna have to pay you more because you’re above that level. And so they’re not going to engage with you either. You need to pick an avenue and be very intentional about your efforts in that avenue.

Lee Kantor: So is there a story you could share, maybe your favorite success story when it comes to helping somebody get a dream job or get a position that, that, you know, maybe, uh, that they were surprised that they were able to get.

Zachary Kuhl: Yeah. There was one individual that I worked with when I was still doing freelance coaching before we sort of made this official. He had a very unorthodox background. Uh, he was a data engineer, but he had never went to school for it. He had worked with, um, one of the larger banks, I think it was either Bank of America or JP Morgan. And he had spent 13 years of his career there. Everything that he knew, he had learned internally within the organization. He had gotten a couple other, um, um, like certifications from third party sources. But he had all these wealth of experience, but he was missing that college education that a lot of people want to see for the roles he was interested in. Primarily, he didn’t have the masters of computer science. He didn’t want to go back to school. Whatever his employment situation was, he was working at an office that was going to be winding down. And so the office was going to close. I wanted to relocate. He didn’t want relocate, so we had to find him something else. And it became really clear that he had all the know how that he needed to be successful in the types of roles he was looking for, but he didn’t know how to translate it into layman’s terms, because a huge part about the hiring process that people don’t think about is recruiters like myself. I only know enough about the role I’m recruiting for to be able to talk about it for about a half hour.

Zachary Kuhl: I don’t know all the jargon, I don’t know all the inside baseball terminology. And so if you lean too heavily into specialty knowledge. It can almost be a deterrent. And everything that he was talking about in our interview prep and all of his resume work was extremely knowledgeable, but it wasn’t anything that a layman could make sense of. And so we had to really sit down together and figure out what he did in the day to day, that he could translate into something that you and I could understand, to be able to leverage that into his job search. And so that’s what we did. Over the course of about three weeks, we started to get interviews coming in, and he eventually ended up getting a head of engineering role, actually for a Web3 startup at the time, which was a huge bump in pay for him. It was breaking into a new field and something he was personally very passionate about. And it all came from that conversation of sitting down and saying, okay, you clearly know what you’re talking about, but how are we going to translate this and leverage this? So other people see it? Just because you’re missing this piece of paper doesn’t mean that you don’t know where you’re going. We just have to be able to convince everyone else by breaking it down to language that they can understand.

Lee Kantor: Now, if a person is just trying to do this on their own without the help of you or coach like you, what is the kind of the typical timeline for somebody who’s just out there winging it, doing the best they can? Like, how long does a job search typically take?

Zachary Kuhl: I don’t know if there’s official numbers for this. We’ve done some independent research, and from the surveys we’ve put out, it’s usually 6 to 6 and a half months if you’re doing it by yourself. And so that’s why whether you’re working with a coach or not, just being very intentional with your output and how you’re positioning yourself will save a lot of time off of that. Because if you’re currently working full time and you’re doing this part time, maybe six, six and a half months is a timeline, that’s reasonable. But if you’re not working, that can be a really rough situation.

Lee Kantor: But earlier you said it could be a matter of weeks if you’re just kind of relentlessly working the system you recommend.

Zachary Kuhl: Right. If you’re doing it, like I said, with the system that we recommend a couple of weeks, but from the surveys we’ve put out to people who are passively looking, they’re reporting back to us as taking 6 to 6 and a half months. We have no idea what their output is.

Lee Kantor: Right. But part of what makes your thing work is you’re being relentless and you’re doing volume.

Zachary Kuhl: Exactly. If you can do the volume, you can shave that down to a couple of weeks or a month and a half reasonably. Um, but most people, even if they are doing the volume side of it, they’re too scattershot in the approach as well. Um, and so my advice to anyone who’s doing it on their own is to be very relentless with the volume, but very intentional with where you’re putting that volume as well.

Lee Kantor: Right. But in order to do that, you have to have a clear understanding of who you are and the value you provide to the market, not just what you think.

Zachary Kuhl: Yes. That’s true.

Lee Kantor: Right. Because that’s I mean, that’s a big part of the value you’re providing is you’re giving them a true kind of assessment so they can aim like a laser instead of just aiming and thinking that they, they are hitting the bullseye when they may not even be in the, in the room.

Zachary Kuhl: No, you’re not wrong about that. And that’s a big part of it is just the objectiveness of it. We’re as human beings, we’re really, really bad at being objective about what we’re good at and really, really bad about being objective, about what we’re bad at. And so having that outside person being, you know, ideally would be a coach of some kind makes it a lot easier to get there.

Lee Kantor: So now how does it work? Okay, I raised my hand. I’m like, Zach, I’m in. What do you do? Some sort of assessment. Do you look at my resume? Like, how do you kind of build the plan for me so that I am like a laser now.

Zachary Kuhl: So we start by doing an intro call with you, and before the intro call starts, you have to send us over some information. So we need your your updated resume or your updated work history. It doesn’t need to be in resume format. You can just send it over in an email. Um, and we need to know what exactly it is that you’re wanting to do. Um, if you come to us and you just say, I just need a job, that’s a fine place to start. But we do need to know what your intention is. If you’re just curiously looking, we probably will pass on you for now because we’re really, again, intentional. And then from there, we will then go into the intro call. We’ll ask you a whole bunch of questions, ranging from where you went to school, to how much you want to make in the next five years. And from that assessment, well, then look at your resume and we’ll build what we call your career story, which is where you’ve been, what you’re doing and where you want to go. All stories consist of three parts beginning, middle and end, and using that resume and that first intro call or what we call our personality interview with you, we build out what we think that story is. And then in our second meeting, we run through that story together, make sure it’s a story that you’re comfortable with, you feel represents you well, and that you’re comfortable speaking to. And then we build the job search strategy from there. But figuring out that career story, that is what we use to build all the materials around.

Lee Kantor: Now, are you helping me identify the places I have to apply or am I doing that? Like, um, is like, how much is this done for me? And how much is this? Do it myself.

Zachary Kuhl: So it depends on the level of assistance that you want. And so if you’re looking for more of just helping you identify the avenues, that’s a little bit more of a cheaper service, if you want more of a hands on service, we will go out and we’ll add usually 25 to 40 jobs, depending on how difficult of a specialty it is into a personalized job tracker for you. And then we use that job tracker to also track your applications going out. So we have a tangible record of how many applications you got going out the door versus the number of applications that you’ve passed on for whatever reason. And then we also use that with a rating system that we build into it to help us figure out what appeals to you and what does not appeal to you to adjust our search going forward. And so if you go with that model, we, most of us come from a recruitment background. We have access to recruiter seats on a lot of job boards. So we can easily filter through postings that you would never find. And so that service does cost a lot more, if I’m being frank about it. If you’re someone who, uh, you know, time is of the essence, it could definitely be a worthwhile service if you’re someone who just wants to help with the confidence and sort of the positioning, that’s something we can do in a matter of a couple of meetings and then send you on your way.

Lee Kantor: So if somebody wants to learn more, have a more substantive conversation with you or somebody on the team, what’s the website? What’s the best way to connect?

Zachary Kuhl: Uh, so best way to get in touch with us is to go to strategically human.org. Um, that’s the name of our website on there. You’ll find a little bit more about us. There’ll be a link to the job or the guidebook as well as our white paper. And then there’ll be some information on the different services that we offer in a contact link. That’s the best way.

Lee Kantor: Well, thank you so much for sharing your story. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Zachary Kuhl: Of course. Thanks for having me on.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on High Velocity Radio.