The career essentials.

Posted by: Jen

Reading Time: 6 minutes

Talent.

There are many things in this world I am naturally good at. Keeping my new years’ resolutions, dancing my heart out at live concerts, selling things on Facebook marketplace, and eating my way through endless chips and salsa at Chili’s. These skills come easy to me. I didn’t have to learn how to do them, and I certainly didn’t need experience to perfect them. However, a skill that I have learned through experience and many years of practice is how to write an excellent resume and nail an interview.

Talent can be natural or learned. Either way, talent is essential to a career. When I googled the official definition of talent the top two were, 1.) a special, often athletic, creative, or artistic aptitude and 2.) general intelligence or mental power. My natural talent is seeing other people’s talent. I have always been good at observing and reading others. My learned talent is recruiting the right talent for an organization or open role.

Career highlights.

My recruiting career began in 2010 when someone I barely knew took a chance on me. The recruitment manager of my internship at Ulta saw something in me that I hadn’t yet discovered. I joined her team as an eager and very green recruiting coordinator. I was promoted within a year and a half to a recruiting specialist where I started to learn the fundamentals of being a recruiter. I found a mentor, Aaron, who took me under his wing and taught me everything he knew. He showed me what to look for in a resume, how to conduct phone screens, how to source talent on different posting sites, and most importantly his passion made me realize I was meant to be a recruiter. I am forever grateful for his mentorship and continued to learn from him throughout the years. He left Ulta for PepsiCo, and naturally I followed him. I wasn’t done learning from him.

I joined PepsiCo as a corporate recruiter. I supported the operations, engineering and optimization teams within the manufacturing division. I continued to learn about recruitment strategy, hard to fill roles, how to use hiring data to make important decisions, and so much more. I then joined the campus recruitment team to broaden my skillset. I was no longer recruiting experienced professionals, but young talent joining the corporate workforce for the first time after graduating from a university. I loved this role! I traveled around the country to different universities to attend career fairs, manage on-campus interviews, and build the PepsiCo brand on campus. I worked closely with the teams I was supporting on strategy, target schools and majors and led the New York internship program with events and networking activities.

in 2019, I moved to Seattle to join Amazon to do similar work on the university side but on a much LARGER scale. I was recruiting and interviewing thousands of students each semester for operations supervisor roles. I jumped in headfirst, drinking from a firehose but learned a great deal about high volume recruiting and increasing efficiencies. After a few busy recruitment seasons, I was ready for something else. I moved into a program manager role. This was very new and a skillset I hadn’t yet developed. While I was still in the recruiting space, I was managing large scale programs (interviewing and outsourcing), leading a team of 15 program coordinators, and writing many documents for new idea proposals.

I am telling you all of this because I know a thing or two about the recruiting world. In my career I have reviewed more resumes than I can count, conducted tens of thousands of interviews, and hired more than 5,000 people around the US in different industries, roles and varying experiences. I have seen all sides, the good, the bad and the ugly. I have spent years learning new skills to be the best recruiter possible.

Taking a risk.

In the last 13 years of my life, I moved from job to job, state to state, company to company, without a vacation longer than three weeks. I put my job above almost everything in my life. My work anxiety and stress were very high, but I didn’t realize it until I was out. That was an eye opener. When I left Amazon in December 2022, I needed a longer mental break from corporate America. I was physically, mentally, and emotionally drained. I wanted to escape reality and give myself time to breathe, reflect, and enjoy life. And as you know, that is EXACTLY what I did. I had a year of new learnings (not related to recruiting for once) traveling the world solo with nothing but a backpack and a new sense of freedom. I gained perspective. I figured out more about what I want and what I do not want. I was the happiest I have ever been in my life.

So where am I going with all this? I will tell you – I am starting a recruiting consulting business. I am offering resume review and writing, online presence improvements and recommendations, interview preparation, career coaching, offer negotiations, and more. I have worked hard to develop these helpful skills throughout my career. I love recruiting (just burned out from corporate America and everything that goes with it). I want to help people. I want to help those who have been laid off and haven’t updated their resume in years. I want to update LinkedIn profiles so someone’s talent shows up in more searches. I know what recruiters look for. I want to practice interviewing and crafting great stories for behavioral based questions. I have crafted interview guides and led hundreds of interviewing prep sessions. I want to offer advice on how to negotiate a better salary during a promotion or a job offer. I want to provide guidance through the entire recruiting process and give others a better chance to land their dream job.

The importance of a great resume.

It all starts with a great resume. A resume is typically the very first thing a recruiter or hiring manager sees. So that resume should be fabulous, concise, data driven, clean, and easy to read. I cannot over stress the importance of a well written resume; it could be the reason you get that interview but it could also be the reason you don’t get that interview. It is a career first impression.

Now with AI and technology there is even more of a reason to ensure the computer notices keywords and information from your resume important to the job you are interested in. After technology sorts through qualified and not qualified resumes, how will you stand out to the recruiter? A recruiter spends an average of 30 seconds reviewing one resume. What gets their attention? If the resume gets passed on to the hiring manager and expert in that field, are the right accomplishments highlighted to get an interview? If invited to an interview, what behavioral or technical questions will be asked? If extended an offer, what are the most important questions to ask and what is negotiable?

Job searching is a stressful situation. Looking for the right role at the right company is time consuming. It is about talent matching, company fit, timing, and utilizing your network. If you know what to look for, how to stand out, and better understand the hiring process, you will be better set up for success.

Let me help.

If you or someone you know could benefit from any of these services, reach out directly. Send them a link to this post, forward them my social media account, or screen shot my contact information below. I offer a free 15 minute intro consultation call to discuss client’s needs and goals, review current resume and industry alignment, cover budget and structure, determine timeline and follow up, and answer any questions on the process. I charge a fee and have different packages depending on what the client is looking for. That will be discussed during the initial call.

I can be reached via email at [email protected] or by sending me a direct message on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/jen-lindquist.