If we've been your job search besties and helped you in some way, there's a cool way you can support the show. Shout us a virtual coffee. We get a huge kick out of reading all of your success stories. Head to byneacoffee.com forward slash interview boss and shout us a cuppa. If you keep us caffeinated, we can keep the content coming.
I have no best bits, can't come up with any stories and it's all because of my job. I disagree. I think you can pull awesome stories from any job that you've got.
Hey everyone and welcome back to Interview Boss. My name is Emma. I'm a radio journalist who's teamed up with my sister to give you advice, inspiration and support when you're looking for a new job. Sarah is a HR and recruitment professional and together we're excited to give you all the tips, tricks and behind the scenes knowledge to help you in your career.
Hey M and welcome back everyone. I don't know if anyone listening is the same, but the way you say professional just scratches my brain just such a nice way and you do it the same way every time and it's just great. HR and recruitment professional. It's so good. I love it. It's my favorite part. Well, you are a professional.
Now, it is time for our favorite part of the podcast. The shoot your shot shout out. This is for you guys, our listeners who've written into us or shouted us a coffee. And it's our way of saying thank you and sharing your wins with everyone else. So this week, we're shouting out Helen, who bought us five coffees. We're so caffeinated. Thank you, Helen.
Thank you Helen, she said Sarah and Emma, you have been such a huge help in the whole job search interview and negotiation process. I'd been at the same job for seven years right out of school and it was super daunting for me when I decided to start looking elsewhere.
I was never good at public speaking and let alone interviewing, and I get nervous so easily. The podcasts were so helpful in offering both practical advice, like what to include on your resume, how to answer questions at the interview, like when you're asked of a scenario or project that you haven't experienced or worked on before, and tips for negotiating benefits. The podcasts are both very informative and very enjoyable to listen to through real life stories you guys share.
My favourite episodes are probably they'll listen to this 30 minutes before your interview, listen to this right after your interview and why we're not using the word rejected in the job search anymore episodes. Thinking of rejection differently has definitely changed my mental game. The mental game is 50% if not more of making it. I actually had a good feeling right after that interview and I landed a job right off the bat. I'm so grateful. Thank you so much. Helen from New Jersey, USA.
Oh, that's incredible. I think that's not been one of the biggest surprises of interview boss. I think I always knew the tips would be helpful, but I don't think I anticipated how helpful the mindset stuff would be. I knew that it would be relevant. I just didn't think it would resonate as much with people.
Maybe we need to rebrand our little intro and say, we're here to give you advice, mindset, support, and something. It needs to be introduced into our core, punchy offering line. Maybe in 2025 is the year that we rewrite our intro. This is our fifth year, and it's the exact same intro that we've had from the very beginning. And I kind of love that, but also maybe we need to put in the hype up.
And like you say, build that into who we are. Now, if you are like Helen, but you need a little bit more support, check out interview Academy. That is our interview preparation course that is going to take you through every single thing in depth that you need to do to prepare for your interview.
We've had people say it helped them come up with stories and examples that are so incredible that they forgot they even did. And you kind of walk out of it thinking, wow, I'm impressive. Like it builds confidence in a way that's not just like, you're amazing. It builds confidence in a way that's like, hey, look at all these cool things that I've actually done. So you've got something behind it. Love that.
Or if you want some one-on-one help maybe you've already got the basics kind of down and you want to have a bit of a chat to me so we can take your answers to the next level. I do one-on-one sessions with people all around the world. You can check out all about them at interviewboss.com.au forward slash coaching to see the different options.
Yes, and if you liked one of our episodes used to tip that we told you about or want to request an episode on your conundrum, you can kindly follow us on Instagram and slide into our DMs and you could be that person next month.
Now, this episode, we are talking about a topic that came to me when I was speaking to a few people who were applying for jobs and finding it a little bit tricky to break through. And it's a concept that I explained to some of them. And I thought, we actually haven't done this topic on the podcast. So it's something that we have to cover. And Em, you really like this concept as well. Tell us, what are we talking about?
Yes, all about how some jobs just inherently have better stories built into them than others. So the jobs that you have, sometimes it can be hard to come up with best bits because the types of work that you're doing, there's a limit to it. And it's hard to come up with groundbreaking over the top examples because of the nature of the job itself. Yep, totally. And it's all dependent on the job you're trying to go for in the future, I think.
particularly for someone who's making your career change or if you're just kind of starting out in your career coming out of a degree or some training or you're trying to get your first kind of job in the industry that you want to work in, this is really relevant to you but I do think it's relevant to everyone. Now, disclaimer before we start because I think that if you're a certain kind of person you might be using this episode as an excuse
thinking, yeah, this is what's happening. I have a boring job and that's why I have no good best bits. I have no best bits. I can't come up with any stories and it's all because of my job. I disagree. I think you can pull awesome stories from any job that you've got. Regardless of what we talk about here and this advice, you absolutely have impressive best bits.
However, when we're trying to highlight transferable skills, sometimes if you don't have the complexity in what you're currently doing, and there's absolutely no crossover with the types of tasks that you're doing in the job that you're trying to get, it's just going to make it a little bit harder for you to highlight those transferable skills. And so sometimes even though
you don't actually have to completely change roles. Getting a different stepping stone job is going to make it so much easier to get the role that you want to get eventually. And that's, I think, a helpful kind of way to think about it rather than going from the one that you're in to your role that you're targeting. Is there a mini step forward that you can take that's going to make it so much easier in your resume and in interviews because you're going to have better stories? So that's kind of the concept we're talking about. But I don't want to hear you using this as an excuse because I promise you you have great best bits.
Yes, but we're going to start with an example to help explain this. So let's pretend that you work at a small cafe. They do sandwiches, pastries, things like that. You serve, you make coffees. What kind of skills are you getting from that job?
Yeah, well, in this example, I'm kind of imagining like a really small cafe. Maybe people sit down, but there's no like people aren't having full meals or anything. It's just you're ordering stuff from like a little cabinet that might already be pre-made on display. So in that role, you might be working by yourself or maybe with one other person, you might be having to work independently. You're having to multitask, obviously, when it gets busy and it goes through rushes.
You're probably doing like a little bit of food prep, like you might be toasting things or you might be, obviously you're learning how to make coffees as well. You're dealing with customers, you might have regulars that you deal with. There could be various different little problems that pop up, you know, you forgot something or something's missing or you run out of an ingredient or something like that. There's plenty of different types of skills that you're getting from that role, but there's kind of a limit to it, right? If you were trying to break into a corporate job, let's say, and not to say that's the goal for everyone, but let's just say that you were,
connecting some of those skills and stories when, if you've already been in that role for quite a while, you're not getting any more examples out of being there longer. Does that kind of make sense? You get more of the same examples that you've already really got. And so I think we can make a really good point here when we contrast this too. Imagine you're still working in a cafe. It's not that big of a change. We're not saying that you have to make a big jump.
Still working in a cafe, but this time it's a larger cafe where there's full meals that come out, there's a kitchen team, it's just a larger format kind of environment. There's still coffees, there's still everything, sandwiches and pastries or whatever, but there's also like actual service to tables. What do you think are the additions that make that role more complex?
Well, there would be bookings that you've got to take when before it was just sort of like a walk up situation, maybe because it's proper meals that you can order what you want, dietary requirements, looking after that, more teammates. So you have a relationship with different departments like the kitchen team, you, yeah, more colleagues to work with.
different colleagues to talk about like people you got along with and people you didn't and like miscommunications and just like so many more people dynamics that might give you stories and examples. Small room for error, I guess. Yeah, training someone else as well and following more complex processes. So you might manage your own section of tables, you bring out drinks and then food. Or I know when I went from working in just like a regular
small cafe to like a fine dining restaurant, having to order for they call it covers, which is the positions of where people are sitting on the table. So there's a certain order that you have to take the orders in. And then when the food runners come out, they automatically just place the correct food at the correct person instead of going, who had the pasta? And that used to just make me wig out. I hated that.
Yep, totally. You have to write it down in a certain order. You might have to remember a menu. There might be different menu items that change every day. There might be like, oh, we've out of this item. We don't have this anymore. We can change this. We can't change that. So much more kind of complexity as opposed to everything we have is in that cupboard there that you can already see. There's no kind of talking people through stuff. You might be managing takeaway orders as well. You might actually have a phone where people can call up and book and ask questions and whatever or something like that.
What I want to make the point here is it's not always going to be the case that the larger business are better and give you more examples at all. Sometimes it can actually be the reverse like let's imagine in the really small cafe, you had heaps of responsibility because there was only a few of you that worked there and you had to do ordering, you had to take deliveries, you had to do catering and stuff like you had to prep all of that balance the till at the end of the day like the books.
Yeah, versus in the larger restaurant you didn't do any of that you just kind of checked in and did one thing and then left like it can be different, actually depending on which way you're going. But I wanted to give this example of some of those roles are going to give you more stuff to talk about.
And if you're trying to move into a corporate environment, the more types of relationships, people's skills, taking stuff over the phone, writing things down, planning, preparing versus just doing your work right now as it comes to you, you're going to have more stuff to talk about and more transferable skills to be like, I have a deadline. Like when you're in a cafe, just making coffees for people who walk in, what's the deadline?
Do you know what I mean? There's no real kind of deadline that you're going to be able to talk about, whereas if you're doing catering orders or there's ordering you have to do or there's a booking that you have coming in that you have to get that table ready for that booking coming in or you've got a function, there's so many more stories you're going to be able to talk about with that.
Hey, interview boss listeners. If the podcast just isn't doing it for you and you need way more help to prep for your next interview, we have the perfect thing for you. Interview Academy. Em, tell us all about it. This is huge. This is the love child of Sarah after doing hundreds of one on one coaching sessions, finding out what people struggle with the most common mistakes.
Sarah has created the ultimate course that you can do in your own time self-paced heaps of modules, videos, interactive quizzes, a workbook that will become your Bible by the end that you can take with you into your interview. Because if you're a long-time listener, you know that we endorse taking notes into your interview, it's a game changer. Check out more about it at interviewboss.com.au forward slash interview academy.
If we went up an even further level, imagine you then took that to working at a venue that had a bar, a restaurant, and also a function space. We might call that a club, or a members club, or something like that.
of that, that's somewhere where I worked while I was at uni. And you might then be on functions, you might then be managing an event, token machines, yep, you might be managing like the gambling section, you might be then managing reception where people have to sign in, you might be like, there's so many different kind of parts of that that you might get experiencing and differences of being trained in different areas, different computer systems, whatever.
So many different examples. So I want you to think about, is there another job that you could use as a stepping stone that might help you build some more useful skills for where you're trying to get to? If you're feeling really stuck in making a career change or you're kind of looking at graduating and getting your first kind of real job post study, this can be something really, really, really helpful to think about.
And in this case, you didn't have to completely pivot into a new industry. We stayed in hospitality, but we're just going that next step to make it easier. So try and work backwards from where you might want to end up and what can help be the next connecting piece in that puzzle. Yes, right. And that was really deliberate. And I'm not trying to say you need to get a whole
other job that's going to be also more serious and you have to be there a year and a half before you take this new job like these are easy little swaps that you can be thinking about in advance to be going okay in my job that i'm currently doing it might not be relevant to what i want to do eventually but am i getting stuff out of it.
Is it helping me add things to my resume? Is it helping me add skills that I can talk about? Is it giving me really good stories? There was a student that I spoke to who had recently graduated from an architecture degree and she was working in a cafe and she was trying to get into corporate working as a graduate architect or as a junior architect or something like that and she'd struggled. It was really competitive and there's certain industries where it will be really competitive and really hard to get into.
But what I found when talking to her and asking her about what she was doing at the moment, a lot of people when they're graduating, they assume that their work experience is not relevant. I always want to know about your work experience. All employers are going to want to know about your work experience more so than uni or your college, because it's super relevant. And she just didn't have that many stories. It was a fairly straightforward job. And so I said to her, she was thinking about actually doing more study, going to do a master's.
but still staying at the cafe and i was like no no no you've got it all the wrong way around scrap the masters like more education is not necessarily the problem problem is not that you aren't educated enough that's not why you're not getting yeah it's competitive and you have.
very, very few transferable skills in terms of your work experience. Fix the work experience problem. Don't just do the easy thing and go into a master's program. You get more student debt and you're going to have the same problem, if not worse, actually. And you're older with less experience than your peers. And sometimes you can be like, okay, you've got a master's, but you've never stepped foot inside an actual architecture firm. That can be worse, actually.
Like I said to her, even if you stay working in hospitality or you're still doing like a casual job or a part-time job or something, try to go work in a call center. Like similarly, not super difficult kind of role to get into. They can still be casual. They can still be flexible. They can still be fairly entry level. You don't need heaps of experience to work in customer service or a call center. Anything that allows you to work in an office or on a computer or over the phone or with professional kind of
customers, if that makes sense, that's going to be a little bit closer to what you might do in an architecture context, because you're going to be dealing with deadlines, planning ahead. Any role that's going to be a little bit more complex that you can do is going to be more helpful.
Even reception in an office. Yeah, totally. Although they can be kind of hard to get. Like I find people say, oh, just get a reception job. Like everybody wants a reception job. But that's why I say call center. Even any kind of customer service role where you're using a computer. Like I was thinking this randomly kind of popped into my head. You know, those like bowling alley kind of gaming arcade kind of places, like that would be a casual role too. But I'm assuming with that you would have bookings coming in, you would have
like a thing that you would have to check who's next, what venue have we got, what lane are we putting them in, we need to assign them shoes, we need to see what they've already paid for and take payment. You know what I mean? Like even that would be more things that are likely to be helpful for you for stories to go with your architecture degree than what you have already been doing. Because you've already nailed that, you've already got the hospitality examples, the customer service things, you need some other stuff.
Yes, in the end, if you do take the next step to get you closer to where you want to be, just remember, this is all in the pursuit of better skills, more things to put on your resume and better best bits to talk about in interviews, and that is invaluable, totally. And you can get that from where you are by putting your hand up a little bit more.
you can get that from a very slight change in what you're doing. You could transfer departments. We just want you to think about get yourself some better stories and that will help you no end always in your next job and the one after that.
Thanks so much for listening to Interview Boss. If you like hearing our Aussie accents, follow us on Spotify or Apple or better yet, tell someone about the show. That's how we can hit the charts and we can help even more people. For more advice, inspiration, but we can't promise that nobody will see that you follow us, check us out on Instagram at Interview Boss.
And can you believe we are in our third season of interview boss? Not really. It's crazy. But that means there are over 90 episodes we've made. Oh, my God.
scrolling through all of our episode titles, you might miss an episode that actually is exactly what you're looking for. Yes, we get so many messages of people asking us to do an episode on something and we're like, we already have. So we've put together playlists to help you find the episodes that are best suited to you. If you're applying for jobs, we have episodes about resumes, cover letters and job ads. If you've been offered your dream job, we have episodes on resigning, exit interviews and how to impress at your new company.
Yes, and we even have a playlist for if you have an interview like tomorrow and you need just our most recommended episodes, just the ones you really need between now and then. Exactly. It is all there for you. You can browse by category, check out the playlist at www.interviewboss.com.au forward slash podcast.