HACK your way into a job (no experience required)
I'm looking for someone that has passion, someone that has passion can almost tackle. Anything. Right. Does your resume speak to the. Position? All right, I've got eight seconds. I'm gonna guess that you're not getting a lot of responses to this resume. But if they can tell that story in some way on that resume, that's gonna catch my eye. They didn't have the experience, but they used that project to really align themselves with the position better than people that had experienced, believe.
It or not. So I'm looking for, what are you doing outside of work like that, to me is a hook alone. You need a job. And in this video, I'm gonna help you hack into one because getting a job at it can be tough.
There's a ton of competition at every level. And it's even harder if you don't have experience, which by the way, we're gonna deal with that later stay tuned. So in this video, we're doing two things. First, I'm gonna help you craft the perfect resume, the kind of resume that makes people stop and go, dang, I have to meet this person. And then second,
we're going to build out your very own resume website. The thing that will set you apart from the crowd that will make people want to hire you. Oh, and by the way, I'm gonna help you build your resume website from the ground up. I even built this amazing template that's free to use. And thanks to our sponsor hosting here. It's gonna be crazy easy to set up. We'll do that here in a bit, but it's these two things, a good resume and a solid website that are vital to you getting a job and it, oh, and also I got some help.
I interviewed four experts and their advice is gold. Now, have you met Bernard Hackel, the aspiring cloud engineer? Well, if you haven't, you're gonna get to know 'em in this video because part of our job is to get him ready for his job. You're gonna help me put together his resume and his resume website. You see Bernard Hackel wants to become a junior cloud engineer, but he has no experience. All he's done is help desk it support. So we're gonna help him apply for this job and tailor his resume to be amazing to help him get that job. We'll talk more about him later. Now I know what some of you are thinking, do I actually need a website? Isn't a resume. Good enough. It's been good enough for a long time,
right before there even were websites. Well, it used to be, but not anymore though. The resume piece is just to get over that HR hurdle and get filtered out, to get to the tech interview. A resume, like we said earlier, you can't really tell your story. You know,
can't be like, Hey, I love these things. And this is kind of my DNA of who I am as a professional. It's more like list all the great things I've done in my life or what I was responsible for a website can help offset that. And in many ways I think a website has replaced a cover letter.
Now don't get me wrong. The resume is still crazy important, but it will only get you so far because it's really hard for just two sheets of paper to tell the story of you, to show someone what you're capable of, the different things about you that make you, you, and why you would be amazing at that job. And by the way, they only spend about eight to 10 seconds looking at your resume. All right, I've got eight seconds. Can I scan this and understand what they're doing? And then I'll go back. If not, that might not eliminate them, but it may be lowered on the stack of ones that you're gonna dive into.
Not for a good reason. That's just nature by recruiters, I think. And this is where the website comes in. It tells your story, which matters a lot. And you'll,
you'll find that out here in a bit now because the website is so important, we're gonna start building it right now. Now again, I partner with hosting you the sponsor of this video to help you make the best resume website portfolio, whatever you wanna call it possible. And I will show you how to use the custom WordPress template. I had designed it's in the link below. So we're gonna actually do that right now. And by the way, before we start even having a website and your own domain name is huge.
Like massive. You already get a ton of cool points just for having. It. So having a domain name, your own domain name is a big one. If I know a guy can set up his own MX records, put the SPF in, get a D mark. And I, I run that through, uh, through like MX toolbox while I'm checking on his resume.
And I see he configured it properly. That tells me something. And that's why I would say you need a website. Even if you already have a GitHub or a LinkedIn. So grab your coffee.
We're gonna build a website right now. Let's do it. It'll be super quick. And if you already have a website and you just want some tips on how to make it better, go ahead and skip forward. I've got timestamps below both. Go ahead and build this right now. I'm gonna navigate out to hosting your.com. Once you're hosting your.com, go ahead and click on, get started.
Now I'll warn you. This is gonna be very fast to get you sip coffee. You'll be up and running in no time. Let's do this. And here we are. Our all in one web hosting, it already costs almost nothing.
And I have a 10% discount code network. Chuck I'll show you how to do that here in a bit. Look at all these features, UN metered traffic, 100 websites. If you need that and the big ones free SSL, free domain, free email, that's gonna make you look amazing on your resume. And of course it's optimized for WordPress.
Let's go ahead and select the sucker. And we do save the most by selecting this plan. And there is a 30 day money back guarantee. So no worries there. Now, if you scroll down just a bit, we can see where we can put the coupon code in at a coupon code. Yes, I do. Go ahead and click that and put in network. Chuck <laugh> cheaper.
And then go ahead and click on submit, go, hello, click on start now. Now we're it people we don't need this tutorial. So just click on skip. We're gonna skip it all. And for most of us, we're gonna be building a new website, click that. Now here,
the clear option's gonna be WordPress. I love WordPress. It's powerful. Most of the amazing tools you want to use are free and fun fact. It's what I use for my website, all my sites, actually.
So we'll select WordPress and then we'll create our account Bernard dot hack. Well, and continue. Now again, we're gonna skip this. You don't need a template because I already have one for you and yeah, let's go ahead and claim our free domain. We'll do Bernard hack. Well,
you should do your name. It makes you really Googleable, goo <laugh> Googleable, Googleable. I couldn't even say that people can search for you. That's what I mean. And then we'll change it from.net to something cooler, like,
uh, dot tech, Bernard hack. well.tech search. It's available. We'll click continue and then finish our setup, finish. And then just a few more details. It's being registered. All right,
now it's it's baking. Go ahead and take a sip of coffee. It'll do its thing. And just like that, you have a website, so let's go play with it. We have a few options first. We can just look at it real quick. Let's take a look at you. Hello world. You can do a ton of stuff to manage your website. Let click on that. A lot of stuff we can do here. Like, Hey, set up your email.
Like how cool is it gonna look on your resume to have your own email domain, not Gmail. Come on Bernard hackel.com. So you may wanna do that, but where the magic of you creating your story happens is on the award press dashboard. Let's go and click on that and then click on edit website right here. Welcome home to WordPress. This will be where you'll add all your stuff. We're not gonna dive deep right now, but we are gonna do one thing to get that template up and running.
So first in the side panel, we'll go over here to appearance, click on that and then click on themes at the top left. We'll see an add new. And by the way, before you click on, add new, make sure you have downloaded the custom theme I have in a link below. There will be two zip files. We're gonna click on, add new and add the first one here. And then we'll click on upload theme. We'll select or choose our file and we'll go find it wherever it might be on your hard drive, probably in downloads, right? The first one we'll choose is my portfolio.zip, select that, and then click on install now. And you should see theme installed successfully.
Now go ahead and click activate to well activate it. And then one more thing we have to do over here on the left click on plugins right here in our menu and click on add new same stories before we're gonna upload a plugin at the top left here, click on that. Choose our file. And this time we'll select NP dash core dot Z. Open that, and then click on install now, and then finally activate plugin.
So at this point, your website should be using the new template. Let's go check it out. I'm gonna navigate out to Bernard hack. well.tech. If yours looks like this, you're closer. <laugh>, there's obviously things we have to do. We'll walk through that later, but right now you have your own website, your own domain, and that's, that's huge. Now I gotta tell you this.
I don't care how fancy or amazing your website is. No, one's gonna look at it unless you got a solid resume. One that will make them want to look at your flashy website. That's the first battle. So we're gonna deal with that right now.
How can we make the best resume possible for you? Again? I asked four experts. I spent some time with them to figure out how do we do this? We got some answers. So here we go. Let's talk about how we can make people stop and stare. Now with our resume,
we have to first think, who are we making this for? Who's our audience. Who's gonna be looking at this thing. And I learned from the experts that we have to make our resume for four people. Yes, all four recruiters, HR or human resources, hiring managers, the people who actually be talking to you and probably doing your technical interview and someone a bit unexpected AI, <laugh> artificial intelligence, a computer. So here's the challenge. Your resume has to be built in a way to make each of these four people kind of people happy to make them want to meet you. Not the AI though. They,
it doesn't wanna meet you. I don't know what it wants. And if you haven't already guessed, this is kind of hard to do. I'll explain why here in a bit, but first let's talk about, Hey, what is a resume actually? Or you might call it a CV depending on where you're from.
It's basically a brochure, a brochure advertising you, and what you could do for that company. You're trying to become a part of it's informational it's keyword. And it has to be quick, short, succinct.
The key word I want you to hear is skin ability, skim ability. <laugh> can someone skin your resume very quickly and learn about you? And how long do you have remember eight seconds. It has to be a super fast digest of who you are. <laugh> which again, that's hard to do. That's barely enough time for a sip of coffee.
So when talking with the experts, I've got four big things. I want you to know about your resume and it's gonna help you make it awesome. And the first one's kind of hard because if you're like me, your instinct, if you want to stand out, if you want your resume to be chosen over all the others, your instinct might be to make it look weird, different, make it pop, put some color in there, show them something they've never seen before. Put a dragon on it. I don't know, ignore every urge to do that. No. Problem with the fancy templates is when you put them into the tracking systems for these bigger companies, a lot of content, it can get, it can jumble, like what actually gets processed, going through certain, uh, certain like, um, you know, fillable, um, content within your database, you know, it's should populate. It should auto autopopulate. And like, when I put resumes into my database, sometimes for example, first name will say security, you know, or whatnot, or it'll be blank because there's an icon. So sometimes I think, uh,
people will overkill their resumes with color and style that actually shoots them in the foot. When they're applying online. Again, it might seem like a good idea because it'll make you stand out, right? And a pile of standard Microsoft word templates. Yours will be the alien sitting there glowing. And you think it'll make you be chosen. But no, in fact, it'll probably do the opposite. You'll probably get lost because first the AI, the artificial intelligence, he can't see it.
He doesn't care that you have all those fancy colors. He's scanning it, trying to put you into a database and he's looking for keywords. Now. I say he, it could be a, she, I don't know what it could be, but it's looking for keywords like, Hey, are you applying for a cloud job? Well, then it might be AWS, Azure DevOps, all kinds of things like that, but it's not gonna care about the color choice and the images. And also it might be too jarring for people. No one wants to see something too different. Uh,
it kind of jars you out when you're looking at hundreds of resumes. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, uh, you kind of wanna know where to. Go. As Jean said, you don't wanna see something too different when you're scanning a bunch of resumes, you wanna know exactly where to go and you wanna be able to take in information.
Now I wanna get out in front of this, cause I know you're probably thinking this, Ooh, I'll put a QR code on my resume. That goes to my website. It's gonna be amazing. No one's ever done that before. First of all, they have second. It's a bad idea for the same reasons we mentioned, AI might freak out like, whoa, what is that? And you'll just get lost. Careful with your QR codes. You know, it's something that I don't know would, would populate properly in the tracking system. Right? Right. I don't know.
I don't. I have no idea. My guess is that a link is going to populate better than a QR code. I don't, I haven't seen any kind of receptor for that. So my advice for your resume is find the most boring standard template because what's gonna be important is the content of your resume, not the, the fr fruit colors and stuff. I know it hurts my heart to say that. Cause I used to obsess over how my resume looked. No. So for example, you might go out and Google resume templates and find something like this.
Or they may even have like a, oh yeah. Here's an it resume. Yeah. Let's go look at that. I think it was this one here. Network administrator resume looks totally boring, but I think it does help the four people here making it for look at it. So let's go ahead and download that. Cool non flashy resume check. Here we go. Number two, put the important stuff up top. Now this may be different depending on where you're at in your career.
For example, if you've been a network engineer or a software engineer or whatever, for like 10 years, put that experience at the very top, that's your selling point? That's your crown and glory. But if your most recent job is a two year stint as a sandwich artist at subway, that's probably not gonna help you become a cloud engineer. So don't put that at the top. Don't advertise that.
If you are a deli meat, you know, slicer at, uh, uh, Publix or something right now own that great. But don't put that before your home lab and your hack, the box or whatever it is, you're training. Because then, you know, like I said, eight seconds. Somebody might not even make it to the second page. They might just see deli meat person and go, well, that's not fit when really that second page just dripping with upside.
So if you're new to it and you're trying to break into the industry and you might be working at subway right now, this might be you ignore the urge to put your sandwich artist skills at the top of your resume. Just don't do it instead. What you wanna put is you're hunger. No, not your hunger for sandwiches though. As I'm talking about this, now I'm getting hungry for sandwiches. No you're hunger for tech. This will set you apart and be like the best thing for you. And by the way,
this matters for every level of it. So if you're that network engineer or a software engineer with 10 years of experience, this matters, but especially for entry level, it's that hunger. It's that thirst that drive that love to tinker, that love for technology that you wanna put at the top.
And you have to show that somehow you have to demonstrate that, because guess what? That's what your audience, the recruiter, the HR manager, the hiring manager, that's what they wanna see. I'm looking for someone that has passion and, and someone that has passion can, can almost tackle anything. Right. Me when I, when I've been in hiring situations and I've been trying to hire for like a network engineer role or an it help desk role, I want someone with passion.
So you're probably thinking, okay, Chuck, how do I do that? It's actually not too hard. And again, I'm probably talking to entry level folks here, but this is applicable to the advanced people. The secret sauce here is home lab. <laugh>, that's, that's what it is in your home lab. You can build projects that demonstrate the skills the job is looking for, especially when you're talking about cloud, because you can use the very thing that they use, the same.
Platform. I want to be able to see that. And if I see that, that carries a lot of weight with me, and I actually think that that's becoming more of a staple in the market and in, you know, awareness with hiring companies like, Hey, look out for home lab, look out for some of these platforms, you know, that they are doing, because that to me is what I want. I want that I wanna give somebody a problem. And I know they're gonna go tinker. If someone has a home lab that they build out, does that hold a lot of weight with you? A lot of weight. Um, so, so especially if they lack, um, a traditional it background.
Finding ways, even at your home, how do you figure your home network? Correct? Mm, can they do that? Right? There's, there's different, you know, there's cloud security. So building out, um, something in AWS or Azure or wherever and explaining, what are the, how did you build that out or the, what were the security steps that you took to ensure that, um, um, that environment was secure? Um, so you can, you can do things at home easily, right? Um, how do you secure your, your home video network or home video surveillance network? Um, those types of things. So I, I don't think there's any shortage of ways to, to demonstrate your knowledge or be able to tinker with, with things, whether it's in the cloud or at home, or what have you. So, uh, there's an endless opportunities. So you may not have experience deploying a Kubernetes cluster for a fortune 500 company. I get that,
but you certainly can by yourself set up a free AWS account or Le node or Azure, and use their Kubernetes service to deploy something, learn how to do it, deploy it and write about it. Write about what you learned, write about the tools you used and put that as a project on your resume. Yeah, you can do that or shoot, you could even do it with a raspberry pie cluster, which I did here. So if you wanna walk through that and do that now,
check out the video and do what a conversation piece that would be on your resume. They would want an interview just to talk to you about that. Like, Hey, did you like really do that? That would totally get my attention on a resume now for Bernard Hackel. Remember he wanted to get a job as a junior cloud engineer. Here's that job.
And it's telling us like, Hey, we want you to know about some things like Python to write small scripts. It wants him to know things about as you're networking, as your compute storage, a little dashes, Cisco and Palo Alto. Ooh, I love it. So Bernard, knowing he wants to become a junior cloud engineer, which I actually think was a DevOps position, which is even cooler. Yeah. DevOps for MetLife, knowing that he's going to try and do projects and add that sucker to his resume. Let's do it right now. I'll show you what it looks like.
So here on Bernard's resume, of course we'll have to change some things to match his stuff. I'll do that real quick. Now. Here's what we're gonna do. And this might break your brain a bit, cuz it's so different from regular resumes. I'm gonna change this professional experience to, Hey, we're applying for a cloud job. Let's change it to cloud experience. Now let's say Bernard Hackel was watching my YouTube channel and he found the AWS video where I deployed a hacking lab in AWS. He's like, Hey,
I could probably do that in Azure. I'm gonna do that and put that on my resume. So here it is Microsoft Azure hacking lab. And you can read through it, but notice my keywords I'm using, I'm using a ton of keywords for skim ability and for Mr. AI or Mrs.
AI again, I don't know to actually like me using things like V nets, Azure, virtual machines, subnets, Azure monitor. You can barely see it there. I haven't put a date on it. Like when Bernard hackle actually did it now, there is nothing stopping you from doing this same exact thing, whatever job you wanna apply for. Look at what they use. Look at their technology stack, look at what they want you to know and then just go learn it, do it, build it, demonstrate it and put that sucker on your resume. And I can't think of really any job that you can't do this for networking software engineering hacking, do a lab, demonstrate your knowledge, tell them what you did. Walk through the steps and be prepared to talk about that intelligently at your interview, because they're gonna ask you about it now again, this is for folks who do not have a solid amount of experience in that job.
They're they're trying to apply for what if you do have that though? Well, again, you'll wanna put your experience right at the top. So kind of like this resume has already done this template here and they do a great job, but here's a few tips for that. Make sure when you're adding info about your job, add stuff that's quantifiable.
That can be measured because you wanna write it in a way to kind of advertise what you can do for that future company. I love how it's quantified here. It's results driven. So if you migrated exchange to oh 365, talk about that, tell them how many mailboxes you migrated. Talk about all the servers. You upgraded, talk about the scripts you wrote and what it did for the company. You know, there's certain people that don't need a recruiter, right? They they're gonna get a job. They're gonna get a call back. And even if the resume is formatted and not the best way you can just tell the, the, um, you know, the experience is really good, but I'll tell you that the most resumes I get are people that are kind of on their way up. You know,
they're trying to break in or they're in it for a couple years. And they're still trying to be creative with telling their story on something that resonates, especially if they don't have experience. When a person, whoever it is, HR, a AI, whatever is scanning your resume. When they're scanning it, skim it in the eight to 10 seconds, they're scanning it with a filter with the filter of the job that they're trying to fill. Is it AWS? Is it Azure? Is it penetration? Tester? Is it network, engineer, whatever it is, they're gonna be scanning that resume with all those keywords, all those related terms in their brain.
And they're gonna be scanning it to see if they're there. Remember skim ability. I wanna be able to pick up what is this person's story? What, what is their kind of background? What, what could, what is a word that I could use to label him if I wanted to? But just something that helps me to understand is irrelevant or is it irrelevant. Now for Bernard? He does have experience. So we will add that on there. And here's how Bernard might write this. So I'm gonna take away the non pertinent stuff and add a whole section here, professional experience at very big company, it support Bernard. He's a rockstar and he highlights the things he did.
Just kind of pause the video and take a Gander at that. Now, while this is good, Bernard Hackel is missing a massive opportunity here and that bleeds into our next point, tailor your resume to the job you're applying for now. So far with the projects, Bernard did a great job. In fact, he looks back at the job and to make sure he's putting his best foot forward. He's like, Hey, I better put some stuff in there about maybe Cisco and Palo Alto, these sphere.
So he did two more projects, Cisco related, and even a home lab with two Dell servers, which by the way, I've got videos on both of those. If you wanna try it out, link below or somewhere up here, now that's cool with the projects, but what about his experience? You see if Bernard can, he should look at the job that he's applying for and see, Hey, is there anything about that job that I may have done? Even just the smallest thing in my current job that I can advertise. And at number Bernard's example, he, he has working his it support. He did log into Azure active directory and help out with managing users.
He did help the cloud team every once in a while to log in and maybe delete a VM. Just touching that portal professionally is a big deal. So add that in there. Let's, let's do that right now. Manage users and Azure active directory. I'll do like the Mac D and parentheses to show. I know the lingo that's move ad change, delete and creating deleted DMS in the Azure portal for the cloud team.
And then maybe Bernard does this again, this, this is a career tips for you. He's applying for this job, right? And he, he sees that they do want some sort of automation with scripting. So he's like, Hey, I could probably write a Python script that could help me create and delete those virtual machines in Azure. So let's add that to that. So he adds this little tidbit of information, which by the way, could just be something he learned in an afternoon, but it speaks so much to who he is. Do something like that on your resume. Yeah. There was one person who, um, they had listed and we're gonna get to that later, uh, you know, projects that really aligned. And they, you know,
were able to really speak to the position through their own work. So this person didn't really have a lot of experience, but they put in so much work that myself and the other people on the panel were really just blown away, that the amount of effort and charisma that the person showed. So again, tailor your resume to the job you're applying for.
Look at the job description, look at what they're looking for and do that. Do the project. In fact, one of the experts I spoke with, they actually hired someone who did this and they chose that person over people with real world experience. This person was actually able to spell out how they designed it, the steps that they used to implement, and then really what they did with it. And it showed basically, Hey, they could do this position. So I mean,
that really lent itself extremely well and help them to really, again, align, they didn't have the experience, but they used that project to really align themselves with the position better than people that had experience, believe it or not. Oh, and one more thing on that. I don't want you to be overwhelmed because honestly, a lot of these jobs, they asked the world, they want you to know everything and you might be inclined to go, okay.
They want me to know everything. So I'm gonna do a project. And every one of those things, no, no calm down. <laugh> you don't have to do that. Maybe target just a few things, build it out, put that on your resume. And that's probably enough. As long as you can speak to that technology, you can speak to what you did, walk them through it. That's gonna be amazing. Now my final piece of advice, um,
this might sound kind of harsh. Number four, don't be an idiot. <laugh> the best advice you can ever receive. Right? Dwight, what is the most. Inspiring thing I ever said to you? Don't be an idiot, changed.
My life, and this will kind of be a section on red flags on a resume. What makes people go, oh yeah, I'm not gonna talk to that person. You wanna avoid these things? And in talking with the experts, this is probably the biggest pain point they have.
And the first thing they look for, it's the communication skills <laugh>. And I struggled, as I said, that. Communication is one of the guiding principles or guiding, uh, items that I look for in a candidate's, uh, whether it's resume or verbal, uh, communication is gonna be key in any, any corporate role really. And, um, being able to, you know, clearly and concisely explain what they've done in the past, I would imagine should be pretty easy for them.
And if they're not able to do that, then I think it's, it becomes a red, it. Becomes a red flag for me pretty quick. You know, I tell people, spell check, right? You know, that is a really easy, important thing. So when writing your resume, you spell check, <laugh> get your grammar checked, use Grammarly. You know, that that service that'll just suggest things for you. And then maybe have like your mom or your dad or your whoever, look it over, make sure you just a second pair of eyes.
Even a third pair of eyes is always good in all situations. Just do that because remember you are applying for an it position and in it being detail oriented <laugh> is kind of a big skill. You have to have making sure the configuration you're about to apply is accurate. If you can't demonstrate that on your resume,
that you're shipping out to people, ah, it looks really bad. And then this one's kind of fun from gene. Uh, gene, go ahead. Tell us. Listening too many tools that that's kind of a red flag for us because we we're saying, we know you're you should be somewhat of a subject matter expert in a certain field. We know, you know how to use NMA. <laugh> we're pretty sure. Um. So I know a lot of you are like, okay, I know so many tools and you're gonna list everything on there. E I G R P BGP, uh, inmap go Buster dura, Buster. You're like,
no calm down. A lot of that is assumed and you're just wasting space. So there you go, four resume tips. And I use those four tips to create the best possible resume for Bernard hack. Well, here it is. And all's glory. And by the way, I had the experts take a look at this thing, and this is expert approved.
They would talk to this person for that position. Let's go over it real quick. First, the top of the resume, all the important stuff, keeping in mind, look at this sucker custom email address that's gonna go far. And then also, Hey, my website, my portfolio, huge, but I also wanna show them that I have a good hub. What that communicates to my perspective employer, especially for an entry level position is that, first of all, I'm aware of GitHub. <laugh>, that's a big deal.
And also I'm probably updating that. I'm adding code to it, by the way, don't just have a GitHub. Don't put it on your resume. If you're not updating that GitHub with stuff, if you haven't put anything in there in like a year, don't advertise that.
And then of course throw up your LinkedIn. Having a LinkedIn is important too. And then we get to my professional summary, my paragraph, this is where you want to kind of catch their eye notice. I've got some spicy words in there.
You can pause and read that and notice what I'm harping at. I'm harping on cloud. I'm applying for a cloud position. So I'm like, I'm hitting it. I'm nailing them in the face. Like please you Azure, Azure. I'm just, I'm screaming it from the mountain tops. You wanna be professional. You wanna have good grammar. You wanna speak good,
but also this is your chance to have fun with it and to get their attention. So I was told by the experts, Hey, this was really fun. And it totally peaked their attention. Oh, keep mind. These are people who look at hundreds of resumes a day.
This one made them stop and stare. This one made them want to interview. If not, just jump to the website, to learn more about this person. Now you already saw the cloud experience. We highlighted everything, put everything at the top and Bernard's situation. His certifications are probably more valuable and more pertinent than his professional experience. So I put those above his professional experience.
So a plus CCNA and he already went out and got his AZ 900 and he is working on his AZ 1 0 4 for Azure administrator. And he told him, Hey, it's gonna be done in September, 2022. Don't put in progress. So vague. Tell them when it's gonna be done. And then of course our professional experience, we already covered that noticed I only added one job cuz only one job really is pertinent to this. Now, if you don't have any it experience, yeah. Put like you worked at subway. Like they want to know you've had a child before.
So you know how to act and shoot adding that you've been at a coffee shop or subway, wherever it is does tell them that you know how to deal with difficult people and you are able to communicate. And then at the very end, my education or not mine Bernard hack Wells. He uh, went to video game high school and he just got his diploma, nothing to write home about. So he put it at the very end. If you only went to high school. Totally. Okay. That's my story.
But don't put it at the top of your resume. It's not the biggest thing you did put it at the bottom, put it at the back. Don't put it at the back. But notice Bernard hack Well's resume one page,
a person at his level and what he's done with his life. So far, two pages would be too much. Again, we got eight to 10 seconds. Give them something to scan. Now, if you got experience 20 years, whatever. Yeah. Two pages is probably what you need,
but you probably don't wanna go beyond two pages unless you got like 50 years experience and yeah, you might wanna do that. Now back to our website. Did you forget about that? Cause remember the goal with our resume was to get the people to stop and stare, cuz we only have eight to 10 seconds and once they stop, they'll think, man, I kind of wanna get to know this person, boom, go to our website. And that's where we get 'em that's where we hook them. That's what sets us apart. That's what makes us different. That is what's going to secure an interview for us or Bernard hack. Well,
so let's build his out real quick. So here we're back in WordPress, let me show you how to use the whole WordPress thing. This will be quick. Don't worry. First I go to my portfolio options.
Just ask some information about myself. Now here. I just added a few things. I'm not gonna get too crazy. You can get crazy. But remember the website is where you can actually start to show your personality, show them who you are, show them how you communicate, show them why you would be awesome on their team, but just be careful. You can shoot yourself in the foot. As Joe will say. I think that you can shoot yourself on the foot with a personal website.
If you do it poorly, I've actually seen some websites and I've gone on there and be like, Ugh, this is a director level role. And writing skills are extremely important for this role. They're me emailing all day. And I read six typos in the first paragraph of this person's personal website. So same story with the resume. Make sure your grammar, your punctuation,
the way you speak, the way you come across is all great. Cuz here you wanna tell your story. You don't want that story to be that you're not very, <laugh> good at communicating. So anyways, couple things we can do here that are really cool. I can do a type of description and change this from a image you wanna put a picture on there, show them who you are or you can do a video. So if I choose video, I can add a video URL. Let me go grab that video URL.
All right. I'll paste that there. Let me go ahead and save it. We'll take a look at it. Okay. Let's uh, go to our site. <laugh> yes. Okay. So here you can put an image and that's fine. Or this could be different. You can add your own little introductory video because let me tell you a big part of applying for an it job is they wanna know how you can communicate. You're gonna be talking with people in your job, especially entry level. You're gonna be dealing with higher ups.
You're gonna be dealing with customers and clients, irate people. They wanna see how you kind of how you hold yourself and how you speak. Can you communicate effectively? Bernard Hackel can hello? Perspective employers. My name is, if you wanna watch this video go to Bernard hackel.tech. Now let's get back to the portfolio. We can add a few more things like, um,
maybe we have a YouTube, maybe a LinkedIn. You should have a LinkedIn Twitch, Twitter. Just make sure your Twitter is work friendly. Make sure you're posting relevant things. Otherwise just don't put your Twitter on there. So once you add all those links, save your portfolio, go back over here, check it out.
And all your links should be gorgeous right up here at the top right now next we have a section called what I'm working on. Now I did this because I want you to put only the things that you're actively well, <laugh> working on to show that you're continually growing now. Obviously you don't wanna keep something in there that was, you know, four years ago. And like he's working on this, like he worked on it like last, like that's old. You don't wanna do that, but lemme show you how to do it real quick.
So over here in our WordPress dashboard, we got a few options here. We're gonna go to projects. Now let's click on all projects here. We'll add a new project by clicking on ad new and using WordPress here. We can just add whatever we want to demonstrate how we're working on our project. Oh, I forgot one thing. Oh my gosh. Before we do the project thing,
let me get back to our portfolio options. I forgot to show you. You can upload your resume and have it right there. Let me get Bernards up there in case you wanna look at it. We save that once we save that and we refresh it over here, we now have a download resume option. Look at that.
That's all you gotta do is point people to your domain. They can get everything they need. So back to our projects, uh, here, I just pasted what I had in my resume. But if I were to really go crazy with this, I probably record a video talking about it. Or if you're more of a writer or you wanna add some pictures and maybe a walkthrough of your lab, you could do all that right here. Be much more detailed. And by the way, add that same stuff to your GitHub.
Put the GitHub link here. Just do all of it. Do all the things, make it look amazing. And then if you go down to the bottom here, the very bottom, additional information we can say, Hey, I don't want this to show on the main page. Of course we do. We can put what order we want it in 1, 2, 3, 4. We'll say it's one.
We can say project status. Is it working or is it complete? Well right now we're still working on it. Let's just say that we can add the URL to our GitHub. We can have a video right there now since it was my project, I'll just go and add one of my YouTube videos. There you add a category, a tagline, add more of a description if you want now, because I added a YouTube video. Let me just go ahead and publish this already. Did it once I'll just click on update. Bam. There it is.
One of my projects I can jump in there. Let's get all the information about my project right there, where you can set an image as well. If you wanted to set a featured image, it's gonna grab a random image. I'll update that now let's get, check it out. August YouTube video will override it. So let me go room with the YouTube video. If you don't want that being your thumb. Now, there we go.
Now just underneath what I'm working on, we have projects, just things that you've completed, that you've done in the past. I wanted again, I wanted that difference because I wanted it to be clear and obvious that you're currently working. You're always progressing. You're always doing something. You could also add a certification here. Bernard may want to add AZ 1 0 4, put the whole AZ 1 0 4 there. Talk about his journey, make a video about it. Just and text for him. Whatever. It's gotta be keeping in mind that here there's no limit.
You can just go crazy and talk a lot. You're not limited to one page. And then down here we have experience. Got a nice little timeline for your experience. So let's go back to WordPress.
I'll show you how to do that. And by the way, if I was done with this project, I would just go down here as we saw before and change project status from working to complete and it would move to the next category. Let me just try that real quick. Yeah. Notice the, uh, <laugh> the default ones filled in again, but now we have projects here. One's moved over now for experience. You'll wanna go over here too well experience and we can add new at the top here. And same story is the project. Add information about what you did.
Let's do Bernard hack walls. I'll do one real quick. Well, he only had one on his resume so you can put stuff here and a lot in the, in the paragraph, but you can add a lot down here at the bottom. You see the company, very big company. It support. Tell 'em where it is when it happened. Show on main page. If you're still there, obviously you won't put an end date show on main page.
And those cool was at the bottom here. If you had a project you were working on and it might have been like a job, really like you did this project at your job, you can tag those and relate them. So if that were the case here, I'll just go and click that.
Or one of the projects I had publish, I go back here and look at my timeline, scroll down a bit. There it is. It support projects related click on that sucker. It'll take you right to it. Oh, that's so cool. And if we scroll up again, we should see I'll look at that.
It linked back. So it'll show that, Hey, this project was for a company and I should say a big company. Not it support. I'll have that change. By the time you download this. Now from here,
it's pretty much the same story for everything you can go from, you can go to education, add your education. If I add new, I can add all the information I have about what's going on. You can also add certifications and even badges.
And I'll put a badge of section, cuz I know that many websites, including my own, as you're learning, you might pick up a skill and I'll reward you with a badge. Like if you're on tri hack me, it's like, Hey, you earned the, um, hacking for 90 days or whatever, or you or you finish the junior penetration tester module that give you a badge and it'd be kind of cool to put a badge there on your, on your website to show that off. That's where you can add that. Okay. I added a few more things for Bernard hack while just kind of built it out again. The WordPress thing and the template. <laugh> it's all pretty much the same as you go between doing the, what I'm working on. Projects, the projects,
which I added a few more here experience. I did add a few certifications, CCNA, a Z 900. You can add a badge. So this is one of the badges you might see in tri hack me and of course education. Now you can get as crazy as you want on this really show who you are, put your personality out there and document your journey here, do that. Oh, and also just notice there's the menu up here. And whenever you click on anything in that menu, it's nice and clean takes you right down to stuff. It's awesome.
And it's mobile friendly looks great on your phone. Need to actually check it out real quick. Oh yeah, it looks awesome. So we've covered resume website. The two things you need to get a job in it.
Now, before we go, before I end this video, I do wanna cover a few more things, actually just one more thing. And that's overcoming the lack of experience. Now throughout this video, we've already talked a lot about that. How you can augment your experience with projects you can do at home right now, like right after this video. But there were some other tips from our experts that I think you, you need to know the first big one. And a lot of people mention this that's networking and not the switch and router kind. I'm talking about actually talking to people, getting to know people in the industry.
I, I think the first and foremost thing, and I don't think I'm alone at all in saying this, but networking, um, is it's not, not a natural thing for everybody. And there's no one formula for the way you're supposed to network. Uh, something that is very comfortable to send a note to a stranger, Hey, I'm introducing myself.
That could be like the scariest thing in the world for somebody else to do so there's no recipe for the right way to network, but figuring out what you're comfortable with and then putting yourself out there in a way that introduces yourself and owning that. What you just said. Someone wrote me last night, they were a fireman I think, and then moved into it and now they wanna move into security and you kinda spelled it out for me. I was like, all right, you're not afraid of challenges that that's my first takeaway. The old adage really is true. It's not about what you know, it's about who you know, and if people know you and they like you, they're gonna help you get a job or they're, they might put you forward for that job. Like whatever the case,
that's just human nature. That's how people work. So if you want to get into an industry and you're like green, new, make some friends like seriously get into my discord. Hey, we got 73,000. It pros in there right now, go in there, make some friends, get on LinkedIn, make some friends, go out and join a networking group, go to a CTF, just put yourself out there. Also another way to overcome lack of experience is just to volunteer.
<laugh> you can go and help someone out could be a church. It could be a charity. It could be a number of things and you help them out with their, it. Trust me. You can figure out most of the things and you get real world experience. You can add to your resume. That's pretty big too.
And then also one of the best ways to augment your lock of experience and your lack of knowledge is certifications. Now this will not be a video on certifications versus degrees. Although I will say that in talking with the four experts, it doesn't matter anymore. In fact, Joe said this about certifications.
The cert programs usually can tell the story better about who you're trying to be and what you're trying to do and what you're capable of as well. Cause some of them, you, you certainly can't fake or you know, they're not multiple choice. You, you really have to, to know your stuff. So. A certifications will tell future employers that you have some knowledge, possibly a lot of knowledge doing a project is good and that's great. And you can demonstrate some skills, but it's also good to have, like for example, the a plus it covers a wide breadth of knowledge that you couldn't demonstrate within one project or even three or four.
And it goes for the CCNA and the network plus. So if you're green and you're new, that's what I would start doing. Start networking. Actually, the first thing I would do <laugh> is build out your resume and your website and start adding stuff to it. Like start today, do a project today,
do one of my videos, build a search engine for yourself or do something with the raspberry pies. Just do something and add that to your resume. And I would also go networking, go talk to people. I know it's scary. Just do it. Build out that home lab, man, the home lab is so important and then start working on certs. If you're really green and new, get the basics a plus net plus security.
Plus you may be able to replace this the network plus with CCNA and then pick your path. I've got videos on what certs you can get or whatever path you're trying to go down. The. Entry level certs definitely focus on those. Um, and then for our positions,
like we said, we have labor categories. So we have to have those. We, we, we can't compromise on. Those. And then my last piece of advice for you is don't be afraid to apply to that job you're looking at right now. Yeah. You may not be qualified. I get that,
that they may be asking for a lot of things that you don't have, but a lot of times you can tailor your resume, tailor your website, to what they're looking for and show that hunger show that thirst for knowledge and the willingness to learn and grow and that, and show that humility that'll go a long way. So don't be afraid to apply for that job right now and kind of go like above and beyond. Like don't stalk them, but like go find them on LinkedIn and send 'em, you know, a connection request. Maybe do a little bit of ENT. And what I mean by that is like, find people at the company, find people who are maybe doing the job that you're applying for and connect with them. See, Hey, can we like check? Can I find out what's going on?
And maybe through networking and hanging out and, and, and just talking together, they recommend you to the boss. And all of a sudden you get a job there. I mean, just think about that. Like there's different ways you can do this, you can do it better. Like you gotta work smarter with this. You gotta hack away into a job.
So that's the video. This video has been long probably, but I hope you got something out of this. I, I want to help you hack into a job. And when I say hack, I mean this, this path I've, I've gone down and Bernard hack Wells going down is, is non-traditional it's, you know, we don't graduate high school, go to college, then intern, like you don't have to go down that traditional path. You can make your own path. And that's why it is so cool. You can do something like this. It's awesome. And by the way,
we talked a lot more about tips and resumes and people who got hired and all kinds of cool stuff, uh, with the four experts, they were long interview. I've only shown you the bits and pieces. So if you wanna see the entire thing, I gotta link below. You don't wanna miss that. Like, so if you're like, okay,
I want more go for it. The mixture as you're listening to it, you, you start to build that resume and stuff again. Uh, thanks to the sponsor, hosting your checkout, their stuff, link below. And yeah. Um, now that we've helped you to hack your way into a job, which by the way, if you do get a job at some point from watching this video or any of my videos, please let me know in the comments or send me a tweet or something.
I'd love to hear that. I'd love to hear that you got anything out out of all this rambling. I do. So just let me know. I, I would love to hear that.
And also have you hacked YouTube today? Have you hacked the YouTube algorithm? Cause it, you have to, you gotta hit that life button notification, bell comment, subscribe, hack YouTube today. Ethically of course. Yeah. I think I'm done rambling. I'll catch you guys next time. Yeah, I'm done.
2022-08-11 21:15
