Customer Success Playbook - Carly Agar - PostGame - Job Hunt in Customer Success
Nov 07, 2023Season 2Episode 6
Kevin Metzger and Roman Trebon
Are you ready to supercharge your job search and career transition strategy? Our recent chat with Carly Agar, a seasoned career coach, promises to equip you with dynamic networking techniques, personal branding strategies, and the art of curating a compelling resume. We also delve into the do's and don'ts of using AI in your job hunt and how to manage job search-related stress to prevent burnout. Trust us; you don't want to miss these practical gems from Carly!
Meanwhile, are you curious about opportunities in the customer success space? Carly and our team explore the landscape of jobs in this field, the importance of staying informed about industry trends, and the resources at your disposal for a successful job search. Plus, we've got the scoop on where to find the latest job listings and how to stay plugged in for updates. Whether you're actively seeking a Customer Success Manager role or just looking for career development tips, we've got you covered. Get ready to take notes and transform your career journey.
Are you ready to supercharge your job search and career transition strategy? Our recent chat with Carly Agar, a seasoned career coach, promises to equip you with dynamic networking techniques, personal branding strategies, and the art of curating a compelling resume. We also delve into the do's and don'ts of using AI in your job hunt and how to manage job search-related stress to prevent burnout. Trust us; you don't want to miss these practical gems from Carly!
Meanwhile, are you curious about opportunities in the customer success space? Carly and our team explore the landscape of jobs in this field, the importance of staying informed about industry trends, and the resources at your disposal for a successful job search. Plus, we've got the scoop on where to find the latest job listings and how to stay plugged in for updates. Whether you're actively seeking a Customer Success Manager role or just looking for career development tips, we've got you covered. Get ready to take notes and transform your career journey.
Welcome to the Customer Success Playbook podcast post-game show where myself, roman Trevon and my co-host, kevin Metzger go behind the scenes and dig into our latest episode. Kevin, on the last episode we had Carly Agar on. She is from Carly Agar training and she works with Customer Success managers to help find their next career opportunity and then help best position them for their future career growth. Really interesting conversation, kevin. I was glad we had her on the show. Any thoughts from takeaways from our recent conversation?
Speaker 2:
Yeah Well, first, I think this is one of our longest podcasts that's out there. We had some thoughts on it as we went through it. It's just so pertinent to what's going on right now with the job market. Lots of people are out looking and people are having a hard time. Carly had some great thoughts on that. She's been a professional in the field. We extended the podcast this time to have that extra content available to two people who are actively looking for CSM jobs. That's my first one.
Speaker 1:
No, I agree with you. We've talked about Chern Kev. We've talked about playbook development. Those are all super interesting but I think a job, your livelihood, like those, are real obviously big impacting. That's a big weight on families as people are going through a career transition. So hopefully there's a nugget or two in there from Carly's conversation, her tips and guidance, that people can incorporate and really help them. I definitely recommend, if the audience hasn't checked out Carly's site, go to her site, check her out. She does great work.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, so you were talking about some of the nuggets. One of the things that she brought up was the networking levels.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, the scale.
Speaker 2:
The scale. Yeah, that was an interesting topic. She was talking about how you engage when networking. Honestly, I don't remember all the steps, but basically there was the pretty Networking and the post networking.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, it was like start with. There was start with like your first LinkedIn. Yeah, your family, friends, close connections kind of start there, which makes sense. I guess she had mentioned people aren't very comfortable in networking, right, if they don't do it a lot, so kind of cut your teeth a little bit with that group and then really kind of expand out from there. She talked about I think she was the the reactive networking versus the proactive networking, right. So I think the one is the proactive is you're trying to get into an organization before you apply, and then the reactive is maybe you've already applied. So how do you best kind of find the right context to help navigate the decision-making from that perspective?
Speaker 2:
Yeah. And then one of the other things she was saying is a lot of people are nervous about reaching out to an executive, but as a CSM, who might be the hiring executive or the up level, right, but a CSM should be comfortable going to speaking to the executives and all that. And she was saying, yeah, don't be afraid to to reach out to that a hiring executive. Let them know that you've applied and that you're interested in why you're a good fit.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, I, yeah, I liked her kind of talking about how to spend your time right, and you know there's a lot of Uncertainty and if you're in the job market long enough, you start to question everything. I think, right, am I doing the right? Am I doing the? Am I doing enough? Am I doing the right level of stuff? Right Am I?
Speaker 1:
And you know we talked about resumes because we've heard a bunch that you need, you know, an ATS resume. You need to tailor each resume to skills and in Carly's perspective, which I thought was unique, was just one really, really good resume. Now she did talk about some nuances that you know, in certain situations you may need a second one, depending on, but have one really good one and then spend that additional time on the networking right on these real value. What she says is is really value-added. You know, cast to help you find your next job. Don't spend hours changing key skills, because once you get into the interview, if all you've done is you key skills and and you know, and you don't really have that level experience, that's gonna come out anyway. So you've kind of just spun up all this time without any, you know, going any further in in your search.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, and interestingly too, when she we started talking about AI is talking about really positioning yourself. She was talking about how you should Record it. So she thinks it's good and recommends using AI to hone what you're saying and make it make more crisp and clear, but really don't use it to. You know, in AI they'll talk about hallucinations or it's response, but really she's saying don't let it hallucinate about who you are. You know, don't use AI to make up information about yourself, because that'll come out while you're interviewing as well, which I thought you know. Definitely good advice and, as people try and learn that, to use the tool to Help, whether it's with their job search or their jobs, I think that advice in general is pretty important Right at this point is to help you hone what you're trying to say, but not necessarily something you want to create. You know content that you haven't been able to verify, specify, adjust, make your own. It's got to be your, your content.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, it's gonna be your personal brand, your market, your personal marketing plan. It can't be this AI version of that right, which sounds great and has all the buzzwords, but it's not really what you've done right. And, and I think the last thing kept for me that stuck out I'm glad she raised it up, because we didn't ask about it specifically is just, you know the the importance of of fun, you know Managing burnout right and finding balance, and it really is a roller coaster, right. I mean, there'll be times where you'll get five rejection letters hey, we've gone in a different direction and things seem to be bleak. And then you have a bunch of interviews and things seem to go great and you do that enough. You can definitely say, like, one of the biggest things is you burn out and then you know you just kind of leave the job search right, you go elsewhere because you're you've reached a point of frustration. So I thought that was really good and and I know you know Carly's really, really big on finding that balance.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, you know from from past. You know past job searches and stuff. One of the things that I think was always Really you know, critical to making sure that you didn't burn out was just making sure that you're getting outside doing some kind of exercise, doing something outside of the job, searching each day, you dedicate the time, a certain amount of time, to it, and then you got to go do other things. It can't be the so really important point that I think she made yeah, and so the lesson kept.
Speaker 1:
So If you're an audience member and you are you know you're in a career transition or you've been impacted by layoffs or reorganization and you're reaching out, first of all, definitely reach out and check out Carly site. She has tremendous stuff. But I would say reach out to Kevin and myself as well. Right, we'd love to help. That's why we're doing the podcast. We want to help our audience and you know we have a Big, growing, big network. We'd love to kind of learn about you, know how we can best help you and if we can be of assistance. Obviously, kev, I don't want to speak to you, but I I kind of know your answer. I know you're in the same same boat as me here, right, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:
And you know, as as we've been doing this and as our networks growing, we're learning more and more about.
Speaker 1:
Companies that are hiring.
Speaker 2:
You know good places to reach out to. Um, yeah, I'm sure most people who are csm's in the csm space, you know do follow nick meta, but he's always put he's posting new jobs every week. Often they're pretty pretty often I think it's every week. You post a list of jobs in the csm space, check that stuff out and you know, we know it's a, we know it's an important topic in the space right now as companies do do playoffs and things like that. So Glad that we got to have carly on, have this opportunity and you know, thanks, thanks for being a part of the audience and listen.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, well, just I mean it must be a hot topic, kevin, because I think we went. This is our longest post game show, probably too Right with the longest episode, but it is super important. So again, if you, if you missed anything, check out our website, customer success playbookai Reach out to kevin and myself on linkedin. We have a customer success playbook linkedin page where we post and you can sign up for Our newsletter there. So check that out and and, as always, uh, thanks, thanks for listening, keep on playing.